DRONESWhy U.S. Should Be Worried About Ukrainian Attack on Russian Warplanes

By Christina Pazzanese

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.

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.