Asymmetric strike: Ukraine's attack on Russian air assets holds lessons

In a daring and unexpected offensive, Ukrainian forces carried out several simultaneous attacks deep within the territory of the Russian Federation, targeting the latter’s long-range or strategic bombing fleet. The Russian authorities confirmed that these attacks had taken place, but did not reveal how many bombers were damaged. Russia’s fleet of strategic bombers is irreplaceable, given that they date from the 1950s and the assembly lines have long since shut down. The Ukrainian security service claimed that a third of the fleet was hit; President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said that damage worth $7 billion was done. But what has seized the world’s attention and will keep military planners and strategists occupied for the next months and years is the mechanism by which Kyiv dealt this damage: Cheap first-person view, or radio-controlled drones. These were disguised as a regular shipment of building materials and loaded on to commercial container trucks, which were then sent to locations close to air bases across Russia. At a specific point in time, these drones were commanded to fly out and guided by operators towards planes sitting on the tarmac.

 

This is not the first time that Ukraine has weaponised regular commercial logistics. Reports suggest that its 2022 attack on the Kerch Bridge, connecting the Crimean Peninsula with the Russian mainland — an attack that closed it to military traffic for some weeks and had even greater symbolic impact — was due to a bomb in a truck that was ostensibly carrying plastics. Explosives were concealed in the load of plastics, which originated in Armenia and Georgia before rolling towards Crimea. Similar methods were likely used to put the 120 or so drones used in this latest attack in place. The drones themselves do not have to be particularly remarkable or expensive. The takeaway is that a relatively small and besieged country, without a credible air force, has used modern logistics and cheap drones to asymmetrically take down a proportion of a superpower’s nuclear deterrent.

 

The drone era, combined with the interconnectedness of trade in a globalised world, is going to create new and unanticipated security challenges. These will be felt in particular in India, given the vulnerability of many of its most strategic sites — including those related to its core industrial backbone. Ukraine planned this operation for 18 months, according to Mr Zelenskyy. It will have had some boots on the ground in Russia as well, though he claims that all such personnel have already been pulled out. But the overall cost of the operation, both in terms of time and resources, remains low. In this case, the methods were deployed by a national government that is more than three years into a war. But there is no reason why the next such attack may not come from a non-state actor engaged in a proxy conflict. Indian planners will have to take stock of its military and infrastructure vulnerabilities to new-age drone warfare in this context.

 

Asymmetric warfare has been demonstrated to have become much easier. Many non-state groups will be able to afford 100-150 drones, alongside the personnel required to place and pilot them remotely. Innocent and unsuspecting trucks and commercial shipping could be used to transport these drones. The consequences to India of a large attack would be disproportionate to the costs incurred by whichever adversary may have planned it. There is no option but to re-examine how critical infrastructure can be protected from new-age threats.