Can any nation protect against a Ukraine-style drone smuggling attack?
Ukraine’s Operation Spiderweb showed how small, cheap drones can be smuggled into a country and used against expensive military hardware. Now, there are concerns that nations like the US and UK aren’t ready to defend against a similar attack
By David Hambling
12 June 2025
An image taken by a Ukrainian drone during Operation Spiderweb
UPI/Alamy
On 1 June, Ukraine stunned the world with an audacious attack against Russian airbases. Using cheap, small drones concealed inside trucks that had penetrated deep into Russian territory, Ukraine says it was able to hit dozens of nuclear-capable strategic bombers, taking out a reported $7 billion of military hardware.
The drone-smuggling attack, codenamed Operation Spiderweb, was an incredible feat of military planning – but it also highlighted a vulnerability that has defence chiefs around the world concerned that their assets could be hit next.
“The risk potentials of small drone attacks to US or UK air bases right now are 100 per cent,” says Robert Bunker at US consultancy firm C/O Futures. “You simply need a group with the intent and capability, which is a very low bar to overcome.”
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Ukraine’s security service, the SBU, says it used 117 first-person view drones for the attack, adapting them from racing quadcopters to carry a couple of kilograms of explosives each. The country produced around 1.5 million of these drones for battlefield use last year, costing just a few hundred dollars each. They are typically limited to a range of around 20 kilometres, but as Spiderweb shows, they can be delivered to the target area and flown remotely.
The attack came as no surprise to US defence analyst Zachary Kallenborn, who predicted exactly this kind of threat to strategic bomber aircraft in a 2019 paper. “Ukraine did far more in scale and impact than I could have imagined. I figured such an attack might be a small part of a far larger strike on adversary nuclear delivery vehicles, but Ukraine managed to destroy 34 per cent of the nuclear bomb force with an incredibly complex and coordinated operation. That’s amazing.”
