The recent Ukrainian attack on Russian Air Force bases got me to thinking.
What is to stop a nation state, or even moderately advanced non-state actors doing the same thing to our incredibly expensive warplanes, at a nominal cost. As I recall there are less than two dozen B-2s, mostly concentrated in one location, very near normal civilian activities.
Or worse major civilian airports.
Now every truck within a dozen miles (likely much more), could be a very real, short term threat.
This seems like a genie that can not be put back in the bottle.
And for which I can see no, even remotely effective defense.
Most US airports and bases are protected from consumer-level drones with frequency jamming. I don’t know what sort of protection Russian airbases employ, if any. They likely believed those airfields were far enough away they were out of reach, and thus lightly defended and unprepared.
Max Boot agrees with you.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/06/01/ukraine-drone-attack-russia-bombers/
Does that thought not also apply to all our air bases, and airports.
Navy bases, power infrastructure… damn near everything
Doubt you can jam everything, everywhere, always
Technically, the USAF needs to keep many of its bombers out in the open, per treaties with Russia, in order so that Russia can verify the number of bombers via satellite imagery. I’d imagine that either the United States has to withdraw from such treaties so it can put the bombers into hardened shelters, or else erect very expensive anti-drone defenses around its airfields.
Why would attackers be limited to consumer-level drones? Frequency jamming won’t work against fiber-optic drones
Or against AI-operated drones
Well there actually is a remotely effective defense, putting aircraft back into hardened or camouflaged bunkers.
The main defense is fear of retaliation, which doesn’t apply to Ukraine/Russia since they are already at war. And has less or no effect on non-state actors, they just lack that level of resources and expertise. For now.
Could work for fighter sized aircraft
But not bomber, tanker, cargo, or airliners
This article on the technology evolution from commercial technology in the Ukraine. Drones with anti-jam, GPS denied capabilities are already in use.
That’s the real threat here- drone terrorism.
It’s not so much some bad actor bombing Whiteman AFB with drones from some nearby farm road, it’s some bad actor blowing up a flood gate, power substation, water purification plant, or a sewer lift station. Or really any number of other small, numerous, and vital infrastructure components that exist everywhere.
Militarily speaking, although they could almost certainly pull off some kind of Pearl Harbor style attack within the US, they couldn’t hit everything, and Uncle Sam would be pissed off and out for blood if they did so.
404 Media is reporting that the Ukraine drones used in the airbase attacks used the open source ArduPilot software. They discuss the software being pretty versatile. It can provide autonomous flight when GPS is available, but it also can provide stabilization and pilot assistance in high latency environments, for example, if you’re controlling drones from hundreds of miles away only connected by laggy Russian mobile networks.
I’d fear not just attacks on military targets which may or may not have active defenses, but more terroristic type attacks on civilian targets or civilians themselves. A Superbowl in an open air stadium in any major city is easily adjacent to a road where any random truck can access and unleash a hundred drones a few hundred yards away from the game.
You put 100 small drones at the end of commercial airport runways and create artificial bird strikes on planes taking off. They don’t have to be guided (so jamming wouldn’t work to stop them) if they just go up and hover in the flight path and get sucked in the engines.
I think I’ll be staying on the ground for a while.
All of this stuff is stuff you can already do though without drones.
I remember reading way back in 2003 one of the fears for terrorism was terrorists with .50 cal sniper rifles shooting plane engines right as they took off from fields outside the airport.
B-2s don’t park outdoors. According to Wikipedia, they live inside “air-conditioned hangars … which are needed to maintain the aircraft’s stealth properties, particularly its “low-observable” stealth skins”. I’m no expert but I’m guessing you need a lot more than the hand-grenade sized munition carried by a quadcopter-size drone to punch through the roof of a (possibly hardened) hangar and then still have enough energy left to seriously damage the aircraft inside.
Why not?
Absolutely correct
So you target, two or more drones a few seconds apart on each shelter.
As far as now their are no hardened shelters for large aircraft.
Regardless B-52S, B-1s, AWACS, Tankers, vast majority of F-22s… pretty much sit in the same few unprotected locations for the majority of their lives.
And a small swarm could decimate a civilian airport.
And there is no need for updated guidance, just put a few on each known ramp position.
I am ex Air Force, and never heard of a hardened shelter for a large aircraft
All this handwringing about drones and airports is silly.
Guys with rifles could do the same for the last 100 years. Pickup trucks or vans filled with explosives can too. Since the 1950s.
This is a glitzy novelty that’s walking up some slumbering wannabe armchair experts.