What Drones Can—and Cannot—Do on the Battlefield

Within the space of two weeks in June, the Ukrainian and Israeli armed forces executed two of the most audacious operations in recent military history. On June 1, using hundreds of short-range one-way attack drones smuggled deep into Russian territory, Ukraine was able to significantly damage or destroy at least 11 Russian strategic bombers as part of its Operation Spider’s Web. Then, starting on June 13, in Operation Rising Lion, Israel used one-way attack drones that had been smuggled into Iran piece by piece to destroy Iranian air defenses, helping Israel gain full control of Iranian airspace. In each case, drones that cost no more than a few thousand dollars each were able to wipe out tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of advanced weapons systems that cannot be easily replaced.

These two stunning tactical successes herald a broader shift in the conduct of warfare. Both Ukraine and Israel also continue to rely on traditional, expensive weapons systems, and Israel’s success in Iran in particular required the extensive use of crewed fighter jets. But for modern militaries, uncrewed weapons systems—increasingly enabled by artificial intelligence—are becoming critical for success on the battlefield. This should be no surprise: according to Ukrainian officials, one-way attack drones are now responsible for 70 percent of the frontline casualties in the war between Russia and Ukraine. In 2024, Eric Schmidt, the chair of the U.S. National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence and Google’s former CEO, argued that the rise of cheap drones has rendered older technologies such as tanks “useless” and advised the United States to “give them away” and buy drones instead. In posts on X in 2024, Elon Musk suggested that “idiots are still building manned fighter jets like the F-35” and said that “future wars are all about drones.”

Despite this growing consensus, the U.S. Department of Defense still devotes most of its funding to expensive legacy weapons systems. Operation Midnight Hammer—the June 22 U.S. attack on Iranian nuclear sites involving more than 125 U.S. aircraft, including seven B-2 bombers—showed that high-cost, crewed weapons systems still have an important role on the battlefield. But as modern warfare evolves, so must the world’s most powerful military. The Pentagon spends tens of billions of dollars annually sustaining and upgrading aircraft carriers, F-35s, and tanks. But it invested just $500 million in low-cost drones through the first round of its signature Replicator Initiative in 2023. Although the Replicator Initiative represents a good start, U.S. investment in the low-cost drones necessary to fight a high-intensity, modern war is still at least an order of magnitude too small.

Making the shift to a high-low mix of forces—larger numbers of inexpensive assets paired with lower numbers of expensive platforms and weapons—will not be easy. After decades of focusing nearly exclusively on building a military made up of small numbers of advanced systems, the United States must recoup lost time and invest in and develop the capacity to deploy large numbers of cheap but accurate uncrewed systems, or what could be called “precise mass” capabilities. It must also integrate this new generation of capabilities with its existing legacy systems so it can operate more effectively in creative ways. If the Pentagon does not adjust to the new realities of warfare, it will lose the ability to deter adversaries’ aggression before it occurs—and perhaps the ability to win wars.

ADAPT OR DIE

The Ukrainian and Israeli operations show that precise mass attacks can be devastatingly effective, even against sophisticated adversaries. In Operation Spider’s Web, Ukraine made use of several emerging technologies. One was an open-source autopilot system that enables its drones to operate autonomously when the signal between human pilot and drone is jammed or weak. Another was an AI-enabled targeting system trained to identify Russian bombers based on three-dimensional scans of Russian and Soviet aircraft housed in Ukrainian aviation museum collections. Spider’s Web’s success—and Ukraine’s ability to smuggle more than a hundred drones over 2,000 miles into Russian territory in preparation for the operation—reinforces a pattern evident from the outset of the conflict: expensive military platforms are more susceptible than ever to attacks by precise mass weapons, especially when they are parked out in the open in airfields or seaports.

Israel’s Operation Rising Lion demonstrates the vulnerability of other expensive systems, such as air defense, to cheap, precise mass capabilities, no matter how deep into a country’s territory they are. Well before the mid-June attack began, Israeli agents had smuggled drone parts into Iran, then reassembled them so that they could strike Iranian air defense systems quickly and without detection.

By using cheap uncrewed weapons systems to carry out their attacks, Ukraine and Israel also imposed asymmetric costs on their adversaries. Although the full scope of Russia’s losses from Operation Spider’s Web is not yet clear, Ukraine claims to have destroyed over 40 aircraft. The 11 Russian bombers that commercial satellite imagery has verified were destroyed or severely damaged were alone hundreds of times more valuable than the drones used in the attack. If Russia lost even one of each kind of the advanced aircraft Ukraine supposedly destroyed, it would have incurred serious costs: a single Russian airborne early warning and control system aircraft has an estimated price tag of $330 million, and Russia’s long-range bombers cost up to $270 million. By contrast, Ukraine’s quadcopters cost between $600 and $1,000 each, meaning that the total capabilities used in Spider’s Web likely cost Ukraine no more than $117,000, a fraction of the cost of a single Kh-101 missile carried by one of the destroyed Russian bombers, and less than the $200,000 per-unit Javelin antitank missiles the United States has provided to Ukraine.

U.S. investment in low-cost drones is still at least an order of magnitude too small.

Although they took place in vastly different contexts, Spider’s Web and Rising Lion underscore an emerging dynamic in modern warfare: militaries that rely too heavily on expensive legacy systems may struggle in longer wars of attrition, and if wealthy countries do not adapt, they will be able to afford to lose only so many of these systems before the costs become financially or politically unsustainable.

Precise mass weapons are not just cheaper than their legacy counterparts, affording even underresourced militaries the ability to compete with stronger foes. They can also be produced much faster. Ukraine is now producing millions of drones each year, whereas it will take many years for Russia to rebuild its degraded bomber fleet. Such a gap in replacement times could help level the playing field or even determine the outcome of a protracted conflict between a state that overinvests in expensive, difficult-to-replace legacy weapons systems and one that can rapidly scale production of precise mass systems.

Ukraine and Israel are not the only countries that are exploiting these advantages. Their adversaries are, too. Moscow retaliated against Spider’s Web with some of the largest drone attacks of the war, nearly overwhelming Kyiv’s already overstretched air defenses. Iran responded to Israel’s initial attacks by launching its own waves of relatively cheap drones and missiles against Israeli targets. Although Israeli air defenses intercepted most of these attacks, the Iranian response was effective enough to prompt concerns from Israeli and U.S. officials that the Israel Defense Forces could run out of interceptors. The counterattack also forced Israel to use its fighter jets to further target Iranian launch sites over the course of a 12-day war that cost Israel hundreds of millions of dollars a day.

BRING OUT THE BIG GUNS

Even as low-cost drones become increasingly important on the battlefield, legacy capabilities, such as stealthy submarines and fighter and bomber aircraft, remain useful, especially in combination with cheap systems. For example, Israel’s June 13 strikes on Iranian air defenses with one-way attack drones allowed advanced Israeli and (subsequently U.S.) aircraft and pilots to enter Iranian airspace to bomb the country’s most sensitive nuclear sites and other strategic targets virtually unimpeded. Notably, Iran did not fire a single surface-to-air missile at any U.S. aircraft, and the Israeli government claims that none of its crewed aircraft were shot down.

Israel’s early use of uncrewed weapons systems to weaken Iran’s air defense reduced the monetary and human risks in the event that the initial attack failed and the drones were shot down. Then, once the skies were cleared, Israel used its crewed aircraft to strike targets such as the Natanz nuclear facility with an accuracy and payload beyond drones’ capability. Russia has similarly combined cheap systems such as Shahed-136 drones with advanced missiles to exhaust or destroy air defenses and then strike high-value targets.

Stealthy legacy weapons systems are expensive and take a long time to produce. But they can be extremely effective. To successfully degrade the deeply buried Fordow and Natanz enrichment facilities, the United States not only had to use 14 30,000-pound massive ordnance penetrator bombs that only it possesses; it also had to dispatch seven $2 billion stealth B-2 bombers, the only aircraft in the world equipped to carry and deliver such bombs. For all their advantages, one-way attack drones simply cannot carry over 400,000 pounds of firepower.

Investing exclusively in precise mass systems would limit the targets a military is capable of destroying. In fact, Iran’s military exemplifies the pitfalls of such an overreliance on low-cost weapons systems. Tehran has one of the most extensive drone programs in the world, but because it lacks a modern air force, it couldn’t successfully strike well-protected Israeli military and civilian targets and force Israel to rethink its war plans.

HIGH AND LOW

The Allies’ victory on D-Day in 1944 required the integration of air, naval, and artillery fire to soften Nazi defenses and clear the way for ground forces to seize and hold territory in Normandy. That victory required mastering the cutting edge of combined arms warfare at the time. Today, operating with a mix of low-cost and high-end systems is the new combined arms warfare.

Taken together, Spider’s Web, Rising Lion, and Midnight Hammer suggest that well-resourced militaries need to invest in both types of capabilities to strengthen their deterrence. As China rapidly modernizes its military in every domain, including precise mass, the United States has invested too little in “low end” systems that can be easily acquired at scale and updated as needed. The Replicator Initiative’s initial $500 million expenditure amounted to just 0.05 percent of the U.S. defense budget in fiscal year 2024.

The United States could comfortably spend ten times as much on precise mass capabilities—including on one-way attack drones and surveillance platforms—than it does by reprogramming money invested elsewhere in the Pentagon’s vast budget. The Pentagon could also easily draw on the vision of uncrewed and crewed aircraft flying alongside one another and acquire large numbers of inexpensive, uncrewed, autonomous surface naval craft to add firepower and surveillance capabilities at sea. But even in this new era of precise mass, the Pentagon should continue investing in stealthy bombers and submarines that are hard to locate and destroy.

Historically, countries that fail to adapt effectively to changes in the character of war are less capable of deterring their adversaries and more likely to lose future wars. Japanese airpower destroyed supposedly impregnable British battle cruisers in the Pacific at the outset of World War II. In the Hundred Years’ War, England used the longbow to end the era of the mounted knight by defeating France at the Battle of Crécy. If the United States continues to underinvest in precise mass to complement its legacy investments, it may not face such a dramatic fate. But its deterrence may deteriorate at the hands of adversaries who believe they can bleed U.S. resolve. At the same time, however, Washington should not lose sight of the high-end, stealthy platforms and weapons that are cornerstones of U.S. military power and simply chase the newest, shiniest technologies in the hopes that they represent a magic bullet. Preparing for the future of warfare has never meant abandoning the past. But it does require a nimbleness the United States has not yet shown.

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