I also like the cleverness of Ukraine’s recent attack: smuggling over a hundred drones on trucks to military airports deep into Russia, then suddenly launching them to blow up billions of dollars worth of bombers on the runway. Brilliant! And terrifying!
I imagine that military planners in countries all around the world are panicking right now at the idea that a poorer country can build $600 devices and sneakily destroy their pretty fancy mega-million dollar toys before they can be used to reduce a village to rubble. They’ve introduced so much uncertainty into the Great Game!
I also appreciate the beauty of the drone launches. Those trucks were like egg sacs, they opened up, and a swarm of little multi-limbed creatures emerged to float into the air and disperse. I’ve seen phenomena like that so many times, it’s no wonder they called it Operation Spiderweb.
Now…please don’t terrorize my country or me with your flying weapons, no matter how adorkably comparable to spiders they are.
Well now I have that old No Doubt song running through my head. . .but that’s actually a very cool song, complaints at all here.
Keep fighting that good fight, Ukraine! Hopefully this inspires more of the US to do the same.
*No conplaints at all
While this was an extraordinary coup, I wish so many details of the operation had not been revealed. Now they know what to look for, so if they do anything like this again, they’ll have to work out a different way to smuggle in the drones at greater risk. They could’ve just shown the footage of the successful strikes and left the world guessing how they managed it.
It’s even better that they revealed how this was done – now Russian security services have to check every cargo container, every truck that’s moving all over their humongous territory – or risk a repeated attack. This has already thrown a metaphorical spanner to their logistics machinery that was overwhelmed anyway because of personnel crisis having lost thousands of workers to this idiotic unnecessary war…
Another way to look at it, though, is that revealing the details means Russians are now going to be paranoid about ordinary shipping on their roads. Just like the US has been paralyzed with fear by a few terrorist attacks. We have to take off our shoes at the airport, they’re going to be wasting a lot of effort searching trucks.
An excellent operation by Ukraine, but……
We are one step closer to this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O-2tpwW0kmU
Revealing the details doesn’t really help Russia terribly much in the first place: recovering the operation’s leavings is too risky, so it’s just sitting there for them to examine.
SpiderMable
Now showing at tubitv.com
Thinking of how easy this attack would be to pull off in the USA, say near a major B-52 base like Barksdale AFB in Bossier City, Louisiana. With the bombers lined up neatly.
US defense analysts must be furiously coming up with ideas, unless they’ve anticipated these tactics already. But once those trucks got into the US, I don’t see how you’d stop it short of shutting down the entire economy.
Was talking about this with my dad during our morning walk. I knew they destroyed a lot of Russian bombers, but dad was ahead of me and told me about the drone delivery truck scheme. We’re seeing a new face for modern warfare. I doubt Hegseth is paying attention with his “warfighter” fixation.
The Templin Institute did an episode about warrior cultures in science fiction: Why the “Proud Warrior Race” is Doomed to Extinction
I don’t know if it is, but it might be that no Russians died or were injured in the attack, which would make it an even better attack.
Ridana @3: While this was an extraordinary coup, I wish so many details of the operation had not been revealed. Now they know what to look for, so if they do anything like this again, they’ll have to work out a different way to smuggle in the drones at greater risk. They could’ve just shown the footage of the successful strikes and left the world guessing how they managed it.
I think the cat was probably out of the bag either way. We might not have the details, but the Russian authorities still would. Even blown up, the remains of all the drones and carrier trucks would have more or less revealed to the Russians how it was done and what they’d need to try to guard against.
I’m sure the Ukrainians knew from the beginning that this kind of surprise would be difficult to pull off twice, at least in exactly the same way. By revealing the clever details now, Ukraine gets a bonus propaganda coup out of it. And as others have already noted, “phase 2” here isn’t another identical attack anyway, it’s “force the Russians to spend a lot of effort searching trucks and grinding traffic to a halt”
I don’t want to get too “5D chess”, but this was clearly well-planned. If there’s some kind of “phase 3” coming, maybe it’s even beneficial to release these details and keep the Russians looking in one particular direction, rather than for something clever from another direction altogether. (At the very least, smarter Russians need to be worrying about that now, which expends even more resources.)
Robert Westbrook @9: US defense analysts must be furiously coming up with ideas, unless they’ve anticipated these tactics already. But once those trucks got into the US, I don’t see how you’d stop it short of shutting down the entire economy.
I think we’ll probably see a lot more close in weapons systems deployed at bases (and on ships, etc.). Think “see-wiz” guns, and/or newer systems designed specifically for taking down drone swarms reliably and economically. The writing’s been on the wall about this kind of threat for a while now, so some of those are at least in the advanced stages of development, if not deployment. (I think I saw something go past just the other day about a new anti-drone laser cannon or something.)
Obviously, I’m sure they’d also prefer that no one manage to assemble a truck full of killer drones inside the US in the first place, but that’s more of an FBI/CBP type of job. Even in this administration, I doubt we’d actually see trucks getting preemptively stopped and searched miles from an airbase. At least not unless there were active hostilities.
What I’m most curious about is the autonomous line being crossed here: my understanding is that at least some of the drones in this attack were operating on their own, not under remote control. That’s kind of a scary line to cross, and has a lot of implications for the future effectiveness of jamming-based defenses. (For example, the US has already bought a lot of those “radio rifle” type anti-drone weapons which jam or override normal RC drones. I feel like those were obviously doomed from the beginning, since the obvious next step is to harden the drones, use fiber optic control, etc. Full autonomy takes it to the next level though.)
i only saw one drone emerge in the video, not a swarm diespersing
*dispersing
I just wish they had blown up the kremlin with putin and all his thugs in it.
@14 Brian Pansky wrote: ‘i only saw one drone emerge in the video, not a swarm diespersing’
I reply: I read an article with a confirming video that the drones were released at intervals, one at a time from multiple containers and the the drone pilots took their time to find the best location of a shot before blowing up the russian planes.
Also, on ‘allhat no cattle’ (IIRC) someone posted that ‘the united states was not informed by ukraine before the mission . . . . and that’s why it worked!’
I am told the software was LLMs trained on real aircraft -some of them in museums- so the drones could find their targets without human intervention.
Some were clearly remote-controlled as we got coverage from some of the drones but if most of them were autonomous it is a new era of warfare.
You cannot stop the by jamming com, and it is much cheaper than drones guided by fiber-optic wires unspooled behind the drone.
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Of course this would be much harder with camouflaged aircraft, but from now on, the Russians cannot let military aircraft sit parked along the airfields without a lot of precautions.
In the future, if an enemy moves into an area you know has been evacuated from civilians, and you have no troops there you can let loose drones even if the radio is jammed. The LLMs will identify and lock on vehicles or soldiers.
I did not expect real terminators to be so tiny and cheap.
Jeez, I realised… in the future, hated autocrats may need lots of body doubles swarming around them to confuse drones using deep network pattern recognition software.
Imagine Putin sitting with twenty Putin lookalikes at the next May victory parade.
Combat veteran reacts:
“Ukraine’s Drone Strike Used AI -War Changed Forever!!”
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=kEHZPHo0KoY
What struck me was the good operations research that this reveals.
From the whole chain of resources and events that leads to the russians lobbing cruise missiles at Ukraine, they identified the one that is both the most fragile and the hardest to replace; the bombers launching the things. The last Tu-95 and Tu-22M were built in 1993.
Next they identified where those are easiest to hit; on the ground.
It doesn’t surprise me that they used trucks to deliver the drones. Remember the bombing of the Kerch strait bridge? Even though the russians use rail transport a lot, they cannot do without trucks. Their economy would grind to a halt. Regularly inspecting all the trucks soaks up a lot of manpower and causes a lot of friction. And I doubt they would find all the drones.
Even if they would be able to scrounge up enough industrial X-ray scanners to install them at check points at large traffic nodes, I suspect the SBU would manage to put x-ray triggered bombs on some of them.
Aha! Now we understand the real reason for Trump’s tariffs! He’s been trying to stop anything being imported into the USA! Then those pesky courts started getting in the way…