On Sunday, June 1, 117 small AI-controlled drones costing about $2,000 each trucked in and launched from flip-top boxes destroyed or badly damaged more than 40 strategic nuclear-capable Russian bombers costing an estimated $7 billion dispersed at four heavily guarded military sites.
Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. David Allvin called the Ukrainian offensive a “wake-up moment,” noting at a Center for a New American Security event that U.S. “Seemingly impenetrable locations, maybe, are not.”
It’s not the first reason for such warning.
One of President Trump’s backup aircraft was delayed from flying as fighter interceptors were scrambled in response to unidentified drones that approached and entered restricted airspace over multiple U.S. military installations last year.
On Oct. 19, 2023, the USS Carney destroyer in the Red Sea was attacked by a barrage of Houthi drones and missiles leading to a 10-hour engagement where the Navy warship shot down more than a dozen drones and four fast-flying cruise missiles.
Another example of this threat occurred on January 29, 2024, when three U.S. service members were killed and more than 40 injured after a drone slipped past air defenses at a remote base in Jordan near the Syrian border. The Department of Defense later confirmed that the attack was carried out by the Islamic Resistance in Iraq, an Iranian-backed militia coalition.
Just months later, in August 2024, U.S. troops stationed in Syria were attacked once again by a similar system, resulting in eight service members suffering traumatic brain injuries and smoke inhalation.
As noted by former Navy officer Thomas Shugart in a Hudson Institute report, drone warfare alarm is especially high in the Pacific, where U.S. bases sit within range of China’s growing missile arsenal.
While Beijing has built more than 400 hardened aircraft shelters — protective concrete bunkers designed to shield warplanes from missile and drone attacks — over the past decade, the U.S. has added just 22 in the region.
Of particular concern is the need for critical target protection from drone swarms — coordinated masses of unmanned systems that can overwhelm traditional defenses through sheer volume.
Meanwhile, Kyiv’s devastatingly successful strategy to smuggle parts for relatively short-range drones and assemble them near strategic targets would logically provide additional reason to worry about Chinese entities purchasing numerous farmlands near U.S. military bases.
Chinese companies have acquired nearly 10,000 acres of farmland in Polk, Florida, near MacDill Air Force Base (a key global command and special operations hub supporting U.S. and allied forces), 277 acres in San Diego County near Camp Pendleton (the West Coast’s premier fleet marine training base), and 370 acres near the Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota which houses both nuclear-armed manned bombers and intercontinental ballistic missiles.
Drones also present potent, low-cost, high-damage ground combat weapons that can degrade human forces, destroy vehicles and battlefield equipment, and otherwise disrupt logistics operations without placing the attackers’ personnel in harm’s way.
Making defenses more problematic are difficulties in identifying and distinguishing between friendly and hostile drones where detection technologies and defensive coordination protocols are inadequate.
Additionally, military commanders in the homeland often lack the authority to engage drones.
As U.S. NATO Ambassador Matthew Whitaker stated last Wednesday, “We are trying to learn every single lesson that can possibly be learned about modern warfighting and how quickly it can evolve and how we must innovate and be technologically nimble to address those threats that evolve over time.”
Accordingly, the Army plans a massive increase in its use of drones as part of a broader shift from large, expensive systems to a fast-changing array of smaller, expendable units.
In one particularly costly previous case, a U.S. ally reportedly shot down a $200 quadcopter drone with a $3 million Patriot missile.
Here, the budget-restricted Ukraine attack on Russian military assets offers a sobering reminder that cheap and constantly advancing AI-directed drone technology multiplies lethal UAV threats to U.S. domestic and global assets and personnel from adversarial opponents in other far smaller, less prosperous countries.
With frightening irony, the tech revolution provides cheaper products with higher performance. This includes weapons that are more difficult to defend against that cause more destruction and puts them in more aggressively threatening hands.
While, according to the Heritage Foundation, the U.S. has taken important initial steps to develop advanced counter-drone systems and training programs, “these steps remain fragmented, underfunded, and unevenly implemented across the joint force.”
The U.S. military currently deploys a layered, diverse and adaptive array of counter-drone systems including relatively short-range directed-energy weapons (DEWs) to either physically destroy drones or neutralize them through signal disruption and surface-, ship- and aircraft-deployed kinetic missiles to intercept them.
Whereas due to limited range, DEWs have not yet been effectively employed in combat, the most promising kinetic defenses for frontline ground units presently appear to be the laser-guided Thales Lightweight Multirole Missile (LMM), also known as Martlet, costing a little over $100,000, and an Advanced Precision Kill Weapon System (APKWS) costing about $22,000.
Regarding Trump administration plans for a massive Golden Dome missile shield, White House spokesperson Karoline Leavitt recently told reporters that the president “has a full understanding … about the future of warfare and how drones are a big part of that.”
Nevertheless, a Ukraine drone takeaway suggests reason for doubt that any dome over America can protect us from determined terrorists, who having crossed a recently open border, are now already hidden inside.
Larry Bell is an endowed professor of space architecture at the University of Houston where he founded the Sasakawa International Center for Space Architecture and the graduate space architecture program. His latest of 12 books is “Architectures Beyond Boxes and Boundaries: My Life By Design” (2022). Read Larry Bell’s Reports — More Here.
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