Cheap Drones, Priceless Targets: Fortifying America’s Bomber Fleet

Abstract

In June of 2025, Ukraine’s Operation Spiderweb proved that 117 cheap drones were sufficient to cripple a third of Russia’s bomber fleet overnight. Ukraine’s massive operational success underlined a simple fact: the logic of previous aircraft basing no longer holds. Remoteness is no longer as effective a shield as once thought, and threats towards high-value assets can come in the form of small drones and large, expensive missiles. What was once efficiency is now complacency, and the U.S. Air Force needs to learn from the mistakes of our adversary to minimize the risk of a strike that could cause irreparable damage to the U.S. bomber fleet. Solutions to this problem exist, and if implemented by the United States, can provide increased resiliency to our strategic assets in the 21st century.

Irreplaceable and Concentrated

Much like Russia’s far interior, the United States bomber fleet has benefited from its relative isolation from the rest of the world. Two oceans separate the continental United States (CONUS) from its major adversaries, and the north and southern borders present no significant threats to some of the U.S.’s most valuable strategic air assets. As a result, the U.S. bomber fleet’s footprint since 1988 has been consolidated to bring all U.S. bombers to just five home bases across three time zones: Whiteman Air Force Base, Missouri; Barksdale Air Force Base, Louisiana; Minot Air Force Base, North Dakota; Ellsworth Air Force Base, South Dakota; and Dyess Air Force Base, Texas. There are a few bombers stationed at any given time at Edwards Air Force Base, California, for flight testing, and others are deployed abroad. However, the overall picture is clear: a successful attack on just a handful of American airbases using small, cheap drones could cripple the U.S. ability to use bomber assets for the foreseeable future.

Long life cycles of modern bomber aircraft mean that the United States has no immediate capacity to produce legacy aircraft beyond maintenance and upgrades. Much like the Russians, our current crop of bombers went out of production long ago. With the exception of the B-21 Raider —  itself still early in its production cycle — any bombers destroyed or significantly damaged could not be replaced on the shortened timescale an attack on the U.S. homeland would require.

While sources occasionally allude to the use of multirole fighters like the F-35 to replace certain missions of strategic bombers (such as nuclear payload delivery), clear operational limitations make their use as “complete replacements” untenable. Long-range bombers such as the B-52H can fly 8,800 miles unrefueled while hauling 70,000 lb. of ordnance, and the forthcoming B-21 Raider, which the Air Force calls “the backbone of our bomber fleet,” gives Washington the option to strike or visibly hold at risk any target on earth from domestic bases.  By contrast, the F-15E’s ferry range is 2,400 mi even with three external fuel tanks, and the F-35A’s internal-fuel range is just over 1,350 mi, so both fighters must rely on tankers and forward hubs to reach intercontinental distances. Bombers also carry a broad nuclear load-out, such as air-launched cruise missiles, whereas the F-35A was only certified in 2024 to deliver a single B61-12 gravity bomb. Fighters augment regional operations, but they cannot replace the bombers’ unique blend of global reach, heavy payload, and strategic-signaling power that anchors U.S. deterrence strategy. These weapons are irreplaceable and more vulnerable than ever.

Latent Threats

Chinese purchase of farmland across the U.S. further elevates the dangers to the U.S.’s strategic bomber fleet. In 2010, Chinese ownership of American farmland was valued at roughly $81 million; by 2022, it had surged to approximately $1.9 billion, a more than twentyfold increase. Morgan Lerette, a former contractor for the private military contractor Blackwater, writes, “The Chinese are, or will, use this farmland to learn more about U.S. military capabilities, movements, and technology.” Indeed, the strategic purchase of land immediately adjacent to (or nearby) American bases – including Grand Forks Air Force Base and Warren Air Force Base (which has since been divested)-  raises the danger of offering a launch point for sabotage missions or deep-strike operations similar to what was witnessed in Operation Spiderweb. Chinese nationals have already used drones to enhance their surveillance efforts; Key West, Florida, has seen repeated incidents at an intelligence center, where Chinese ‘tourists’ were found swimming near the military facility and snapping photos. While government reforms to land ownership have attempted to counter these emerging threats, Chinese Communist Party (CCP) backed companies have grown increasingly creative, using judicial loopholes to circumvent restrictions. The innocuous cornfields surrounding the U.S.’s newly vulnerable strategic bombers have thus become a possible forward operating post in a future crisis.

Solutions

To defend our bomber fleet, we can think in terms of James Reason’s Swiss cheese model. Any single line of defense will have holes that can be exploited, but by layering different defenses on top of each other, the system can cover for the weaknesses of any individual defense. The goal is to create a system where individual layers of defense complement each other and where responding to one layer makes another more effective. Options for short- and long-term solutions that are both passive and active are highlighted below.

Short Term & Passive

The current conflict in Ukraine has seen the widespread use of anti-drone netting, including for the protection of entire logistics routes in the hottest sectors of the conflict. Both Russian and Ukrainian combat engineers have set up these tunnels, though they have only been effective when constantly maintained and well-built to ensure drones can’t slip through holes in the netting. These nets have the benefit of being easy and quick to set up, on a timescale of hours or days instead of the months or years required to fund, plan, and build more permanent infrastructure. They also have the benefit of being more flexible: drone netting could protect American bombers at home airbases as well as at forward operating bases like Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar, with a minimum of lead time and effort to set up, lending them to snap deployments in response to regional events. For U.S. home airbases, these would be best as a temporary solution. Anti-drone netting simply does not provide the same amount of protection as a true aircraft shelter, and the bases where strategic bombers can be expected to spend most of their time are worth the investment of proper protection.

In addition to radar, the U.S. should utilize its airmen to give more consistent surveillance of the outskirts of crucial airbases. Where a radar might miss a drone in ground clutter, a human tasked with guarding a sector is much less likely to miss the distinctive and loud sound of a small drone passing close by on its way towards the assets within an airbase and is able to report such an incursion or even respond. While a screen of airmen with shotguns trained in skeet shooting is far from an ironclad guarantee of keeping drones out of an airbase, it’s one more layer of defense that can be deployed to collectively make it harder to attack valuable air assets.

Short Term & Active

Electronic warfare is, as the war in Ukraine has shown, the focal point of drone defense. In the U.S., the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) already has a contract with a company called Dedrone to protect civilian airports and civilian airliners from small drones. The U.S. military should look to emulate and expand this model, extending the use of electronic warfare from operations abroad to peacetime defense of critical infrastructure like the airbases holding strategic aircraft. Electronic jamming will be crucial: with the exception of fiber optic drones, small drones tend to be susceptible to signal jamming, and the drones involved in Ukraine’s Operation Spiderweb were flown using a combination of signal transceivers and autonomous piloting. While autonomous targeting systems can’t be jammed, the presence of those systems only as a backup suggests that human piloting is still preferable to AI-driven systems.

The ability to jam both commonly used and novel radio frequencies used to communicate with drones will be important: with the speed of adaptation in the war in Ukraine, jammers and drones not developed in that crucible are outdated as soon as they arrive. Using the experience of our allies in Ukraine will allow for American jamming capabilities to stay ahead of the game, leveraging American expertise in technologies like digital signals to give ourselves and our allies an edge in the constant battle of adaptation. American airbases should also have the ability to turn off cell signals within a radius of at least several miles with no lead time or external clearance. During the Spiderweb attacks in June, Ukrainian pilots used Russia’s LTE cell coverage to pilot the drones remotely from within Ukrainian territory itself. GPS signals carry different (though similar) risks, allowing both drone pilots and autonomous drones to better pinpoint their location and therefore the way to the target.

Long Term & Passive

While a potentially costly solution, simply reoccupying some of the bases deactivated or downsized during the Cold War or in its immediate aftermath could reduce the potential damage any single attack could cause the fleet, complicate the logistics of a mass strike, and make such a strike more detectable. Especially for active fighter bases, the amount of additional logistics required could be minimized.

Defense companies, both established and new, have developed radars specifically suited to picking small drones out from ground clutter. The use of these radars in Ukraine under combat conditions has allowed for adaptation to real-world conditions. The U.S. should take advantage of these existing systems as well as its deep pool of capital and defense engineering expertise to continue developing new methods of radar detection to maximize the window of detection that radars can afford an airbase under attack.

As a more permanent passive defense, hardened aircraft shelters are a cost-effective and shovel-ready solution for the protection of the U.S. bomber fleet. Satellite imagery of Whiteman Air Force Base shows that these structures have already been built to permanently house the American B-2 fleet; given the novel threats facing the bomber fleet today, it would be a cost-effective solution to extend this protection to other aircraft types. While the cost of a hardened shelter is difficult to ascertain from public documents, recent contracts as well as recent publications suggest a cost per shelter on the order of $8-9 million each. However,  this may be a low estimate given the larger size of bomber aircraft compared to fighters. Interest in these shelters has been growing for some time. Most recently, Congress published an open letter in 2024 to the Air Force and Navy asking for clarification on the feasibility of better protecting U.S. aircraft on the ground with such shelters, with the signatories including Secretary of Defense (then Senator) Marco Rubio.

China has certainly made a decision regarding the value of these structures: over the past decade, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) has built over 400, while the U.S. has built only 22. While the sheer number of upgrades the B-52 has gone through in its nearly 70 year service life makes it difficult to estimate the cost of a single bomber, the eye-popping price tags on more recent bombers make the additional cost of aircraft shelters well worth it if they protect even a handful of B-1s or B-52s, or a single B-2 or B-21. Shelters also have the benefit of being a well-understood, mature technology that could be constructed in a matter of a few years. The contracts linked above were closed in two to three years; if tenders had been released to build shelters when Congress asked about their feasibility in May of 2024, they would be approximately halfway done by now.

Long Term & Active

To engage in active defense against a swarm of cheap drones, those drones must be detected first. Though solutions are being proposed and developed, radar systems have, since their inception, been focused on large, fast targets like fighter and bomber aircraft or missiles. Drones flip these assumptions on their head: by being small, flying low, and being constructed of materials like carbon fiber and plastic, they become extremely difficult to distinguish from radar “clutter,” and reaction times suffer as a result. In many cases, even with a radar pointed at an incoming small drone, the first warning will be visual or auditory. Defense companies, both established and new, have developed radars specifically suited to picking small drones out from ground clutter. The use of these radars in Ukraine under combat conditions has allowed for adaptation to real-world conditions. The U.S. should take advantage of these existing systems as well as its deep pool of capital and defense engineering expertise to continue developing new methods of radar detection in order to maximize the window of detection that radars can afford an airbase under attack.

In addition to radar, the U.S. should utilize its airmen to give more consistent surveillance of the outskirts of crucial airbases. Where a radar might miss a drone in ground clutter, a human tasked with guarding a sector is much less likely to miss the distinctive and loud sound of a small drone passing close by on its way towards the assets within an airbase and able to report such an incursion or even respond. While a screen of airmen with shotguns trained in skeet shooting is far from an ironclad guarantee of keeping drones out of an airbase, it’s one more layer of defense that can be deployed to collectively make it harder to attack valuable air assets. Furthermore, training and equipping ground troops in the use of fragmenting rifle rounds that increase the chance to hit a moving aerial target, or introducing newer kinetic options such as Saab’s new Loke anti-drone cannon system, will be crucial in preparing airbases for novel attacks. The speed of deployment of these systems- the Loke system was developed and tested in just 84 days– is indicative of the opportunity that exists in kinetic drone defense. As rapidly evolving technology, the infusion of American defense technology expertise and capital would allow for these systems to be brought online faster and with better results. The U.S. should partner with its allies, such as Sweden, to ensure that defense technology is developed as quickly and effectively as possible and to leverage experience gained by allies’ development programs. Ukraine in particular provides an excellent testing ground for new systems, and has recently begun a program aimed at providing live combat test data for Western military systems in exchange for the military edge those systems provide. 

Conclusion

For decades, the geographic remoteness of the bases that the American bomber fleet calls home protected the most valuable air assets that the U.S. possessed from enemy attack. In the age of cheap drones that can be smuggled close to a target and released nearby, however, the fundamental ideas behind airbase defense need to change. Ukraine has created a new paradigm in offensive operations behind enemy lines. Kyiv demonstrated the ability of a well-planned attack, bypassing geographic distance, technical challenges, and the alertness of a police state, to simultaneously strike multiple airbases and destroy billions of dollars in irreplaceable assets.

To defend our bomber fleet from such an attack, the United States needs to apply a layered defense model using dispersion, early detection, passive defenses, and a variety of methods of active defense to safeguard the bombers that form a core part of our military strategy. While the post-Cold War model of cost cutting and defense by geography has been sufficient to defend the American bomber fleet in a world where threats mainly came from a small number of highly effective and expensive systems like cruise missiles, the introduction of cheap weapons, deployable by small sabotage teams working deep within enemy territory and accurate enough to target specific points on an aircraft, has obviated the old model. Adaptation to current conditions is a necessity to secure the future of the U.S. bomber fleet.

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