Ukraine just rewrote the rules of war [View all]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/06/01/ukraine-drone-attack-russia-bombers/

Ukraine just rewrote the rules of war
A drone attack damaged Russia’s bomber fleet — and exposed air base vulnerabilities worldwide.
By Max Boot
June 1, 2025 at 6:29 p.m. EDT

On Sunday morning, Dec. 7, 1941, the Imperial Japanese Navy rewrote the rules of warfare. Almost no one had imagined that the Japanese could sneak across an entire ocean to attack an “impregnable fortress,” as U.S. strategists had described Hawaii. Yet that is just what they did. Japanese aircraft launched from six aircraft carriers managed to destroy or damage 328 U.S. aircraft and 19 U.S. Navy ships, including eight battleships. The Pearl Harbor attack signaled the ascendance of aircraft carriers as the dominant force in naval warfare.

The Ukrainians rewrote the rules of warfare again on Sunday. The Russian high command must have been as shocked as the Americans were in 1941 when the Ukrainians carried out a surprise attack against five Russian air bases located far from the front — two of them thousands of miles away in the Russian Far North and Siberia. The Ukrainian intelligence service, known as the SBU, managed to sneak large numbers of drones deep inside Russia in wooden cabins transported by truck, then launch them by remote control.

President Volodymyr Zelensky claimed that Operation Spiderweb, as the Ukrainians are calling it, destroyed or disabled a third of the bombers Russia has been using to launch long-range cruise missiles against Ukraine. Among the Russian planes that were hit, reportedly, were Tu-95 and Tu-22 bombers and A-50 airborne early warning and control aircraft, akin to the U.S. AWACs. (There is no independent confirmation yet of the damage.)

Little wonder that Russian military bloggers rushed to compare Sunday’s attack to the one on Pearl Harbor 84 years ago. The analogy is inapt in that, while the Pearl Harbor attack signaled the start of a new war, the airfield attack against Russia was simply another attempt by Ukrainians to defend themselves against the unprovoked war of aggression launched by Vladimir Putin in 2022. But the analogy might make sense in that both attacks could signal the obsolescence of once dominant weapons systems: battleships in 1941, manned aircraft today. Swarms of Ukrainian drones that probably cost tens of thousands of dollars to build in total might have inflicted $2 billion of damage on Russia’s most sophisticated aircraft.

In the process, the Ukrainians revealed a vulnerability that should give every general in the world sleepless nights. If the Ukrainians could sneak drones so close to major air bases in a police state such as Russia, what is to prevent the Chinese from doing the same with U.S. air bases? Or the Pakistanis with Indian air bases? Or the North Koreans with South Korean air bases?

Militaries that thought they had secured their air bases with electrified fences and guard posts will now have to reckon with the threat from the skies posed by cheap, ubiquitous drones that can be easily modified for military use. This will necessitate a massive investment in counter-drone systems. Money spent on conventional manned weapons systems increasingly looks to be as wasted as spending on the cavalry in the 1930s.

...