Ukraine’s deep strike

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MARY REICHARD, HOST: It’s Thursday, the 5th of June.

This is WORLD Radio. Thank you for listening. Good morning, I’m Mary Reichard.

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: And I’m Myrna Brown.

First up on The World and Everything in It, a surprise attack deep inside Russia.

Bombers on airstrips across Russia exploded in a coordinated attack on Sunday. When the smoke cleared it wasn’t tanks or fighter jets behind the assault: it was drones. Ukrainian officials say the operation took 18 months to plan and hit targets thousands of miles away.

Russia struck back hours later, launching heavy attacks ahead of rare face to face talks in Istanbul on Monday. That meeting didn’t last long.

REICHARD: Joining us now to talk about the drone strike is George Barros. He leads research on Russia for the Institute for the Study of War. He previously advised the House Foreign Affairs Committee on Russia and Ukraine.

George, Good morning.

GEORGE BARROS: Hi, Mary. Good morning. Thank you so much for having me.

REICHARD: So glad you're here. Well, give us the rundown, if you would, what damage did Ukraine do and what did it cost them to stage this attack?

BARROS: Absolutely. So as of now, we are still clarifying the battle damage assessment, as many of the actual sites are still covered by clouds, so satellite centers can't see it all. But from what we know, the Ukrainians claim that they've taken out upwards of 40 Russian strategic bombers and other strategic aircraft such as airborne command and control craft. U.S. intelligence sources reportedly assessed that the Ukrainians took up to, got at least confirmed 20 such bombers. From what we can see from open source intelligence, we're confirming at least the destruction of 10 or 11 of those bombers. But again, that's not that doesn't mean that they haven't hit more. We're still waiting for the clouds to clear so clouds to clear.

These bombers are used to lob air launched cruise missiles against Ukrainian cities, and the Russians have been using them in this capacity for months. They're also high value targets. Many of these bombers, such as the Tupolev Tu-95 they've not been in serial production since the 90s, and it's very difficult to replace them, and in many cases, the Russians operated fewer than assessed 30 or 40 such aircraft in operation for the airborne command and control, fewer than 10 of those. So to lose even just a couple of those is a significant loss to Russia's Air Force.

They also play an important role in Russia's nuclear triad. These are some of the craft that are used to deliver Russia's air-launch nuclear tipped missiles, and so, along with the Russian ground base nuclear weapons and our submarine launched nuclear weapons, these are important in that regards as well.

REICHARD: Now we know that this isn't the first time Ukraine has successfully struck Russia with drones, but this one does stick out in the manner. What do we know about how Ukraine pulled this off?

BARROS: Yeah. So this attack was spectacular insofar as the range was very deep. Some of these air air bases were in the Russian high Arctic. They were in Siberia, upwards of 4000 kilometers far away from the actual fighting in Ukraine. And so that's what made this attack so impressive, Ukrainian intelligence successfully smuggled in false shipping containers that were carried by Russian commercial truckers to drop off points close to the actual air bases. When these false shipping containers got close to the air bases, the roofs popped up and several remotely piloted and also partially AI enabled drones flew out and then closed the final 20 kilometers or so to go get to the airfields and take out all these bombers. It's really the range, the distance, that is impressive here, nowhere in Russia is safe. The Russians had previously redeployed these bombers from air bases that were closer to Ukraine, further away, as the Ukrainians were using longer range missiles, but now the security of distance is no longer a safety net.

REICHARD: You're an expert in warfare and history of warfare, so let me ask you this. Some people are calling this Russia's Pearl Harbor. Others are comparing it to Israel's exploding pager attack on Hezbollah. How significant would you say this strike is in the history of warfare?

BARROS: In the history of warfare. It's very significant. Look, when we've talked about these FPV drones in Ukraine, we typically thought about those at the lowest level of war, the tactical level of warfare, sort of troops-on-troops in combat with each other, using the basic tools that soldiers have to take each other out. But these bombers the Russians took out, these are strategic assets. I mean, this is at the level of warfare of the entire state's resources to wage war and project power globally. And so what we've seen here is the Ukrainians marry up a very simple tool that's used by the everyday war fighter at the front line to be able to cause effects at the strategic level. And that is very interesting. I'd be hesitant to call it Pearl Harbor. I would, I would note that Pearl Harbor was an unprecedented attack from Imperial Japan against the United States, which was not a belligerent. Of course, this is a Ukrainian attack against Russia that has begun a war of conquest against Ukraine, and been waging it for three years. So that's a little bit of an apples and oranges. But from a military science perspective, it's very incredible what the Ukrainians can achieve with these cheap drones.

REICHARD: What notes do you think the U.S. should take from this attack in terms of how we fight and what we need to be on guard for?

BARROS: Any air base that is not secured, that doesn't have hard shelters, for hangars, for aircraft that doesn't have electronic warfare countermeasures is liable to attack. Insider threats are real. Nation state threats are real, simply having a fence around an airfield and posting up a sign that says you're not allowed to fly drones in the vicinity, that's not going to cut it. So there's a massive force protection requirement.

What we also need to realize is that the old way of doing business is currently out of date. Drone warfare is revolutionizing and transforming all of the operational concepts and doctrine for how basic war fighting tasks are done. And currently the U.S. military and NATO, we are not prepared to fight the kind of war that the Russians and the Ukrainians are currently fighting with drones. We are actually, I think, generationally behind the Russian and Ukrainians in military innovation here and the U.S. Army must really go back to the textbooks and rethink the doctrine. There is no single military unit within the U.S. Army, no tank unit, no mechanized infantry unit that currently knows how do you breach an enemy prepared defense in depth, when they also have these drones that can destroy all of your breaching vehicles, that can destroy your tanks before they even get within 10 kilometers of the front line, just as how tanks revolutionized warfare in the 20th century, or how bows and arrows and firearms revolutionized the way that knights in armor used to fight. We need to think about, how do drones revolutionize the future mode of fighting?

REICHARD: George Barros is Russia team and Geospatial Intelligence Team Lead for the Institute for the Study of war. George, thanks so much for joining us.

BARROS: Thank you very much for having me, Mary. Appreciate it.

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