How Vulnerable Is America to an ‘Operation Spiderweb’ at Home? Very

The wars that have raged in Europe and the Middle East over the course of this decade have featured operations in which technically sophisticated powers managed to disable lightly defended targets deep inside hostile nations by using capabilities they smuggled into enemy territory.

Ukraine’s “Operation Spiderweb” was a benchmark-setting example of this new way of war. Over 18 months, Ukrainian operators smuggled hundreds of low-cost suicide drones into Russia inside cabins designed to look like shipping containers. Each were ferried to locations outside key Russian airbases throughout the federation. When released, they struck and disabled 40 strategic military aircraft — more than a third of the aircraft Moscow used to deliver missiles and bombs onto Ukrainian targets.