How Ukraine outsmarted Russia with garage tech and changed the face of war..

When NASA first sent men into space in the 1960s, it faced the problem of how to write in zero gravity and spent millions of dollars designing a pen that would work in space. The Soviets got around the same problem by using pencils.

The story may not be true but it illustrates that a cheap technology can produce similar results to an expensive one. On Sunday past, the Russia/Ukraine war took a dramatic turn when the Ukrainian intelligence services produced one of the most stunning coups in history. Four separate and geographically diverse Russian airbases were attacked by drones launched from lorries. The attack destroyed or damaged around forty Russian bombers and also according to some sources, two AWACs – aircraft used as flying radar centres that can see much further than ground-based radar. Most of these aircraft are no longer in production so the losses are irreplaceable and could account for around a third of the Russian bomber fleet. Some are dual purpose, capable of delivering both nuclear and conventional weapons. In reality the largest of them the Tu-95, a Cold War relic with turboprop engines rather than jets which was first flown in 1952, is only capable of stand-off missions where it launches cruise missiles, well out of range of Ukrainian air defences. In a shooting war with NATO they would be detected and shot down long before they got near their targets.

What makes Operation Spiderweb as Ukraine has termed the attack, so remarkable is the fact that one of the Russian bases is in the heart of Siberia, 4,000 km from Ukraine and the drones were launched by remote control and possibly directed by Artificial Intelligence, although that is speculation at this point. It seems that an Ukrainian agent set up a business in Russia and hid the drones in the roofs of pre-fabricated housing units which were transported in containers close to airbases by Russian hauliers, who were totally unaware they were being used. Once in situ, the roofs of the containers lifted off and the drones were launched by remote control.

It is not the first time a cheap technology, designed for a more innocent purpose has changed the face of war. Barbed wire was invented to protect livestock in the American west in 1867 but it quickly found a military use. Properly laid, barbed wire was impenetrable to cavalry and presented a formidable barrier to infantry, creating killing zones where soldiers were slaughtered by machine guns and artillery. It was humble barbed wire as much as the machine gun that created the deadlock on the Western Front during the First World War and it required the invention of the tank, which became the queen of the battlefield, to overcome it.

Drones or pilotless aircraft have been around for a long time, HMS Warspite was hit by a radio guided glider bomb off Salerno in Italy in 1943, but it was the availability of cheap mass-produced drones for recreational purposes within the last decade that has led to their unexpected adaption for military purposes. Their success has been an absolute game changer. Our own recent conflict saw the IRA creating its own heavy mortars, drogue and coffee jar bombs to make up for its lack of industrially made weapons. These weapons were crude but proved to be highly effective against lightly protected buildings and vehicles.

It often the weaker side in a conflict that is the more innovative, necessity demands it. During the American Civil War, the Confederacy tried to redress its inferiority at sea by developing ironclad ships, and ‘torpedoes’, what we would today call mines and even a submarine. In the current war, Ukraine has used naval drones to sink Russian warships and has effectively confined the Black Sea fleet to port. As I write this article, the Kerch bridge, which links Crimea to mainland Russia is reportedly under attack by under-water drones.

Tanks have proved incredibly vulnerable to aerial drones; hi-tech, heavily-armoured weapons costing millions are being destroyed by cheap drones, made partly from 3-D printed parts in garages and workshops that cost only a few hundred dollars. Warfare has changed beyond recognition. Prior to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the Pentagon was developing bullets that would explode above or behind soldiers taking cover behind things like a stone wall. ^{Now a drone will fly over the wall, or through a window into a building where a soldier is taking cover and do the same deadly job for a fraction of the cost.}

Indeed, drones are so ubiquitous on the Ukrainian battlefield that to be seen is to be killed. Soldiers need to wait for low cloud, mist or windy conditions to rotate from the front line. The current stalemate is the result of Russia’s inability to establish air superiority over the battlefield. The medium and heavy Russian bombers targeted on Sunday are not used to pulverise Ukrainian positions because the risk of them being shot down is too high. Spiderweb demonstrated that nowhere, even in a country as vast as Russia, is beyond reach. Unfortunately, the genie is now out of the bottle. Non-state actors will have studied the weekend’s events carefully. Civil airports, public buildings, critical infrastructure and VIPs now look incredibly vulnerable to terrorist attacks in a manner they never were before.

The timing, as the UK released its latest Strategic Defence Review, could not be more apt or for the UK, inconvenient. The review talks about drones and the weapons and wars of the future but it is unlikely that government committees or Whitehall Mandarins will be able to keep up with the pace of change. The prominent military historian, Dr Peter Caddick-Adams, wrote in the Daily Express:

‘At a stroke, this has already rendered Sir Keir Starmer’s all too slender strategic defence review, already obsolete.’

It is impossible to predict how tomorrow’s wars will be fought, over the years the world’s best militaries have consistently failed to do so. The old adage that armies prepare for the last war retains a grain of truth, but I imagine today and in the months to, military planners all over the world will be reviewing their work with great urgency.