I have a new column this week on OnlySky. It’s about Ukraine’s audacious “Operation Spiderweb” – a covert operation to smuggle military drones deep into Russia, from where they launched attacks on airbases across the country. It succeeded beyond what most people would have thought possible, destroying irreplaceable strategic warplanes that Russia was using to bomb Ukrainian cities, all for an investment of a few hundred cheap drones.
Nevertheless, although we should cheer its success in this instance, this tactic opens up a troubling horizon in the future of war. Ukraine isn’t the only nation that can do something like this. Precisely because it was so cheap and effective – and so difficult to guard against – we should expect more drone-based surprise attacks in the future. How will nations adapt when any cargo container passing over their borders could be a Trojan horse sent by an enemy?
Read the excerpt below, then click through to see the full piece. This column is free to read, but paid members of OnlySky get some extra perks, like a subscriber-only newsletter:
When this story broke, national leaders and military officials all over the world must have shuddered with fear. There’s no reason this strategy wouldn’t work in other contexts.
A hostile nation could “seed” an adversary with drone-packed cargo containers, smuggling them across the border and concealing them near valuable military assets—or important infrastructure like railroads, pipelines or power plants. These robotic sleeper agents could lie dormant for weeks, months, potentially years. Then, at a signal, they’d all deploy simultaneously, launching a massive wave of surprise attacks with the goal of crippling the rival’s military before they know what hit them.
A well-equipped terrorist group could use the same blueprint to strike at soft civilian targets. It would eliminate the necessity of finding religious fanatics willing to be suicide bombers. Just a few such drone bombings could sow mass panic among the population. It’s also readily conceivable that suicide drone attacks could be used to assassinate public figures.
Overstates the resources needed. Doesn’t need a group, and doesn’t need to be well-equipped, by the usual standards of what that means.
Consider: in 2018 Gatwick airport, one of the busiest in the UK, was brought to a standstill for DAYS by the deployment of… how many drones? Nobody knows. In a world where every single adult has a high definition camera to hand every second they’re awake, there were no pictures of the offending device(s). It’s possible there never were any. But the message was broadcast, loud and clear: a single unarmed drone can shut down a civilian airport for hours, at enormous cost and inconvenience. Several such drones could potentially shut it down for days… or weeks.
Consider: building a drone is not difficult, or expensive. You can 3d a the chassis and buy the parts off the internet (this is how some of my friends got started flying drones, 15-20 years ago, before you could just buy them off the shelf ready to use). Flight controller software is free. Build a drone for less than £500. Preprogram it to fly vertically upwards 300m, north 500m, loiter on a target with its lights on moving about a bit, then fly 1500m ESE, then cut the motors. You wouldn’t need to control it remotely – there’d be no “pilot”. It wouldn’t need AI or navigation aids, just simple GPS available anywhere, or it could navigate inertially. Activate the launch as you’re driving past Gatwick on the A23 with the drone in the back of a pickup or a van with a large sunroof. The drone will loiter over the main runway, then ditch in the large pond just to the east of the airport.
Chances of it going wrong – practically zero. You could build and test the drone to your heart’s content in the countryside, because it is not doing anything dangerous and no suspicions would be aroused. It’s not like trying to test a bomb. You’d just be one more geek flying their toy around, right?
Chances of anyone being injured – practically zero. The idea is not to damage or put aircraft in danger, it’s to GROUND them, and 2018’s incident demonstrated handily that it will work.
Chances of being caught – practically zero. Even in the unlikely event someone clocks the drone leaving the vehicle, the first time, they won’t recognise what they saw – those things can fly FAST. Or you could just deploy from a quiet spot.
Chances you could do the exact same thing again, either at the same place the next day or at any other airport in the UK as many times as you like with very little chance of capture – pretty good. I’d estimate you could do it three or four times round the same airport before the police lost patience and closed all roads within five miles to moving traffic. And I could build a drone that could cover those five miles in about four minutes… like I said, even the “toy” ones can be FAST.
Chances of MASSIVE economic damage being caused – 100%.
Cost of doing so? I’m a working class professional person in a middle-level job… I could afford to do it between ten and twenty times WITHOUT ANY OUTSIDE HELP, financial or otherwise.
And if you’re caught with the parts? So what? None of the gear you’d use to do this would be illegal to own or operate, and you wouldn’t need to inject the control software into the controller until moments before you were ready to launch. Until that point, it’s just another hobby drone, constable, move along nothing to see here.
Frankly, I’m amazed it isn’t happening all the time.
War has changed, and as ever, the people in charge of preparing for it are still busy gearing up to fight the previous war, not the next one. It’s a massive failure of imagination.
Israel has been doing something similar in Iran. Apparently even running a drone assembly factory in Tehran.
Iran would probably love to pay an “operation spiderweb” type visit to Whiteman AFB.
The question is if they have the personnel assets for an operation like that, given that they like to work via proxies.
Quite possibly, none! No footage of drones was ever produced. Two people were arrested and charged, but later cleared, and compensated for wrongful arrest. But if the use of drones could make air travel much more difficult, well… I’d say the advantages would greatly outweigh the drawbacks. They may also, in the Ukraine War, have had the main role – or at least an important one – in giving the defence the advantage over the offense in conventional war. When a tank or a ship can be taken out by a drone costing a few thousand dollars or less, invasion by land, let alone by sea, becomes a lot harder.
The OnlySky article suggests, reasonably, that a “hostile nation” could seed its target’s territory with “sleeper” drones, which could wait for years and all be launched at once. But how would such a nation know its own territory had not been similarly seeded? Do we have here the possibility of a form of mutual deterrence much less perilous than the nuclear kind?