Who needs "Ghost of Kyiv" when you've got cheap drones?

Ukraine's triumphant drone attack behind enemy lines illustrates why dictatorships usually lose in the end.

When Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, I thought the country may not be able to hold out for three days.

Viral stories about the mythical “Ghost of Kyiv,” a skilled fighter pilot singlehandedly taking out the Russian air force, boosted morale. But surely it was just a matter of time before the Ukrainian capital had fallen and much of the country - maybe even all of it - was restored to the status of a colony within the Russian Empire.

It’s now been three years since the invasion, and while the Russians have made some incremental gains in recent months (maybe, just maybe, they’ll reach Kyiv before “The Winds of Winter” comes out) they’ve paid heavy costs in personnel and machinery.

The personnel, alas, are easily replaceable. If there’s one thing Russia has never had a shortage of, it’s poor Russians who can be thrown into the meat grinder.

And even if recruitment at home is sluggish there’s always North Korea willing to lend some bodies in exchange for a quick ruble. Heck, the North Koreans might see an active war zone as an improvement on their regular lives.¹

It’s the machinery that isn’t so easily replaceable.

Putin has been forced to go cap in hand to Pyongyang for ammunition and has used literal museum pieces in battle to replace the more “modern” equipment they’ve already lost.

Thankfully for the Czar, Russia is so big that its military can keep its most prized weaponry in Siberia, thousands of miles from the front line, where it will be safe from Ukrainian counter-attacks and saboteurs oh hey guess what

On June 1, Russia’s Military Transport Aviation Day, a significant holiday for the Russian armed forces, the Security Service of Ukraine (SSU) carried out a bold and unprecedented coordinated drone strike deep inside Russian territory. The operation targeted four strategic air bases and delivered a major blow to Moscow’s long-range bomber fleet. Codenamed “Spider’s Web”—or simply “Web”—the operation was named for its wide geographic coverage across remote Russian locations previously thought to be beyond the reach of Ukraine’s long-range drone capabilities.

Using small striking drones covertly smuggled into Russia and launched from hidden compartments inside cargo trucks, the operation struck more than 40 high-value aircraft—including strategic bombers Tu-95MS, Tu-22M3, and A-50 planes used for launching and coordinating missile attacks on Ukrainian cities. The meticulously planned operation marks a significant milestone in Ukraine’s evolving asymmetric warfare capabilities and signals a major vulnerability in Russia’s rear defenses.

[…]

Planning for the operation reportedly began over 18 months prior to its execution. Ukrainian operatives smuggled around 150 small strike drones, modular launch systems, and 300 explosive payloads into Russia through covert logistical routes. The drones were concealed inside wooden modular cabins, which were then loaded onto standard cargo trucks.

An integral component of the operation was its use of covert logistics conducted through Russian territory, involving unwitting Russian civilian participants. As part of the operation’s deception strategy, the SSU reportedly recruited Russian truck drivers to deliver the mobile drone launchers camouflaged as standard cargo loads. These drivers were instructed to arrive at specific times and park at predesignated locations in the vicinity of Russian strategic air bases, including fuel stations and isolated roadside areas.

At the designated time, the roofs of the cabins were remotely opened, and the drones launched directly from within the trucks. This minimized the distance between launch and impact, allowing the drones to bypass Russia’s layered air defense systems—including Pantsir and S-300 units—before they could react. Notably, Russian sources confirmed the drones were launched from positions just outside the airfields, including from fuel stations and roadside laybys. After all the drones were launched, the trucks exploded, indicating that they were equipped with a self-destruction mechanism.

Altogether, 117 drones were launched, with over 40 aircraft struck, amounting to what Ukrainian sources estimate as 34 percent of Russia’s strategic cruise missile delivery platforms. This includes some of the few remaining A-50 airborne early warning and control aircraft, which are vital to Russia’s airspace surveillance and targeting operations.

Importantly, all personnel involved in the operation were successfully moved from Russian territory to Ukraine prior to drone launch. Ukrainian leadership, including President Zelensky and SSU chief Vasyl Maliuk, was reportedly closely involved in the planning and real-time coordination of the strike.

Did this operation really do as much damage as the Ukrainians say? I dunno. I don’t begrudge the Ukrainians their own propaganda weapons.

(Plus, these are Russian planes, so there’s a good chance they might have just exploded on their own, like a Soviet television set left plugged in overnight.)

But the mere fact that Ukraine was able to pull this off at all, right under the Russians’ noses, is a game changer. The message to Czar Vladimir, that we can strike literally anywhere, couldn’t be more clear.

We’ll get the whole story from the Ukrainian side soon enough. What I’m chomping at the bit to see is what’s in the Russian archives someday, when Putin is gone and McDonald’s has been restored to its rightful place in Red Square.

A few weeks after the Russian invasion, when it became clear that they were in for a much harder time than anticipated, I wrote about how what would appear to be an authoritarian government’s great advantage over liberal democracy - the ability for its leaders to just “get stuff done” instead of having to put up with the horse-trading and lobbying and arguing and mean tweets which make can make things so exhausting and frustrating for a more open society - eventually becomes a disadvantage.

This is the kind of thing that happens when you’ve consolidated absolutely [my editing is as good as ever - DP] power, purged and poisoned everyone who’s stood up to you and will not tolerate being told you might be making a mistake. God knows the United States and Western countries have made some catastrophic military moves, but when all dissent is stifled and the leader’s word is the law, the odds of making catastrophic mistakes become that much stronger.

That’s why no one could or would stop Hitler from invading the Soviet Union, although that doomed campaign actually might not have gotten as far as it did had Stalin not purged many of his most competent military officers because reasons.

[…]

But he apparently believed Ukrainians would surrender on the spot, and that Western democracies were too divided and malaise-ridden to effectively stand up to him. Anyone who told him otherwise might have gotten some extra polonium in their tea that morning. And now he’s learning the hard way.

If the leader can do whatever he wants without any serious resistance, everyone else learns to keep their heads down and not do nor say anything which will make him angry.

Because you really, really wouldn’t like him when he’s angry.

As a result, the guy in charge is surrounded by sycophants and yes-men who will nod along and feign enthusiasm for whatever he wants to do, even if they know it’s really risky and/or really, really stupid.

That filters down to the drones (the human kind) and proles, too. I’m not a betting man, but I’d bet my entire hoard of Hawk Tuah meme coins that Russian intelligence services actually knew, or at least strongly suspected, that something like Operation Spiderweb was in the works.

Good for them. Now, you go and tell the Czar that there are Ukrainian operatives (and, at the risk of wishcasting, some Russians brave enough to assist them) thousands of miles away from Ukraine, ready to take out much of the strategic bomber fleet.

“I’ll just do it myself and save you the trouble, Comrade.”

Ukraine, by contrast, is an open enough society to learn from its mistakes, see what actually works, and adapt accordingly. Russia is a closed society which keeps doubling down on what it was already doing, and woe is you if you suggest a change of course.

It doesn't matter how much stronger you are in terms of weaponry, if your society and political system punishes anyone who might tell the leader he's wrong.

Mind you, it's not just besieged countries who can effectively use drones for warfare. As points Aaron MacLean out in The Free Press, the Houthi "rebels" in Yemen have been doing so for quite some time, and it's not hard to imagine extremist groups unleashing drones on America's important but soft targets.

The Future of War Is Happening Right Now in Ukraine

The dramatic variation in price tags continues a trend notable in other theaters. For instance, in America’s recent tangle with the Houthis in the Red Sea, multimillion-dollar interceptors and munitions were regularly expended against much cheaper Iranian-axis drones and targets, with the Houthis living to tell the tale and continuing to threaten shipping. (This is one of many dimensions where what’s new is quite old—10-rupee jezails [long Afghan rifles] have been providing “asymmetric” advantages to weaker forces for a very long time.) But the operation was also a dress rehearsal for a nightmare scenario already much on the mind of some analysts, where the West’s under-defended major assets could be wiped out in sudden attacks in the opening moments of a direct great-power conflict: for example, American assets during a war with China over the future of Taiwan.

As the missile defense expert Tom Karako recently put it to me, “People talk about a ‘Cyber’ Pearl Harbor, and a ‘Space’ Pearl Harbor. I worry about a ‘Pearl Harbor’ Pearl Harbor.” Pearl Harbor itself and bases in the first island chain would obviously be vulnerable to China, as would American ships at quayside in San Diego and even Norfolk, Virginia, not to mention American B-2s in Missouri. There are a lot of shipping containers in America sitting on the backs of trucks and aboard cargo vessels. We will never know what is in them. Such attacks could occur simultaneously with other, more traditional kinds of strikes at targets far from the primary theater of conflict—which is to say, we may need to rethink what we are talking about when we speak of military theaters. The special significance of Sunday’s raids is to settle beyond question that the time for accepting the emergency nature of such threats is past. Meanwhile, the time for preparing adequate countermeasures could run out at any moment.

We also should not ignore the obvious. Sunday’s strikes emphasize, for all their newfangled employment of modern technology to solve cutting-edge problems, the essential role of surprise. This is perhaps counterintuitive in an era of bloodletting defined by the widespread proliferation of sensors and precision-strike technology, the net effect of which would seem to be to render surprise extremely difficult. But, if anything, the consequence of the visible battlefield and the widespread employment of sensor-strike complexes (first used in their modern sense by the United States in the Gulf War, later imitated by the Chinese to create their A2/AD bubbles in the Western Pacific, and now available even to para-state groups like the Houthis) has been to make surprise even more important—a virtually necessary precondition of successful maneuver in any form.

America and its allies must be ready to turn on a dime, which makes it all the more important that the United States not succumb to Russian-style authoritarianism. Unfortunately, given the last few years, I can only be so optimistic about that:

1. A variation on an old Cold War joke: an ad appeared in the main North Korean newspaper reading, “wanted to trade: three bedroom apartment in Pyongyang for foxhole in Eastern Ukraine.”