Ukraine’s...

A new age of drone warfare

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paratroopers seized the airstrips on Crete, denying the British Royal Air Force a forward base and tipping an entire island campaign.

A generation later in Vietnam, Viet Cong and North Vietnamese Army assault teams armed with satchel charges and mortars repeatedly penetrated U.S. perimeters at Phan Rang, Da Nang and Bien Hoa, burning fighters on the ramp and forcing the diversion of thousands of American soldiers to base security.

The underlying playbook of hitting aircraft on the ground remains effective because it imposes cascading costs. Every runway cratered and every bomber torched obliges the military hit to pour money into ways to frustrate such attacks, be it hardened shelters or the dispersal of squadrons across multiple bases. Such air attacks also divert fighters from the front lines to serve as guards.

In Operation Spider Web, Ukraine has sought to repeat that strategy while also leveraging surprise to achieve psychological shock and dislocation.

But the Ukraine operation taps into a uniquely 21st-century aspect of warfare.

The advent of unmanned drone warfare has increasingly seen military practitioners talk of “air littorals” — military speak for the slice of atmosphere that sits above ground forces yet below the altitude where high-performance fighters and bombers traditionally roam.

Drones thrive in this region, where they bypass most infantry weapons and fly too low for traditional radar-guided defenses to track reliably, despite being able to incapacitate targets like fuel trucks or strategic bombers.