| Резюме: | The targets were Russian warplanes, including strategic bombers and command-and-control aircraft, worth hundreds of millions of dollars. The weapons were Ukrainian drones, each costing under $1,000 and launched from wooden containers carried on trucks. “Operation Spiderweb,” which Ukraine said destroyed or damaged over 40 aircraft parked at air bases across Russia on Sunday, wasn’t just a blow to the Kremlin’s prestige. It was also a wake-up call for the West to bolster its air defense systems against such hybrid drone warfare, military experts said. Ukraine took advantage of inexpensive drone technology that has advanced rapidly in the last decade and combined it with outside-the-box thinking to score a morale-boosting win in the 3-year-old war that lately has turned in Moscow’s favor. How deeply the attack will impact Russian military operations is unclear. Although officials in Kyiv estimated it caused $7 billion in damage, the Russian Foreign Ministry disputed that, and there have been no independent assessments. Moscow still has more aircraft to launch its bombs and cruise missiles against Ukraine. Still, the operation showed what “modern war really looks like and why it’s so important to stay ahead with technology,” said Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Where the West is vulnerable For Western governments, it’s a warning that “the spectrum of threats they’re going to have to take into consideration only gets broader,” said Douglas Barrie, senior fellow for military aerospace at the International Institute of Strategic Studies in London. In the past decade, European countries have accused Russia of carrying out a sabotage campaign against the West, with targets ranging from defense executives and logistics companies to businesses linked to Ukraine. Unidentified drones have been seen in the past year flying near military bases in the U.S., the U.K and Germany, as well as above weapons factories in Norway. High-value weapons and other technology at those sites are “big, juicy targets for both state and non-state actors,” said Caitlin Lee, a drone warfare expert at RAND in Washington. “The time is now” to invest in anti-drone defenses, she said. Low-cost options to protect aircraft include using hardened shelters, dispersing the targets to different bases and camouflaging them or even building decoys. U.S. President Donald Trump last month announced a $175 billion “Golden Dome” program using space-based weapons to protect the country from long-range missiles. Not mentioned were defenses against drones, which Lee said can be challenging because they fly low and slow, and on radar can look like birds. They also can be launched inside national borders, unlike a supersonic missile fired from abroad. Drones “dramatically increase” the capacity by a hostile state or group for significant sabotage, said Fabian Hinz, a missile expert and research fellow at IISS. “How many targets are there in a country? How well can you defend every single one of them against a threat like that?” he said. Ukraine’s resourceful, outside-the-box thinking In “Operation Spiderweb,” Ukraine said it smuggled the first-person view, or FPV, drones into Russia, where they were placed in the wooden containers and eventually driven by truck close to the airfields in the Irkutsk region in Siberia, the Murmansk region in the Arctic, and the Amur region in the Far East, as well as to two bases in western Russia. Ukraine’s Security Service, or SBU, said the drones had highly automated capabilities and were partly piloted by an operator and partly by using artificial intelligence, which flew […] |