$500 drones destroyed $100M Russian bombers. This attack changes everything about modern warfare and exposes America's most critical vulnerabilities.
Ukrainian forces have achieved what seemed impossible: Commercial drones costing less than a smartphone successfully struck Russian strategic bombers worth $100 million each, deep inside enemy territory. This isn’t tactical innovation—it’s the emergence of warfare where David doesn’t just defeat Goliath, but renders him obsolete.
On this WhoWhatWhy podcast, we talk with David Shlapak, senior defense researcher at RAND Corporation, to examine how these miniature flying weapons are rewriting the rules of military power.
Shlapak, who has spent decades war-gaming scenarios and shaping military strategy, reveals that this vulnerability isn’t new — RAND warned about it nearly 30 years ago in a little-noticed report titled “Check Six Begins on the Ground.”
The conversation explores the profound implications of asymmetrical warfare where the offense only needs to succeed once, while defense must succeed every time. Shlapak discusses how swarms of inexpensive drones could threaten critical US assets like the B-2 bomber fleet at Whiteman Air Force Base, stored in environmental shelters rather than hardened bunkers.
Beyond tactical concerns, the discussion delves into how drone attacks on nuclear-capable aircraft complicate traditional escalation dynamics, the challenges of developing countermeasures against rapidly evolving technology, and the risks to civilian populations living near military installations.
As these low-cost technologies proliferate globally, Shlapak examines whether existing defense systems — built for traditional threats — can adapt fast enough to counter weapons that cost hundreds of dollars but demand million-dollar responses. The mismatch in cost and complexity raises serious questions about sustainability, deterrence, and strategic agility.
And while we’re already seeing the future of warfare unfold in the skies over Eastern Europe, an even more disruptive shift lies just ahead: the integration of artificial intelligence into autonomous weapons systems.
That convergence could redefine not only how wars are fought, but who — or what — does the fighting.
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(As a service to our readers, we provide transcripts with our podcasts. We try to ensure that these transcripts do not include errors. However, due to a constraint of resources, we are not always able to proofread them as closely as we would like and hope that you will excuse any errors that slipped through.)
[00:00:15] Jeff Schechtman: Welcome to the WhoWhatWhy podcast. I’m your host, Jeff Schechtman. In warfare, it’s usually the most expensive toys that garner attention. Multi-billion dollar fighter jets, nuclear-powered submarines, state-of-the-art missile defense systems. Yet, in Ukraine’s recent drone attacks on Russian territory, we may be witnessing something different, a profound shift that challenges every assumption about military power. Tiny drones costing a few hundred dollars are puncturing holes in multi-million dollar defenses, rewriting the rules of asymmetrical warfare and forcing militaries worldwide to rethink their strategic calculus. Today, as these drones proliferate globally, the United States faces an uncomfortable reality. We have now vividly seen how these miniature flying robots are reshaping homeland defense strategy, altering escalation dynamics, and even testing public acceptance of lethal countermeasures. But this vulnerability isn’t new. In fact, it was anticipated nearly three decades ago. Back in the 1990s, RAND Corporation issued a little-noticed report warning that U.S. air bases were dangerously exposed, not from the air, but from the ground. That report, titled Check Six Begins on the Ground, argued that America’s obsession with air superiority had blinded it to threats that would soon arrive at base perimeters, logistics depots, and runways. Fast forward to 2025, and that warning has found its moment, not through saboteurs, but through the swarm of $500 drones. Joining me to discuss how drones might forever change warfare, security, and our future is my guest, David Shlapak. A senior defense researcher at RAND, Shlapak has spent decades leading wargaming scenarios, shaping military strategy on issues ranging from nuclear deterrence to counterterrorism. His latest work examines precisely these kinds of threats of how small technologies might trigger seismic shifts in global military strategy. In fact, we may very well be witnessing the future of warfare unfold today over the skies of Russia and Ukraine. It is my pleasure to welcome David Shlapak back here to the WhoWhatWhy podcast. David, thanks so much for joining us. Well, thank you for having me.
[00:02:39] David Shlapak: I appreciate the opportunity to speak with you.
[00:02:41] Jeff Schechtman: Well, it is a delight to have you here. 30 years ago or more, you and your colleagues warned about the vulnerability and the dangers to U.S. air bases. Talk a little bit about that and why more has not been done or certainly examined to deal with this vulnerability over the years.
[00:03:01] David Shlapak: So, we did this work for the Air Force to examine the sorts of threats that might eventuate that were not within the normal doctrine regarding air superiority, and particularly whether there was a growing threat to U.S. bases. At the time, there was an increasing appreciation that things like ballistic missiles, conventionally armed ballistic missiles and such could pose a threat. We focused on the ground threat, hence the name Check 6 Begins on the Ground. We did some historical work and then we did some analytical work looking at what the current threat, the then current threat might look like and how it might evolve. And one of the things that we noted in that report, it was the potential for what were then called RPVs, remotely piloted vehicles, to be used in attacks against air bases. There are functions within the U.S. military that are more or less emphasized over time. One of the areas that has consistently been under-emphasized has been ground defense against air threats. Whether it’s the Army, whether it’s the Air Force, whenever there is a need to sort of find a bill payer for some other higher priority program, things like ground-based air defenses are looked to as sources of money for these other priorities. And I think that that’s, I mean, that’s held true for as long as I’ve been in this business, and it certainly has for the last 30 years. It’s not due to a lack of recognition of the potential threat as much as it’s the services and the Department of Defense seeking to manage all the things that they are trying to do within constrained resources of both money and attention.
[00:04:59] Jeff Schechtman: Given that, does the recent attack by Ukraine on Russia with these drones, does that fundamentally shift how we are looking at these issues? And what impact do you suspect it will have on the way U.S. defense is structured?
[00:05:16] David Shlapak: There’s been a growing recognition within the DoD that, among other threats, drones are emerging as a problem that needs to be dealt with, whether directly on the battlefield. You mentioned the high-profile attack on the Russian bomber bases. But throughout the Ukraine war, we’ve been seeing inexpensive sort of hobby or prosumer-level drones being used to destroy multimillion-dollar fighting vehicles and to inflict losses on, by each side, on the other side’s troops. So this has been something that we’ve been watching for at least the last three years. The threat to U.S. air bases and power projection capabilities has typically been framed in terms of threats that major powers could bring to bear, so ballistic missiles and cruise missiles and so forth. And so you’ve seen, for example, on Guam, the deployment of a significant number of ballistic missiles and air defenses, that Patriot and so forth, to protect that power projection hub, which would be critical in any crisis or conflict in the Indo-Pacific. I think what the recent Ukrainian attack demonstrates is that we need to think about the defensible wider array of targets. I mean, a nightmare scenario for the U.S., for example, could be that a swarm of these drones hits a location like Whiteman Air Base, where the B-2 fleet is maintained, not in hardened shelters, but in environmental shelters, and potentially destroying a critical and irreplaceable asset in the early days of a war, or even just as a coercive. I think that kind of problem is what this highlights. It’s less the big threat to the known targets, but the ability of adversaries potentially to reach out and touch other installations that are less well protected or considered to be in some sense or another sanctuary locations, and where investments are not being made in protecting them.
[00:07:40] Jeff Schechtman: And what does this do in terms of thinking about the traditional escalation ladder? Does it change that at all?
[00:07:48] David Shlapak: Well, an interesting aspect of this attack, of course, is that in addition to being platforms that the Russians have been using to launch cruise missiles into Ukraine, the strategic aircraft, blackjacks, and so forth that were targeted in this raid are also an element of Russia’s strategic nuclear deterrent. And usually one thinks about attacks on those as being a very sensitive action, and one that carries a signal, an escalatory signal, or at least a coercive signal. Now, the Russians compared to the United States, for example, are much less dependent on their bombers as a strategic nuclear delivery force. Their focus is much more been and always has been on ballistic missiles, both land-based and sea-based. So their sensitivity to it, to this kind of attack, is probably less than it would be otherwise. But it clearly shows that in the course of a conflict or even of a crisis, there are both opportunities and risks associated with both attacking an enemy’s power projection capabilities. I mean, our bombers are all conventional capable, but some of them are nuclear capable and are part of our strategic deterrent. But because they could be used to deliver conventional weapons in a war would be a legitimate target for an adversary, just as Ukraine saw these aircraft as being legitimate targets. Depending upon the context, however, attacking those forces and particularly attacking them on the ground versus shooting them down in the air when you’re conducting a mission bears the risk of carrying that coercive slash escalatory message. Once you’re into a fight, they’re two sides of the same coin, right? And so it definitely indicates that there is a new card in the deck for those sorts of modes of coercive bargaining.
[00:09:55] Jeff Schechtman: What is the framework with respect to counter drone measures and how have those plans been evolving?
[00:10:01] David Shlapak: So the Department of Defense has been intently interested in this for a while and has begun fielding or developing, preparatory to fielding, a number of systems that are intended to help counter drones. We’ve seen things like them being employed in, again, in Ukraine with use of electronic warfare to jam control links. And Ukrainians are using fighter jets to intercept some of these. They’re using surface-to-air missiles against them. There’s a desire and an intent, I think, to deploy lower cost ways of countering them, whether it’s guns or smaller rockets and smaller missiles. These are all the sorts of things that the Department of Defense has been contemplating, researching, and in some cases begun developing. And you also see in President Trump’s executive order on what is now Golden Dome, was that Iron Dome, you see that in addition to the more whiz-bang space-based Star Wars 2.0 missile defense kind of stuff, calling out drones as a threat that need to be countered as part of this overarching air and missile defense for the homeland. So there’s a lot of interest and there’s a lot of work happening. One of the challenges is that drone technology and the strategy and tactics of drone employment has just been proceeding at a breathtaking rate, driven by the Ukraine conflict. The kinds of drones that are being used, the way they’re being used, and how we anticipate both of those trend lines changing is – it’s very hard to get in front of from a defender’s point of view. When you’re a large military like the US and you’re developing a new weapons system, at minimum, you’re sort of looking five or so years in the future before you can actually get anything in the field in meaningful numbers. And usually it’s longer than that. In five years, it’s hard to know what the drone threat is actually going to look like, how much more sophisticated, how much more capable. We are clearly going to move into a world of greater autonomy, where things like jamming communications links will be ineffective because the drones will be able to be more like fire and forget weapons. We’re going to see as sensors become both more sophisticated and smaller and less expensive, because if technology advances more generally, they will have greater capability to do target recognition and strike the target that they’re shot at. So I think that it’s hard to get out in front of this threat. And as you and I were talking off mic earlier, in the relationship between offense and defense, the attacker really only needs to get through once. The defense has to succeed every time or close to every time. So it’s a real challenge. And it’s one that I think the US Department of Defense and other Western militaries are stepping up to, but it’s a big job. It’s a big job.
[00:13:22] Jeff Schechtman: Isn’t part of stepping up to it being able to move with greater speed? You talk about the speed at which drone technology is going forward. And of course, there are lots of other technologies out there that are intended for the battlefield, some that we only hear about, some that haven’t been deployed yet. But doesn’t it require much more rapid planning for what might come, and also greater coordination between the various military services?
[00:13:53] David Shlapak: Absolutely. I think that joint air and missile defense is one of the areas where the US military has done a reasonably good job of developing doctrine, developing procedures for conducting those operations. The challenge has been that there simply haven’t been the resources, the assets, the weapons, the sensors available to really make that pay off. As discussed earlier, air and missile defense has always been a relatively second order priority compared to, as you said earlier, the submarines, fighters, tanks. And certainly work I’ve done, we’ve emphasized this in a number of contexts, strategically down to tactically the need for the United States to more rapidly field a more robust ability to defend ground forces, air bases, naval forces. Faster is better if you don’t have to sacrifice the actual capability. The US procurement system has always been criticized for being slow. I think every administration since I have been in this business, which stretches back to the Cold War, has come into office with the Secretary of Defense promising to streamline, reform, improve the processes of developing and acquiring weapons. But it’s come up against similar problems and obstacles pretty much every time, which are, they’re in some cases legal. There are laws and regulations that impose certain requirements on the process that take time to fulfill. In some cases, they are institutional along the lines that we were talking about a few moments ago, where services have priorities that cause them to back burner certain kinds of capabilities. Some of them are budgetary. One of the complaints you always hear from the US defense industrial base is that from year to year, you can’t plan because you never know what the department is actually going to buy. Some of that is internal to the Department of Defense. Some of that is political. Congress gets to put forward the money and decide how it’s spent. And the fact is the Department of Defense does, it’s the biggest buyer in the world of anything, right? It has the, it’s the biggest business in the world. And there’s a certain amount of friction and inertia involved simply in trying to manage that. So yes, it would be good to make it faster. Yes, I think this is one of the areas where a speedier process would be very valuable. I also think that the department seems committed to trying to move more quickly in the area of counter drone. We’ll just see how well that works out given all the constraints that exist in the process overall.
[00:16:57] Jeff Schechtman: Given the vulnerability of bases, as we talked about earlier, to these drone attacks, what does it mean for the civilian population that is around military bases? Does it change that equation at all?
[00:17:10] David Shlapak: Well, I think that living near an air base that’s, or a military installation of any kind that is likely to be targeted in the event of a conflict, carries a non-zero risk of what we rather bloodlessly refer to as collateral damage. I think what this does, certainly adds another dimension to that, but may, I mean, it’s hard to say, but you could imagine ways in which it would actually reduce it. Because instead of using 2,000 pound bombs, or 1,000 pound cruise missile warheads, or 1,000 pound missile warhead, ballistic missile warheads, people might have, might, adversaries might be able to employ these smaller, potentially more accurate, more precise weapons that would have less risk of going astray, or of causing significant damage to civilian populations. But there’s also the dimension of the risks associated with defending against these systems. Everything you fire into the air has to come down somewhere, right? And so if you start deploying things like the, similar to the SeaWiz, the rapid fire cannon that’s deployed on US naval warships as a last ditch defense against cruise missiles, if you start putting those on the periphery of air bases, say, or something similar to that, you know, those spit out a lot of rounds in a very short period of time. You would probably hope that, you know, they would be sighted and that, so that they expended their energy either on the target or in uninhabited areas. Sometimes that might prove difficult to do. So I think that, yeah, that’s definitely a consideration looking at it both ways. And I think it also might expand the number of places where people might have concerns. Again, you know, bases inside the United States, potentially would be at risk from these kinds of attacks where they wouldn’t have been from traditional cruise or conventional cruise or conventional ballistic missile attacks. But I mean, I wouldn’t want to overstate that. And I wouldn’t want people to sort of get agit, oh my goodness, I live close to Fort Bragg, do I need to move? I don’t want to see property values in those neighborhoods dropping on this basis. I don’t think it, but it is, you know, it’s something that will need to be taken into account as we move forward.
[00:19:37] Jeff Schechtman: Do these drones and the potential for other technology going forward, does it in any way render some of the existing and more lumbering perhaps defense systems and offensive systems obsolete?
[00:19:53] David Shlapak: I don’t know that it renders them obsolete necessarily. I think that as drones proliferate and as they become more numerous and as they become better integrated into the militaries, particularly of larger powers who would have the potential to be able to deploy not just hundreds, but thousands and tens of thousands of these, potentially look like 10, 15 years, you know, single attacks of tens of thousands of drones spread across a range of targets, of course, are not inconceivable. I think it will change the way we use certain systems. For example, we’re already seeing, and I keep going back to Ukraine because it’s the best real world example we have. We’re seeing that ground force maneuver by large units, and here by large, I really mean starting around the battalion level, if not even the company level, is at risk because of both the surveillance and targeting that unmanned systems provide. And then the weapons that can be cued by those systems, whether it’s artillery fires or whether it’s lethal drones, loitering munitions and so forth. So they’ve had to change how they move, both in terms of on offense and on defense. That doesn’t mean the tank or the armored fighting vehicle or the foot soldier aren’t in any way obsolete, but it does mean that we’ll have to think about doctrinally and in our planning, how we imagine those being used. I think the same thing is true for aircraft. I don’t think this attack means that manned bombers or fighter aircraft are obsolete, but it changes the way we need to think about protecting them on the ground, which is, you said, work that we’ve done 30 years ago indicated was already a challenge. This is just a different and added threat to put in that mix.
[00:21:52] Jeff Schechtman: Because these drones are so relatively inexpensive, certainly, as we saw with the Ukrainian drones against the Russian base. They have the ability to swarm in huge numbers to almost overwhelm any kind of defensive system. Talk about that.
[00:22:09] David Shlapak: So I think, first of all, we have to be clear about the use of the word swarm, because in the context of unmanned systems, it has a couple different meanings. One way of talking about swarms has been to think about large numbers of autonomous vehicles that are communicating with one another, that are sort of like a swarm of bees, have kind of a collective intelligence that helps them be more effective. This drone is shot down. The other drones in the swarm know that’s happened and adapt their own behavior to cover down on maybe the target that would otherwise be not struck. That’s one sense of it. And that’s not what we’re seeing. These sorts of swarms are simply large numbers of weapons. You can think of them as being small, lightly armed, slow cruise missiles. But they come at you in the dozens or the hundreds instead of the ones and the tens. It creates a problem, because Lenin perhaps apocryphally said, quantity has a quality all its own. You don’t want to be shooting patriots at $500 drones. You probably don’t even want to be using flight hours of F-16s or F-35s to shoot down $500 drones. You need to have a system that is relatively as economical as some combination of what you’re shooting and what you’re defending. Shooting a patriot to make sure that your B-2 survives is not actually a bad investment. Shooting 100 patriots to make sure your B-2 survives probably isn’t a great investment. But if you can fill up a gun system or a high volume sort of rocket system, think about the kind of rocket pods that aircraft and helicopters have carried for 60, 70 years now, the 2.75-inch sort of solid propellant, unguided rocket. If you could take a system like that and give it a guidance that enabled it to engage these drones, you’d be getting much closer on the cost curve to dealing with them. If you could use rapid-fire guns as a way of defeating them, you’re getting even closer. These are all things that are possible, but they’re not things that we have defending our flight lines or fuel storage facilities or logistics facilities right now. But they’re certainly not beyond the state of the art, certainly not beyond our ability to field them. Again, I think the next few years, you could begin seeing them appear.
[00:25:04] Jeff Schechtman: Do defensive systems change in any way when you think about these drone attacks from non-state actors?
[00:25:12] David Shlapak: They certainly create a more urgent demand for a broad defense of many kinds of targets. A state actor in the course of a conflict is probably choosing their targets carefully with regard to maximizing military effect or providing some coercive impact. A non-state actor is probably less discriminating. They’re more interested in sending a message in most cases than they are in achieving a specific military effect. But that creates a challenge not just for the military, but more broadly for civil society in terms of what are the risks you’re willing to countenance more broadly across all the target sets that you can imagine being struck by non-state actors, whether it’s office buildings, shopping centers. We’ve seen terrorists attacking parades. Well, are we going to defend parades against drones? It’s a choice we have to make. It’s a hard choice, but living in society, particularly in this day and age, means being sober about risk assessments and understanding that you can buy down some, but not all. I think drones just add another dimension to that. I don’t think it redefines the problem, but it does give you something else to factor into it.
[00:26:48] Jeff Schechtman: Was this recent attack in Russia by Ukraine, was it any kind of a wake-up call that it surprised military planners at all, or was it something that they’ve known potentially existed, obviously, for a long time? Was there anything about it that surprised you or anybody else in your business?
[00:27:08] David Shlapak: I think from a tactical point of view, the depth at which they were able to execute this operation, and the really careful and extensive planning that went behind it, I think were unexpected. But I don’t think that the idea of drones hitting airbases, hitting aircraft parked in the open at airbases, in and of itself was particularly surprising. It was more the circumstances under which Ukraine was able to execute this attack that I think was a bit unexpected.
[00:27:49] Jeff Schechtman: Finally, are there other weapons like drones, other technological marvels out there that military planners are thinking about that perhaps haven’t entirely materialized yet?
[00:28:00] David Shlapak: I think there are always things that you see coming and things you don’t see coming. I think drones are sort of the latest thing to enter this discussion. I don’t know if there’s anything else out there that I would call specific attention to. But I think planners are always trying to look ahead and see what the next threat is and how it might be countered. But I wouldn’t want to speculate about specifically anything that is the next big thing.
[00:28:37] Jeff Schechtman: Things like jamming and laser-based systems and those kind of things?
[00:28:42] David Shlapak: Yeah, those are all things that we’ve seen and that we here, meaning sort of the defense establishment, have been thinking about both in offensive capacities and defensive capacities. So will there be unexpected employment of those types of capabilities in the future? Almost certainly. Surprise is intrinsic to warfare. It is inescapable. So there will certainly be things that happen that we didn’t see coming or we didn’t imagine happening this way, right? Everyone knew tanks existed. Everyone knew the Germans had a lot of tanks. What was unexpected was them driving through the Ardennes in 1940. It’s going to happen. The goal of defense planning is really to have capabilities, have plans that are reasonably robust against—to be Rumsfeldian for a moment—the unknown unknowns.
[00:29:49] Jeff Schechtman: And we haven’t even discussed—it’s a whole other conversation, perhaps for another time—the potential of AI to enter into all of this.
[00:29:56] David Shlapak: Yeah. I think that we will certainly see autonomy becoming a bigger and bigger factor in how drone warfare and warfare in general is carried out. I am by no means an expert in that, but absolutely it is something that should be discussed and brought to people’s attention. There are—in addition to there being operational and tactical implications for it, there are moral and ethical implications to how we employ autonomy in different contexts. Yeah, it’s definitely something that needs to be discussed and be made part of the dialogue about how national security is going to evolve going forward.
[00:30:40] Jeff Schechtman: David, thank you so much for spending time with us today here on the WhoWhatWhy podcast. David Shlapak It’s always a pleasure to talk to you. I appreciate the opportunity. Thank you. And thank you for listening and joining us here on the WhoWhatWhy podcast. I hope you join us next week for another WhoWhatWhy podcast. I’m Jeff Schechtman. If you like this podcast, please feel free to share and help others find it by rating and reviewing it on iTunes. You can also support this podcast and all the work we do by going to whowhatwhy.org/donate.
