Ace in the Hole
Among other embarrassing moments during the now infamous Oval Office meeting with Volodymyr Zelensky, Donald Trump famously explained, “You don’t have the cards right now.” It helps explain how Trump bankrupted casinos when you consider just how bad the author of a book called The Art of the Deal is at assessing the state of a metaphorical card game. Trump’s analysis was a few cards short of a deck as it turns out Zelensky still had a card (and a lot of drones) up his sleeve. After more than a year of planning, an attack called Operation Spiderweb deployed more than 100 drones from within Russian territory, delivering a level of damage most experts (and at least one non-expert) thought unthinkable. ‘Operation Spiderweb’: How Ukraine destroyed over a third of Russian bombers. “Drones were smuggled into Russia and placed inside containers, which were later loaded on to trucks. With the trucks positioned near Russian bases, the roof panels of the containers were lifted off by a remotely activated mechanism, allowing the drones to fly out and begin their attack.” The Guardian: Operation Spiderweb: a visual guide to Ukraine’s destruction of Russian aircraft.
+ In addition to being a welcome success for Ukraine, this drone attack marks another chapter in the story of modern warfare and the leveling of the playing field. That doesn’t just impact Russia. The leadership of every major military knows this transformation has been in the cards. But it’s another thing to actually see an attack like this play out from within a powerful country’s borders. WaPo (Gift Article): Ukraine just rewrote the rules of war. “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.”
+ “Every branch of the service and a host of defense tech startups are testing out new weapons that promise to disable drones en masse. There are drones that slam into other drones like battering rams; drones that shoot out nets to ensnare quadcopter propellers; precision-guided Gatling guns that simply shoot drones out of the sky; electronic approaches, like GPS jammers and direct hacking tools; and lasers that melt holes clear through a target’s side. Then there are the microwaves: high-powered electronic devices that push out kilowatts of power to zap the circuits of a drone as if it were the tinfoil you forgot to take off your leftovers when you heated them up.” MIT Tech Review: This giant microwave may change the future of war.
