Ukraine Drone Strikes on Russian Airbase Reveal Any Country Is Vulnerable to the Same Kind of Attack
On Ukraine’s front lines, where drone threats are constant, both sides have adapted by deploying layers of detection tools, short range air defenses and jamming systems. In turn, drone operators have turned to alternatives. One option is drones that use spools of shielded fiber optic cable. The cable is attached to the drone at one end and to the controller held by the operator at the other. Another option involves drones with preloaded flight paths to avoid detection.
Fiber links, when used for control or coordination, emit no radio signal and so bypass radio frequency (RF) -based surveillance entirely. There is nothing to intercept or jam. Preloaded paths remove the need for live communication altogether. Once launched, the drone follows a pre-programmed route without broadcasting its position or receiving commands.
As a result, airspace is never assumed to be secure but is instead understood to be actively contested and requiring continuous management. By contrast, Operation Spiderweb targeted rear area airbases where more limited adaptive systems existed. The drones flew low, through unmonitored gaps, exploiting assumptions about what kind of threat was faced and from where.
Spiderweb is not the first long-range drone operation of this war, nor the first to exploit gaps in Russian defenses. What Spiderweb confirms is that the gaps in airspace can be used by any party with enough planning and the right technology. They can be exploited not just by states and not just in war. The technology is not rare and the tactics are not complicated. What Ukraine did was to combine them in a way that existing systems could not prevent the attack or maybe even see it coming.
This is far from a uniquely Russian vulnerability – it is the defining governance challenge of drones in low level airspace. Civil and military airspace management relies on the idea that flight paths are knowable and can be secured. In our work on UK drone regulation, we have described low level airspace as acting like a common pool resource.
This means that airspace is widely accessible. It is also difficult to keep out drones with unpredictable flightpaths. Under this vision of airspace, it can only be meaningfully governed by more agile and distributed decision making. Operation Spiderweb confirms that military airspace behaves in a similar way. Centralized systems to govern airspace can struggle to cope with what happens at the scale of the Ukrainian attacks – and the cost of failure can be strategic.
Improving low-level airspace governance will require better technologies, better detection and faster responses. New sensor technologies such as passive radio frequency detectors, thermal imaging, and acoustic (sound-based) arrays can help close current visibility gaps, especially when combined. But detection alone is not enough. Interceptors including capture drones (drones that hunt and disable other drones), nets to ensnare drones, and directed energy weapons such as high powered lasers are being developed and trialed. However, most of these are limited by range, cost, or legal constraints.
Nevertheless, airspace is being reshaped by new forms of access, use and improvisation. Institutions built around centralized ideas of control; air corridors, zones, and licensing are being outpaced. Security responses are struggling to adapt to the fact that airspace with drones is different. It is no longer passively governed by altitude and authority. It must be actively and differently managed.
Operation Spiderweb didn’t just reveal how Ukraine could strike deep into Russian territory. It showed how little margin for error there is in a world where cheap systems can be used quietly and precisely. That is not just a military challenge. It is a problem where airspace management depends less on central control and more on distributed coordination, shared monitoring and responsive intervention. The absence of these conditions is what Spiderweb exploited.
Michael A. Lewis is Professor of Operations and Supply Management, University of Bath. This article is published courtesy of The Conversation.
