It took Ukraine 18 months to plan Operation Spider Web, but just minutes for its swarm of cheap drones to send a $7 billion message to Russia and the world: war is entering a new epoch. An age of asymmetric power has arrived, and it is disordering traditional power dynamics everywhere, from how armies fight to how citizens relate to their rulers.
Last weekend, over 100 first-person view Ukrainian drones whacked four air bases across Russia — the furthest in Siberia — severely diminishing Russia’s offensive air capabilities. Zelensky’s message was clear: we can hit you wherever you are, with technology you can buy for thousands of dollars or less on the internet.
Yet if operation Spider Web was part MacGyver, it was also part le Carré. The Ukrainians had their drones smuggled on lorries well in advance of the strikes. The weapons were hidden in containers disguised as sheds, before being transported into Russia by lorry. These were then parked near the air bases, before Ukraine remotely opened their retractable roofs and launched their cargo to devastating effect.
Drones evoke a simple truth: hoard technology, especially military technology, and you centralise power. Disperse it and watch that power vanish alongside it.
Historically, war was an intimate affair. For millennia, the only way to kill someone was if you could see them. That remained true even with the invention of gunpowder. Machine guns and howitzers can certainly fire further, but still require proximity. The basic dynamics were always the same: men and machines clashed on the ground. Success depended on outlasting or overpowering the enemy through sheer force, numbers, or strategic positioning.
In practice, that made logistics and supply lines crucial to war machines. And, as late as the 20th century, conflicts were won by states that could deploy the greatest amount of resources against the enemy. The key here was effectiveness (total output), not efficiency (the ratio of output to input). And this is partly why two behemoths dominated the Cold War world so absolutely. Notwithstanding their vast differences, the US and USSR enjoyed almost unimpeded control of their respective nation’s resources — and because they had more resources than their rivals, they became hegemonic.
But drones are different: representing are a step towards detaching humanity from hand-to-hand fighting. War is no longer only about mobilising soldiers, but rather about sending autonomous machines to survey, target and even strike the enemy. This transforms war for would-be attackers: even if Spider Web’s drones had all been discovered or destroyed, the Ukrainian pilots operating them remotely would still have been safe.
There are broader implications here, especially in the way organised violence shapes society. Whoever deploys violence most effectively is best positioned to secure territories and resources, the foundation of political authority. The Gunpowder Revolution helped drag the West into civic modernity: by increasing the scale and scope of war, it increased the money needed to fund it. That, in turn, sparked the need for more sophisticated revenue-gathering systems, requiring greater centralisation, a trend that persisted until the end of the last century.
Drones, then, have reversed this dynamic, decentralising power and putting it into the hands of groups and individuals — or indeed war weary states facing a continent-sized enemy. Only governments have access to fighter jets and similar: an F-16 costs around $30 million and requires years of training to fly. Spider Web used drones that cost just thousands dollars, and which you can learn to pilot in days, even as they eliminated $7 billion of sophisticated military hardware in mere minutes. How’s that for power dispersal?
The result is inevitable: greater independence for smaller, poorer, or less militarily capable states. The Ukrainians remain reliant on US hardware, especially for air defence systems. As Russia daily pounds Ukrainian cities, they represent a lifeline for Kyiv. But the Americans are refusing to supply any more. So Ukraine flipped the script: rather than beg for more systems to ward off Russian attacks at the last moment, Zelensky’s generals used drones to disable them at source. This sends a clear message to Washington: while we need your support, we can execute high-level operations on our own.
“The result is inevitable: greater independence for smaller, poorer, or less militarily capable states.”
Once again, this technological shift matters politically. That inevitably empowers Kyiv at the negotiating table, while putting pressure on Moscow to update its own air defence systems, designed to counter incoming missiles or aircraft.
Certainly, Spider Web’s timing suggests Zelensky and his generals understand the political ramifications of the drone revolution. The operation hit the day before Ukraine met with Russia in Istanbul for only their second face-to-face negotiations since 2022. This is no coincidence. As well as inflicting serious damage on Russia’s offensive capabilities, Spider Web shifted the power dynamic, given that throughout the negotiations Moscow has maintained its maximalist position.
We must, of course, be careful here: with Russia embarrassed by the fiasco, it will be less likely to make concessions in the short term. Russian officials and commentators in the state media have compared the attack to Pearl Harbour and called for retaliation. State media now call for a nuclear response. Meanwhile, Donald Trump posted on Truth Social that, following the strike, he spoke to Putin who has promised, “very strongly, that he will have to respond to the recent attack on the airfields”. So for Ukraine, it has yielded nothing tangible. Besides, Putin has no interest in ending the war without first crushing Ukraine. Once again, that was clear at the Istanbul talks, when Russian negotiators announced that they would only agree to peace if Kyiv ceded large amounts of territory and accepted limits on the size of its military. A laughable, unserious proposal.
Spider Web may have put a spring in the step of the Ukrainian negotiators, they may feel they can look their Russian interlocutors in the eye more easily. But, alone, it will do little to end the war. As Tim Ripley, editor at Defence Eye tells me, the conflict will likely be decided on the ground, with drones merely supporting a more traditional attritional campaign. Certainly, the Russians seem to understand this. Their summer offensive is already underway: in the northeast, they’ve smashed Ukrainian forces in the Kursk region and continue their push into neighbouring Sumy. Now, they’re swarming the Ukrainian lines across the Donbas with heavy assaults, backed by weekly missile and drone attacks — sometimes up to 300 at a time.
The tempo of the Russian offensive is only intensifying as the weather improves. Ground forces are mobilising for a major push. All told, this is a major strategic moment for the Kremlin. By attacking on multiple fronts, Russia hopes to stretch Ukrainian resources and morale to breaking point. Yes, the Ukrainian air attack has damaged Russian bombers, but the Russian war machine is vast, and it keeps on coming.
And, of course, Putin could also order his own Spider Web. After all, if drones empower Davids, they’re also available to Goliaths: who, let’s face it, have far more cash, infrastructure and human capital behind them. What emerges is a situation where everyone is empowered by the new technology, from great powers, to small ones, to non-state actors like Hamas and Hezbollah.
How are the Israelis likely to respond to a mass Hezbollah drone attack that overwhelms their Iron Dome defences and causes destruction and casualties to a degree previously impossible? And what might the Chinese Goliath do to the American one?
In short, drones may auger yet more chaos, more bloodshed, more war.
And, all the while, the drones buzz on. China, for its part, is developing swarming machines that can operate in coordinated groups to overwhelm adversaries. The Chinese military has also integrated AI-powered drones that can autonomously identify and strike targets with surgical precision — harbingers of intelligent and totally autonomous warfare.
Other countries are rushing ahead too. Turkey’s Bayraktar TB2 drones have long helped Ukraine annihilate Russian forces. Israel’s Harop and Heron drones were among the first to showcase the technology’s versatility in intelligence gathering and strike capabilities. As all these nations advance drone technology, they shift the calculus of modern conflict by removing human risk from the battlefield and increasing the scale and precision of military operations.
We in the UK are yet to fully embrace the technology’s potential. Yes, Defence Secretary John Healey recently wrote in the Strategic Defence Review that “technology is changing how war is fought”. But what the Army needs now is action not words. Clever governments understand the need to balance expensive weapons systems with cheap, flexible drone technologies. States that refuse to learn waste billions on aircraft carriers.
To be sure, and as Russia’s summer offensive so luridly proves, many of war’s fundamentals remain: manpower and an industrial base are both crucial to victory. But morale of course matters too, and on that point Spider Web surely inflicted a deep psychological blow on Russia, one set to linger long after those smashed aircraft have been replaced. Indeed, the war in Ukraine is unlikely to end with a single battlefield defeat, but rather when one side’s morale fractures, finally leading to serious negotiations, regime change, or a collapse.
For the moment, both sides still fight with determination, and this psychological tipping point has yet to arrive. How we reach that point is the question. Thirty or even 20 years ago, it wouldn’t have even been in play. The Ukrainians might have been able to wage a guerrilla war against an occupying Russia — but holding off the enemy in the field would have been practically impossible.
Now, though, for all Russia’s resources, it’s not difficult to imagine its morale imploding if a particularly devastating drone assault obliterates a Russian target of monumental importance — or indeed Putin himself, who would once have been almost entirely safe over 1,000 kilometres from the frontline. But this is an age of power dispersal, and that changes things, if not as much as David might have hoped.
