Edited by Sidney McAlear

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You know this; we've all seen the footage. But I think we're just at the start of a transformation. A $15,000 drone is killing things that used to require a cruise missile, a strategic bomber, or some other form of “high-end” military capability. This isn't just a forward deployment problem. It lands on the doorstep of every military base, sensitive site, and critical node of infrastructure, including ones on US soil.

Nations have been using them for decades. However, the departure from large ISR (Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance) and strike platforms into low-cost kamikaze and First Person View (FPV) drones has dramatically lowered the technical barrier to entry. We've watched the war in Ukraine showcase how FPV drones have taken out key nodes, personnel, and aircraft. Low-cost hardware is killing million-dollar equipment….at scale. That ratio matters.

The capability gap between a superpower and a determined non-state actor (or a beaten-down state actor) has just compressed. When a FPV drone can destroy a strategic bomber on a runway 2,600 miles away (4,300 kilometers for the rest of the world) from the operator, the old assumptions about strategic depth need a hard look. Bases that once were out of reach are now threatened by a mini-van loaded out with kamikaze drones.

That's what we're living through right now. In Russia. In the Middle East. In Louisiana.

Operation Spider Web.

Eighteen months of planning. Drones smuggled inside wooden cabins, bolted to the backs of cargo trucks. Civilian drivers hired for what they thought was a routine haul. On June 1, 2025, those trucks pulled up near five Russian air bases — one of them in Siberia, 4,300 kilometers from Ukraine — and launched.

The drones were FPV. Short range. Commercially derived. Guided by free access autopilot software called ArduPilot, the same software drone hobbyists use. AI-assisted targeting trained on museum models of the aircraft they were going after. Each operator, sitting in Ukraine, flew their drone into the fuel tanks in the wings of bombers that were armed and ready to launch.

Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia has been hit repeatedly. The Department of War hasn't confirmed whether ballistic missiles, drones, or a combination were responsible for each strike. My bet is both.

High Value Air Assets (HVAA) are always a crucial component of any aerial engagement. Their loss is unacceptable for any fighter pilot. Tankers and the E-3 both fit that category. Losing multiple airframes sitting on the ground is a hard pill to swallow. How it happened will be dissected over the coming weeks, months, and years.

The Air Force has a doctrine called Agile Combat Employment (ACE), and plenty of people have already weighed in, calling it a complete failure. My take, looking at the same news you are, is that executing ACE doesn't happen in a vacuum. Geopolitics. Infrastructure. Funding. Personnel. Logistics. All of it shapes what's actually possible versus what looks clean on a slide.

In a perfect world, assets are spread out, combat airpower is distributed, and no single strike can take out multiple critical platforms at once. That's the idea. That's not always the reality.

Maybe the hit on Prince Sultan was the perfect storm. The “golden BB” finding its way through. Was ACE employed? I don't know. My guess is yes, though perhaps not at the optimal level given the constraints above. But here's the question worth asking before you pile on: if ACE hadn't been employed at all, what would that ramp have looked like? Think about what a pre-ACE flight line in 2010 looked like. The losses could have been far worse.

Barksdale Air Force Base, Bossier City, Louisiana. Home of the B-52. Headquarters of Air Force Global Strike Command. Part of the nuclear triad.

During the week of March 9th, while B-52s were actively launching strike packages against Iran, 12 to 15 drones per wave flew over the flight line for seven straight days. Non-commercial signal characteristics. Long-range control links. Jam-resistant. The flight line had to be shut down. Launches delayed.

My read: this isn't a hobbyist who drifted into restricted airspace. You don't coordinate 12 to 15 jam-resistant drones with non-commercial signal characteristics for fun. You don't do it for seven days. You don't deliberately probe security response patterns unless you need that data for something specific.

Barksdale is one of two B-52 bases. The B-52s on that flight line sit largely in the open. There are 76 of them in the entire fleet. Ten years ago, would anyone have worried about the vulnerabilities of our bombers sitting in Louisiana or North Dakota?

My take.

I've been calling this the democratization of strategic strike — and I think that framing is worth a discussion.

For most of military history, hitting a strategic target, a bomber base, a command node, or a radar array required nation-state resources. Stealth aircraft. Ballistic missiles. Cruise missile programs that took decades and billions to develop. The barrier to strategic effect was deliberately high.

That barrier is coming down.

Not all the way. A $1,000 FPV drone isn't replacing a B-2. But it doesn't have to. It just has to make the B-2's parking spot less safe. Force the flight line to close. Make base commanders wonder what the next wave is actually carrying.

Agile Combat Employment: distributed ops, reduced signatures, dispersed forces that are harder to target and harder to destroy in a single strike, is exactly the doctrine the Air Force developed for this threat environment.

Whether it was fully executed here, partially executed, or simply constrained by the geopolitical reality of operating out of sovereign partner nations with fixed infrastructure and diplomatic limitations is an open question. You can't always pick your parking spot. Sometimes the alliance relationship dictates where the jets sit.

To steal a line from Sal from What’s Going on with Shipping…”we are good at swatting the birds, but swatting gnats? not so much.”

I joined Ward and Sal for a fourth live stream the other day, check it out below.

In History

On December 7, 1941, the US lost 188 aircraft at Pearl Harbor — most destroyed on the ground, wingtip to wingtip, because commanders were more worried about sabotage than air attack. The threat came from a direction nobody was adequately defending. Some lessons have to be relearned.