June 2025 Report 1
June 2025 HIGHLIGHTS
- The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) has accelerated the deployment of drone-enabled missions.
- Israeli innovation in the defense tech space continues to rise, with companies pushing the boundaries of flight performance and combat capabilities.
- FPV drones have transformed the battlefield in Ukraine, and both sides have adapted their offensive and defenses technologies and tactics accordingly.
- Ukrainian FPV operations have forced the Russians to increasingly use motorcycles for their ground movements.
- Russia has increased the rate of its long-range, Kamikaze drone strikes — with lethal effects.
- Ukraine is modifying leftover Soviet-era equipment to meet its air defense needs.
- Taiwan fields six different types of military drones to fulfill a broad spectrum of operational needs.
- A new Hybrid Vertical Take-Off and Landing (HVTOL) drone, completely designed and built in Taiwan, marks a step away from dependency on Chinese supply chains.
- Taiwan has launched a major plan to grow its drone industry.
EDITOR'S NOTE
By the time this edition of the Vector Report is published, you will have undoubtedly learned a great deal about Ukraine’s Operation Spider web.
In a daring raid that took one year, six months, and nine days to plan, Ukrainian special operators launched 117 tactical drones against Russian airbases, destroying scores of nuclear-capable bombers as they sat impotently on the tarmac — the same bombers, mind you, that have been lobbing missiles at Ukrainian cities and civilians for years.
Ukrainian special operators concealed the drones in wooden cabins placed on the back of semi trucks. Unsuspecting Russian drivers drove the rigs near the Russian air bases. Then, once in position, the drones swarmed out of their containers and wreaked havoc.
Given the news coverage dedicated to Operation Spiderweb, there’s no need to revisit its granular details. Yet, beyond embarrassing the Kremlin and degrading its ability to hurl cruise missiles atUkrainian cities, it’s fair to say that the operation marked a tipping point in the broader conception of what drone warfare can accomplish. Above all, it highlighted that small drones are tactical tools that can achieve strategic effects — a new maxim of modern warfare that these pages have repeatedly underscored for more than a year.
If you’re a first-time Vector Report reader, I’d like to revisit a few snippets of previous Editor’s Notes that addressed this bridge between conventional and unconventional warfare that drones enable.
This isn’t an exercise in self-congratulations. Rather, our work offers a case study in the value of field research. You cannot anticipate the future of drone warfare while cocooned within the confines of a Washington, D.C. think tank, or from the boardroom of a major defense contractor.
You must be on the ground where innovations in drone warfare technologies and tactics are taking place. These changes are often driven from the bottom up by warfighters looking to meet their immediate priorities — and so you must be among the warfighters to have your thumb on the pulse of drone warfare’s next evolutions.
On Dec. 20, 2024, I wrote:
“Even if they are unarmed, small drones offer America’s adversaries a low-cost, plausibly deniable way to spread panic and paralyze our economy. The drone incursions at London’s Gatwick Airport in December 2018 highlighted that threat. By simply flying drones within the airport’s vicinity, the unidentified perpetrators were able to ground traffic and strand more than 100,000 travelers for three days. A similar incident could easily happen in America — and just imagine the propaganda impact of a cheap, armed drone destroying a multi-million-dollar American warplane parked on the tarmac at some Air Force base.”
In the April 25, 2025 edition of the Vector Report, I went on:
“Due to our democratic culture, the endurance of America’s wars is sustained by popular, civilian support. Thus, should a conflict erupt, China will aim to inflict some measure of suffering on the American civilian population aimed at undercutting our national will to fight. To that end, China (or any adversary) doesn’t need to use ICBMs or hypersonic missiles or even massive cyberattacks. Instead, covert teams operating within the U.S. homeland could employ small, tactical drones to carry out a coordinated, nationwide attack that sows fear and panic and paralyzes our economy.”
Wake-Up Call
For Ukraine, Operation Spiderweb was a triumph, and it certainly should come as welcome news for Americans, as well, since it reinforces, once again, the fact that Ukraine is a nation of freedom fighters who have earned our assistance.
Yet, Spiderweb is also a wake-up call for Washington, for we must assume that our adversaries are taking notes and learning lessons that could be used against the American homeland. Other, compounding factors also make the threat even more immediate. In April 2024, the House Homeland Committee reported that 24,214 Chinese nationals had been apprehended illegally crossing the border by that point in Fiscal Year 2024. Moreover, the number of Chinese nationals encountered at the southern U.S. border was up by 8,000 percent in March 2024 versus March 2021, the committee reported.
Given China’s recent track record of using dirty tricks to infiltrate and destabilize the American homeland, I would submit that there is a very high likelihood that Beijing has been building up a fifth column of saboteurs and special operators ready, at a moment’s notice, to unleash a nation wide series of attacks.
For the April 25, 2025 Vector Report edition, I wrote:
“Aggressive, authoritarian forces are on the march around the world, and we’d be fools to think that two oceans and a border wall are enough to protect us. Apart from a full-blown nuclear exchange, the most pressing threat is a conventional war with China over Taiwan. During such a war — or one against any nation-state adversary —we should expect a retaliatory campaign against the American homeland carried out by a fifth column of saboteurs pre-placed within our borders. We should also anticipate that small, tactical drones will be their kinetic weapon of choice.”
In that same edition, I added:
“When it comes to defending the U.S. homeland, advanced missile defense systems and space-based tracking systems aren’t enough. We need to consider the risk of aerial attacks launched from within the U.S., operating at extremely low altitudes. We’ve seen time and again how Ukraine’s fleet of homegrown, relatively low-tech kamikaze drones have slipped through the cracks of Russia’s air defenses. Our adversaries are likely wondering how America’s air defenses would fare against such low-altitude attacks.”
Best of the Best
Drone warfare professionals will be studying and referring to Operation Spiderweb for years to come. And even from this proximate vantage point, less than one week after the operation, one lesson is already crystallizing, and it has nothing to do with technology.
As one Russian military commentator wrote in the wake of Ukraine’s daring drone raid: “Whether there is parity between us and the enemy in drones is no longer important. What is important is that we are lagging behind in the development of human competencies.”
The war in Ukraine has repeatedly highlighted the need for skilled human operators to fully exploit the new technologies they wield. Operation Spiderweb offered another data point in this regard. Reviewing the video footage, you see how the Ukrainian drone pilots managed to maintain control of their drones through interruptions in their video feeds and then meticulously chose the best places to strike the Russian bombers for maximum damage. Thus, for all its technical sophistication and tradecraft, Operation Spiderweb’s success ultimately hinged on human skills.
Fighter aircraft demand elite fighter pilots to be effective, and the same goes for drone warfare. Particularly with first-person view, or FPV, drones, which must be hand flown through all phases of flight. As a former Air Force fixed wing pilot, I’ve flown FPV drones at some training programs here in Ukraine, and I can say for sure that it isn’t easy and requires a high degree of spatial awareness and fine hand-eye coordination — even more so, at times, than flying fingertip formation in a supersonic T-38 jet, which I used to do.
Ukrainian drone pilot instructors generally say that it takes about 30 days to become a proficient FPV pilot. Yet, it takes much longer to be a truly skilled and an experienced combat FPV pilot. In combat, skilled FPV pilots attack from behind the sun and use wind direction to conceal the sound of their drone’s motors. And they make split-second decisions about target priorities as well as where to place a munition for it to be most effective. That’s a lot of information to process, especially when you’re sitting in an active war zone wearing video display goggles. Technology is not the sole enabler of Ukraine’s drone warfare leaps. The top-tier skills and combat seasoning of Ukraine’s drone pilots are, arguably, even more impressive accomplishments. Thus, as America and its allies build up their unmanned arsenals, we should not overly focus on hardware and thereby ignore the need for highly skilled and creative drone operators. With that in mind, designing elite drone operator training programs must be pursued with as much urgency as searching for the next silver-bullet, technological leap. As we’ve said in these pages many times, the greatest constraint in drone warfare is the imagination of the humans who control them.
Final Thoughts on Air Defense and Modern War
While much of the media discourse and expert analysis of Operation Spiderweb has painted the raid as an innovative example of asymmetric warfare, it’s important to remember the war’s broader context and the evolving combat roles that small drones now play. In terms of defending one’s airspace, raids against parked enemy warplanes are nothing new. Yet, in terms of the transformative combat uses of FPV drones in the Russo-Ukrainian war, it is important to highlight how these small, tactical platforms have emerged as air defense and intercept options. In the Vector Report’s previous edition, we referenced how rebels had used lessons from Ukraine to destroy an Mi-17 helicopter operated by Myanmar’s ruling junta. In this context, drones aren’t a wholesale revolution in warfare. Rather, they expand one’s options for completing a wide range of pre-existing missions.
From replicating the ISR coverage of U.S. special operations raids in Iraq and Afghanistan, to the F-4 Wild Weasel missions that suppressed air defense sites in North Vietnam, drones now offer ways of achieving similar results at lower costs and at a much lower risk to elite human operators.
The basic tenets and mission sets of modern warfare have not fundamentally changed. But, thanksto drones, the ways of getting the job done are much more diverse. And that growth in operational options has put missions that were once exclusive to top-tier nation-states within the grasp of second-rate adversaries like the Houthis. Drones have also reset the calculus for attritional wars such as Russia’s ill-conceived, full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
Ukraine’s defensive war effort has not obeyed the traditional rules of attritional warfare, in which a country’s military-industrial potential to produce things like artillery shells, tanks, and new recruits determines the overall outcome. Instead, Ukraine overcame its attritional disadvantages by leveraging the strategic and operational potential of cheap, attritable weapons empowered by the creativity of their operators.— Nolan Peterson, Editor
