‘Ukraine Attacks Russian Air Bases in Far-Reaching Drone Strikes,” the Washington Post reported on June 1. “How Israel’s Mossad Smuggled Drone Parts to Attack Iran From Within,” the Wall Street Journal reported two weeks later. And just like that, the future of warfare has become today’s headline news.
Both operations followed a similar pattern: Technologically savvy militaries used large numbers of low-cost, easy-to-produce autonomous systems to inflict damage on their targets — usually sophisticated, highly capable, and effectively irreplaceable pieces of military hardware that cost orders of magnitude more than did those operations to the attackers. Indeed, in Operation Spiderweb, Ukraine likely expended less than $150,000 in weaponized drones to inflict a loss of up to $7 billion in Russian strategic bombers that had taken decades to produce.
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