Ukraine’s Operation Spiderweb, also known as “Russia’s Pearl Harbor,” marked the country’s longest-range drone attack of the war, striking multiple Russian airbases—including sites deep in Siberia—and reportedly destroying or damaging $7 billion worth of military aircraft, according to The Guardian. The assault involved 117 drones launched from concealed containers smuggled into Russia, targeting high-value assets such as the Tu-95, Tu-160, Tu-22 bombers, and A-50 surveillance planes. Secretly prepared over 18 months, the operation relied on FPV drones hidden in disguised cargo trucks, with strikes carried out across four key airbases. Ukraine claims the attack damaged 34% of Russia’s strategic cruise missile carriers.
Beyond its immediate military impact, Operation Spiderweb underscores a much broader security concern, particularly for the United States. Ukraine’s ability to conduct a coordinated strike deep inside enemy territory using civilian-style vehicles and commercially available drones reveals glaring vulnerabilities in modern base defense systems. These concerns are amplified by ongoing weaknesses in U.S. border security, which may have allowed foreign operatives, potentially from adversarial nations like China or Iran, to enter the country undetected, reports Brandon J. Weichert of The National Interest. With the threat of low-cost, asymmetric drone warfare rising, this incident serves as a wake-up call. Upgraded base protection and stronger border controls are no longer optional—they are urgent. It’s not a matter of if a similar attack could happen on U.S. soil, but when. Weichert writes:
For the last four years, until President Donald Trump’s return to power in January, the previous Biden administration was notoriously lax on border security. Biden’s policy saw a dramatic rise in illegal immigration into the United States—not only through quasi-legal channels such as asylum claims at ports of entry, but also directly across the border, giving the US government no visibility into who was entering. Concerns abounded that China, for instance, was inserting military operatives into the country. Similar worries arose about various Islamist terrorist groups secreting jihadists into the United States.
Is there any merit to these concerns? We don’t know—and this is alarming. The United States today doesn’t know how many people who crossed illegally were merely economic migrants seeking opportunity, and how many were deployed here by bad actors—foreign governments, criminal drug cartels, or ideological extremists. Any one of these groups, if sufficiently threatened by the Trump administration’s policies, might be able to replicate the Ukrainian drone attack here in the United States. […]
The biggest threat, of course, is China. Right now, China is the world leader in drone technology. With their advanced mass production manufacturing capabilities, China is building advanced FPV drones at a rate of 500,000 per month. Defense expert Simone Ledeen recently posted on X (formerly Twitter) that China could potentially scale this production to upwards of 700,000 FPV drones in wartime. […]
Just as with the Ukrainian attacks on Russia, Chinese agents could disguise large-scale drone launchers in seemingly civilian container trucks, parked just outside of sensitive US military facilities. Similar tactics could be employed using seemingly civilian container cargo ships in key US ports and launching offensive drone operations against poorly defended though strategically important targets in the United States. […]
Sooner or later, an adversary will attempt to conduct the same kind of attack on American facilities that Ukraine did to Russian ones. It is not a question of if, but when.
Read more here.
China produces around 500,000 advanced FPV drones each month—far surpassing the 117 drones Ukraine used in its recent Operation Spiderweb strike—and could scale to 700,000 in wartime. On top of this, China recently launched a dedicated drone carrier “mothership,” further expanding its ability to deploy swarms of drones at sea or abroad. If similar tactics were ever used against the U.S., the scale and precision of such an attack could be devastating. These developments underscore the urgent need to strengthen American border and base security before it’s too late.
Also read China’s Drone ‘Mothership’ Set to Launch.
