Why U.S. should be worried about Ukrainian attack on Russian warplanes

Ukraine stunned Russia — and the world — when it launched Operation Spider’s Web, an audacious drone attack on June 1 that damaged or destroyed dozens of Russian warplanes. In the days since, Russian President Vladimir Putin has responded by escalating aerial assaults, launching record drone and missile attacks on Ukraine. 

Beyond its secrecy and complexity, military analysts say Ukraine’s remarkable success using inexpensive homemade drones against a larger, more formidable adversary ushers modern warfare into a new and potentially troubling era.

In this edited conversation, the Gazette spoke with Eric Rosenbach, a senior lecturer at Harvard Kennedy School and past executive co-director at the Belfer Center, about how drones are rapidly reshaping global conflicts. Rosenbach, a former Army intelligence officer, was chief of staff to U.S. Secretary of Defense Ashton B. Carter from 2015-2017, a job in which he advised on Russia policy and led efforts to improve innovation at the Defense Department.

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Beyond its success, what was significant about Operation Spider’s Web?

I think the most significant thing is that it showed Ukraine’s ability to reach deep into Russia and to hit targets that have a very high level of strategic significance. The use of drone technology itself was important, but it was more about the fact that they were able to project power in a way that I’m sure deeply impacted Putin.

So not only the targets they hit, but also that Ukraine was met with no resistance from the Russians?

Exactly. The targets that they hit, they’re called strategic aircraft. Those are aircraft that are used to deliver nuclear weapons. They were also the type of aircraft that were used by the Russians to launch many of the high-end missile attacks against Ukraine for some of their hypersonic and long-range cruise missiles. So symbolically, that was super important but also had an important operational effect.

And if you look at some of the details about how the Ukrainians must have done this, it’s amazing. It will be an amazing spy thriller movie to watch the Ukrainians smuggling in drones over borders, probably loading them into trucks, driving the trucks probably within, I bet, five to 10 kilometers of these military bases, launching the drones through the roofs of these cargo trucks and then piloting them in to hit the right targets. They must have done an enormous amount of advanced intelligence work to pull this off.

Many observers say this was a watershed event that suggests we’ve entered a new era of modern warfare. Do you agree?

Yes. I think it’s important to look at the sophistication of the Ukrainian drone program and how it has evolved. In the very beginning of the war, they were using a lot of off-the-shelf drone technology, wiring some munitions to them, using those then to attack Russian tanks or infantry formations.

Now, it’s quite different: They’re designing their own drones, using a global supply chain to get the parts, including from China, and then doing things like 3D printing the drones themselves. The production line produces numbers that, quite frankly, are much higher than what the U.S. is producing right now or probably could produce.

Also, they’re really pushing forward the capabilities of these weapons in terms of what they can do, and how they’re utilized. And part of that is based on the artificial intelligence that they have been able to develop, and the data. Some of it is also just learning on the battlefield.

“What would really start to worry you is if there were drones that were very long-range and had full autonomy.”

What is — or should be — most worrisome for the U.S., for NATO countries, and others whose drone programs lag behind Ukraine and Russia?

Three points here, I would say. One is that the Taiwanese are very closely studying what the Ukrainians have done and will do in the future in terms of using pretty inexpensive autonomous weapons for both defense and offense. In particular, the way they hit deep inside Russia.

Xi Jinping has said that Taiwan will become part of China sometime — some people say by 2027. I doubt that, but there’s a really important reason that the Taiwanese would want the ability to strike deep with China, if the [People’s Liberation Army] launched a military action against the island. I just wrote a report on that a few months ago that talks about how the Taiwanese could learn from the Ukrainians to develop their own type of autonomous weapons.

I would say the second is the Europeans are very nervous about how advanced the Russians have become with these autonomous weapons. They ask, for example, “What if the Russians wanted to try to mount some type of limited, small incursion into one of the Baltic states to test Article 5 of NATO and the way that they were doing it was, in large part, through the use of autonomous weapons?” The European defense technology sector is not very well developed, less so than the United States, and far behind Ukraine. I think the Europeans recognize that.

For the U.S., there’s a pretty jarring homeland security takeaway from this, which is: Imagine there are some bad actors — it wouldn’t even have to be a nation state, but it could be a terrorist group — that decides they’re going to 3D print these within the United States, or go across the border, and mimic the Ukrainians with a high-profile attack. I know a lot of people recognize that, but this should really drive home that the U.S. is vulnerable to attacks like this.

How vulnerable?

It’s getting better. If you look at high-profile public events, they’re called national security events. There’s quite good technology in place to protect the president, for example, when he’s out and about, the Super Bowl, things that would be logical opportunities to attack.

It’s the lower-profile things that are a much softer target that still could have a big impact both on the American psyche and, probably, the economy.

What does the U.S. need to do to prevent an attack like this? 

The United States will always be vulnerable to some degree from these attacks that are based on newer technology, whether it’s a cyberattack, there could be a space-based attack, and attack from autonomous weapons. The risk will never be zero.

So that’s also important to recognize when you read, for example, about a “golden dome” that will protect everything in the country. It’s just not realistic to think that we’ll ever be zero risk, fully protected from some magical defense technology.

So that means that we probably do need to invest more in counter-UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle) homeland defense. And you see in the headlines of the last couple days that the U.S. is pulling more of the support we’ve given to Ukraine back to protect Americans, whether in the Middle East or even in the homeland, to try to do that.

How close are we to having something effective?

To a limited degree, there are pretty effective counter-UAV systems that have been developed, but they’re in very limited numbers to get up to the level that we would rest easier. I think it’s a years-not-months type of scenario.

What’s the potential global fallout from this demonstration by the Ukrainians?

From a geopolitical perspective, I think it makes clear that a peace agreement is nowhere near in the future. I’m sure the Russian response will be very heavy. The way Putin and the Russians have always reacted to something like this is with an overwhelming response of force. So that will be unfortunate. It probably will be one of the worst attacks we’ve seen against Ukraine from a technology perspective.

One thing to recognize about this is, although the operation was sophisticated, the drones were not fully autonomous. They were not completely reliant on AI, and they didn’t travel 5,000 miles. It was still a local-based operation with a pilot operating them to do the targeting. What would really start to worry you is if there were drones that were very long-range and had full autonomy — they were doing the identification, selection, and targeting of targets on their own, without a human in the loop.

Why would that be more worrisome?

The range is a significant limiting factor right now, both in defense and offense, when you’re using autonomous weapons. Think about the U.S., for example: If someone drove a boat just off the coast of the United States, and didn’t even have to go through the border. They had produced and put everything together there, and they could get even a couple hundred miles range, you could see how a lot of people in Washington, D.C., or other major metropolitan areas would be very vulnerable.

As I mentioned, true fully autonomous weapons would mean that a terrorist or nation-state could simply program targets, launch the killer drones, and then escape. Because that technology is still several years from being fully mature, the likelihood of this right now is low. The technology isn’t fully developed, hasn’t even really been tested extensively.

There is one thing to worry about: Throughout history, technologies that are lethal but have not been subject to a lot of testing end up having unintended consequences that sometimes are worse because of the catalytic effects in generating new classes of weapons.