Ukraine's Effects-Based Precision Guided Munition Strikes: Implications
Ukrainian munition hitting Russian bomber
On June 1, 2025, Ukraine launched a bold and innovative series of attacks against four Russian airbases, including some deep within Russian territory. As the world now knows, they used precision-guided munitions in the form of inexpensive quadcopters armed with small explosive charges. This operation, termed Operation Spider Web, was notable not only for the destruction of valuable Russian combat aircraft, but also for its profound strategic implications. These attacks exemplified an effects-based approach to operations by employing innovative means to achieve desired strategic outcomes in unconventional ways. Through these actions, Ukraine demonstrated that it is fighting smarter than the Russians, which highlights a potential strategy to defeat Russia's attrition-based combat approach.
Central to any large-scale military campaign is the beneficial objective of gaining and maintaining control of the airspace—air superiority—to ensure freedom from attack, while also enabling optimal offensive operations. Counter-air operations, especially offensive counter-air missions targeting enemy aircraft on the ground, are critical to achieving this goal. Such missions traditionally involve coordinated efforts by strike packages of fighters, bombers, suppression of enemy air defense aircraft, and aerial refueling tankers to penetrate defended airspace and disable enemy command and control, communications, aircraft, airbases, and associated logistics support.
Ukraine, lacking long-range bombers, possessing only a small number of modern strike fighters, no aerial tankers, minimal suppression of enemy air defense capability, and a limited stock of long-range missiles, applied non-traditional methods to achieve offensive counter-air effects. The result was the destruction or damage of multiple Russian bomber aircraft on the ground, thereby reducing Russia's capacity to launch offensive attacks against Ukraine.
Most analyses describe Operation Spider Web as a special operations raid. Implementing an effects-based strategy goes beyond that approach. This type of strategy could be applied across all operational domains and employed by all military service components. The methodology aims to incorporate alternative actions that are effective against an enemy, moving beyond traditional force-on-force doctrines reliant on attrition to achieve exhaustion of an opponent. Instead of fighting an enemy in a linear fashion—blow for blow—the objective is to land a series of leveraged punches that deliver outsized impacts. This approach offers Ukraine the best chance to achieve its objectives against Russia.
Russia's strategy hinges on leveraging its numerical superiority in troops, artillery, and other warfighting materiel to prevail in a prolonged war of attrition. Ukraine must execute its military operations to greater effect—as illustrated by its June 1st attacks. Ukraine should expand this approach to the entirety of key Russian centers of gravity—not only the counter-air target set. An effects-based strategy involves identification of and planning for alternative courses of action aimed at changing adversary behavior to achieve desired outcomes that ultimately support Ukraine's overall military and political objectives.
These attacks represent more than tactical successes; they provide a broader strategic framework demonstrating how asymmetric innovation can serve as an alternative to brute force. By focusing on specific outcomes rather than engaging in direct large-scale confrontations, Ukraine showcases a viable path to victory. The principle is clear: in warfare, strategic insight and operational innovation can be more decisive than numerical superiority alone.
It remains uncertain whether Ukraine will adopt this approach as the basis of its strategy against Russia, but doing so would likely increase their chances of success. As would the U.S. and Ukraine's western allies equipping Ukrainian forces to facilitate their success. That outcome is directly tied to securing U.S. critical national security objectives.
Commentators assessing Operation Spider Web largely focus on aircraft vulnerabilities. However, the implications of recent attacks on infantry, tanks, ships, logistics, power generation, and other targets using inexpensive, small, and numerous precision guided munitions (lethal drones) are significant. These small uninhabited aerial vehicles have undeniably changed the character of warfare. Accurate assessment and realistic understanding of their implications are essential to capitalize on this reality.
The actual effects of small lethal drones are many. Perhaps the most significant in the context of the Russia-Ukraine war is that they provide individual soldiers access and control of precision guided munitions. Before this war, these were generally only applied in quantity by combat aircraft. Facing an existential threat, Ukraine came up with a means to effectively defend themselves while compensating for their weapons deficiencies in both capability and capacity relative to Russia. Their solution was to develop cheap, numerous, easy to produce and tactically effective precision guided munitions, largely quadcopters delivering explosive charges, along with relatively inexpensive cruise missiles to give Ukraine the ability to strike critical targets in Russia.
While the media is focusing on Ukraine's drone attacks on Russian airpower, their most effective use to date is in countering conventional infantry and armor engagements. Indeed, today nominally 80 percent of the targets engaged by Ukrainian Army units on the front lines are by portable precision guided munitions/ drones—we may be witnessing artillery being replaced by drones as the new 'king of the battlefield.'
The vulnerability of aircraft—along with infantry, tanks, ships, etc.—in the open should not be a surprise to anyone. During the Cold War, U.S. Air Forces in Europe and in Korea were virtually all positioned in hardened aircraft shelters. The U.S. military leadership of the day understood the consequences of unprotected forward-deployed combat aircraft and were not willing to take that risk.
With respect to forces based in the continental United States, the oceans were then still considered to be an effective defense. That is no longer the case. Portable precision guided munitions/ drones can be concealed and transported near the area of intended use by other means to overcome vast ocean distances. Not requiring complex or expensive construction, indigenous drones are easily constructed, Note the drone incidents that occurred at Virginia's Langley Air Force Base in December of 2023. The drone operators could have very easily executed a Ukrainian-style attack had they desired.
A playbook titled 'Unrestricted Warfare' detailing non-traditional methods to accomplish desired effects was written by two Chinese Air Force colonels in 1999. It describes how China plans to nullify U.S. defenses using asymmetric means. We are on notice and the warning indicators have been blinking red for years. No one should be surprised that adversaries intend to hold U.S. forces overseas and in the continental U.S. at risk. Lethal drones provide a cheap, high volume, and effective means to actualize these sorts of concepts—not only against military targets—but even more leveraged targets in the form of vulnerable civil infrastructure such as electricity power generation, communication and transportation networks, oil, gas, water distribution, etc.
The 1941 strike against Pearl Harbor was against a limited set of distant military installations. A modern equivalent could impact a broad range of targets across the U.S. in a very narrow window of time. If executed across a comprehensive set of key targets, America's ability to competently fight could be derailed at the opening of a conflict.
Since the end of the Cold War, force protection has not been a priority for the U.S. armed forces or the civil authorities responsible for safeguarding critical infrastructure. This reality stems from a confluence of erroneous strategic assumptions, associated fiscal constraints, bureaucratic inertia, and risk taken based on a low probability of credible threat to justify the cost of protection. These presumptions are no longer tenable. Both the threats to U.S. forces and the capabilities of adversaries have advanced dramatically—and ignoring these changes puts American security at significant risk.
As far back as 2004, while serving as the Director of Operations for Pacific Air Forces, I proposed building hardened aircraft shelters on Guam to protect B-2s and F-22s. That proposal was rejected due to insufficient funding. At the time, senior U.S. security leadership accepted the risk of attacks on Guam, and on the continental United States. Two decades later, that mindset is only now beginning to change, despite a radically different threat environment. China, by contrast, has taken the opposite view. It has made significant investments in protecting its airpower by constructing thousands of hardened shelters, underscoring a clear strategic emphasis on survivability.
Perhaps the recent proliferation of portable precision-guided munitions/ drones will finally serve as a wake-up call for Department of Defense leadership, the Office of Management and Budget, and the Congress to provide the required funding to secure our military assets. The vulnerability of unprotected U.S. air, space, sea, land, and cyber resources is clear.
The widespread and innovative use of portable precision-guided munitions by Ukrainian forces has revealed the effectiveness of such weapons, even against major military powers. The U.S. military must respond with resolve. Base and area defense must become a top priority. That includes decentralizing operations, investing in layered defenses, and ensuring that its military forces are adequately protected.
Airpower, along with every other element of military power, without assured survivability is a hollow deterrent. It may be rendered ineffective before it can be brought to bear in combat. Ensuring the ability to fight starts with protecting the ability to survive.
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