How Ukraine’s Daring Drone Strike Compares To Middle East Predecessors

While Ukraine’s June 1 coordinated drone strikes on Russian airbases were truly unprecedented, it was in many ways inevitable. Several incidents across the Middle East in recent years served as demonstrations of how relatively inexpensive drones could fundamentally change the nature of modern wars.

Operation Spider’s Web saw 117 attack drones, mostly small, relatively cheap tilt-rotor forward-person view drones, suddenly emerge from hidden crates inside trucks strategically parked near Russian airbases thousands of miles from Ukraine. The drones swarmed over parked Russian Tupolev strategic bombers and hit at least 40 of them, causing irreparable losses, with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy estimating the attack eliminated 34% of Russia’s entire strategic bomber fleet, the Washington Post reported. Drones, costing only a few thousand dollars each, inflicted up to a staggering $7 billion in damages.

Ukrainian officials told the Associated Press the operation required 18 months of planning. In many ways, this attack was more than a decade in the making, given the long-known potential these drones had to cause untold destruction at little cost or risk to the attacker using them.

A series of incidents throughout the volatile Middle East over the past decade aptly foreshadowed how drones have changed the nature of modern wars.

How Drones Are Changing Modern Warfare

On October 2, 2016, a drone fitted with explosives by the Islamic State group hit a position outside Iraqi Kurdistan’s capital, Erbil, killing two Kurdish Peshmerga troops and injuring two accompanying French special forces. The attack was unprecedented and, almost nine years later, a clear indication of how drones could change the nature of modern warfare.

At that time, the Peshmerga held a front line approximately 600 miles long against the marauding militant group, which had seized one-third of Iraqi territory at the peak of its self-styled caliphate. The main threats these forces faced along these front lines were not ISIS drones. Back then, ISIS sent armored vehicle-borne explosive devices—hence, cars or trucks loaded with explosives—toward Kurdish positions. Machine guns and RPGs often weren’t enough to stop these VBIEDs before they hit their targets, leading Germany to donate MILAN anti-tank missiles to counter this lethal threat.

For months during the war with the ISIS caliphate, the front lines could remain static, almost World War I-like, and aside from VBIED attacks, ISIS had little ability to strike Kurdish positions or deep inside Iraqi Kurdistan. ISIS’s October 2016 drone attack forebode how that was beginning to change.

Years later, Iran-backed militias would repeatedly target U.S. troops hosted in Iraqi Kurdistan using explosive drones. In one near-fatal incident on October 26, 2023, an explosive drone penetrated the air defenses of an American base, crashing into the second floor of a barracks. Miraculously, it failed to explode due to a malfunction.

Previous Russian Experiences With Drone Attacks

When Russia intervened in the civil war in neighboring Syria in 2015, opponents to the regime of President Bashar al-Assad had little means to match Syrian or Russian air power. Furthermore, they lacked any substantial air defenses to shield themselves. Russia played this to its advantage. It deployed fighter-bombers at Syria’s coastal Hmeimim airbase and pounded opposition-held areas across the country, killing thousands of civilians in the process. It also used the opportunity to test its bombers, flying many of those same Tupolev bombers that went up in smoke on Sunday directly from Russia to bomb Syrian cities.

Russia also deployed medium-range Pantsir-S1 air defenses at Hmeimim in a move that critics of the intervention derided as proof that Moscow’s official justification for intervening in Syria was to combat ISIS was invalid. (It was, but not for that reason.) After all, they invariably said, ISIS did not have any air force.

Deploying air defenses proved a wise move on Russia’s part. In an attack that had the potential to inflict significant casualties and damage, at least 13 small homemade “DIY”-type drones produced and manufactured by opposition forces descended on Hmeimim. Russian air defenses and electronic warfare detected and intercepted the 13 “small-size air targets” in time. Nevertheless, the implications of the attack were immediately evident, with one RAND political scientist observing how it portended “a very dark future.”

Of course, future drone swarms became much more sophisticated and larger than that rather amateurish attack attempt.

Turkey And Israel Show How Drones Change The Power Dynamics Of War

Later that same year, in northern Iraq, Turkey demonstrated for the first time its ability to carry out targeted assassinations using its homegrown Bayraktar drone when it killed a senior member of a Yazidi militia linked to the Kurdish Workers’ Party in precision strikes. In the intervening years, Turkey would assassinate several members of the group’s leadership using these drones, a game-changing capability hitherto possessed only by Israel in the region in that decades-long conflict.

In a much more significant incident, Iranian-made drones launched from three positions on September 14, 2019, struck Saudi Arabia’s Abqaiq and Khurais oil processing facilities in the kingdom’s east, briefly cutting Saudi oil production by almost half. The attack hit specific parts of the installations that Riyadh could repair in short order. In other words, it was a demonstration of Iran’s ability to cause severe damage to Saudi oil production if it chose to do so. As one expert noted, the attack took a mere “seventeen minutes and less than $2 million” worth of drones and cruise missiles that could have caused untold billions of dollars in damage.

Israel was long a pioneer of armed drones in the Middle East, devising a series of loitering munitions based on its experiences in Lebanon in the 1980s. Several shadowy attacks in Iran attributed to Israel in recent years seemingly used similar methods to Operation Spider’s Web, albeit on a much smaller scale.

For example, on February 12, 2022, six quadcopter drones rigged with explosives targeted an Iranian drone manufacturing facility near Iran’s western city of Kermanshah, destroying “hundreds” of Iranian drones by one Israeli estimate. Given the short range of these drones, they were likely smuggled into the country ahead of the attack, possibly using similar methods to those employed in Spider’s Web.

Another covert operation using more quadcopter-type drones struck a building linked to the Iranian missile program near the city of Isfahan on January 28, 2023. The parallels are almost indistinguishable in retrospect.

Long-range drones assembled by the Iran-backed Houthis in Yemen have repeatedly targeted Israel over the past year. In another first, an extended-range Iranian-designed Samad drone used by the group slowly flew over 1,600 miles. Evading Israeli air defenses by traveling in an unexpected direction, it hit an apartment building in Tel Aviv near the U.S. embassy, leaving one dead and 10 injured. The incident prompted Israel to launch the first of many retaliatory long-range airstrikes against economic infrastructure in Houthi-controlled parts of Yemen.

In late November 2024, the Islamist Syrian opposition group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham burst out of its enclave in Syria’s northwestern Idlib province and rapidly captured the country’s second city, Aleppo. Building on that momentum and coordinating with other opposition groups, HTS advanced into the capital, Damascus, on December 8, forcing Assad to flee the country for his new life in exile in Russia.

The swiftness of HTS’s offensive was helped in no small part by its diverse arsenal of drones developed over the years of Syria’s civil war. Interestingly, Ukrainian intelligence operatives provided HTS with 150 FPV drones and 200 operators in the weeks proceeding their offensive. HTS also employed several similar methods to those used in Ukraine to develop such drones and compensate for their lack of air power.

“While the use of drones is not new in the region, HTS’s development of an indigenous drone fleet that includes long-range, rocket-propelled drones and employment of 3D-printing technology is a notable advancement,” analyst Rueben Dass wrote via Lawfare Media about the group’s drones. “As drone technology and 3D printing become cheaper and more accessible, more groups—groups that could never have built their own air force—will be able to pose a threat from the skies.”

Operation Spider’s Web doubtlessly raised the bar for what these kinds of drones are capable of doing under certain circumstances. These incidents in the Middle East have long suggested that something like this was inevitable.