Drone Attacks Are the New Front in War. NATO Is Trying to Catch Up.
On Sunday, Ukraine launched hundreds of drones it had smuggled into Russia to strike air bases there, damaging or destroying as many as 20 strategic aircraft thousands of miles apart. That sent defense officials in some NATO nations rushing to assess whether they, too, could be vulnerable, if an adversary using drones could severely hobble a big military power — be it Russia, China or even the United States.
'This is more than an isolated incident — it's a glimpse into the character of future conflict, where war won't be confined to neatly drawn front lines,' said James Patton Rogers, a drone warfare expert at Cornell University. He said the urgent question for NATO, after 'an impressive attack by Ukraine,' is to determine the vulnerabilities of its own air bases, bombers and critical infrastructure.
Before the Ukrainian barrage, Russia had intensified a near-daily deluge of long-range drones to attack military and civilian targets across Ukraine, demonstrating an ability to launch thousands of uncrewed aircraft as quickly as they are built, experts said. By comparison, defense manufacturers in the United States and Europe have struggled for more than three years to ramp up weapons production.
NATO knows it has much to learn.
Earlier this year, NATO opened a joint training center with Ukrainian forces in Poland to share lessons from Russia's invasion. Ukraine's military is the largest (aside from Russia's) and most battled-tested in Europe, even if it is struggling to maintain territory in its border region.
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(Photo by Gavriil GRIGOROV / SPUTNIK / AFP) (Photo by GAVRIIL GRIGOROV/SPUTNIK/AFP via Getty Images) 'There were no reports of casualties,' he said, yet added: 'The IAEA remains on high alert.' Just weeks ago, Grossi said the IAEA team stationed at Ukraine's Zaporizhzhya plant, where the nuclear safety guardians remain despite the escalating wartime dangers, reported hearing hundreds of rounds of small arms gunfire that ripped through the night. The crossfire followed 'a clear escalation in drone strikes during this war, also affecting Ukraine's nuclear power plants and potentially putting them in further danger,' added Grossi, a longtime diplomat and disarmament scholar with a doctorate in international relations from the University of Geneva. Dr. Bennett, meanwhile, predicts the Kremlin's quest to extend Russia's borders will not stop at Ukraine, and that Putin's dream of recreating the Soviet Union could escalate to spark a new global war. 'The Russian president has been determined to recover Russia's lost glory,' Bennett says. 'He has made it his life's work. It's a personal crusade.' 'Russia has been preparing the ground for a confrontation with the West since Putin became Russia's president.' Bennett's prophecy of an ever-expanding war that begins racing across Europe like a wildfire in some ways echos and amplifies a warning issued by NATO General Secretary Mark Rutte in the run-up to the NATO summit in June. 'There is great worry in many circles of NATO,' Rutte said. 'We have heard the Chief of Defense in Germany, a couple of weeks ago, and many other senior military leaders speaking about this, and also senior intelligence community people speaking about, that between 3, 5, 7 years from now, Russia will be able to successfully attack us.' NATO chief Mark Rutte has warned that Russia could attack a NATO state within the next three to ... More seven years (Photo by) As the Kremlin counts down toward its confrontation with the Western Allies, Bennett muses, it is likely already creating its masterplan for victory. Moscow's attacks on Ukraine's atomic stations, he says, could be mere precursors, testing varying battle stratagems to lay the groundwork for the destruction of nuclear stations positioned in NATO nations in the future. Could Moscow already be mapping out pre-emptive missile strikes on British and French nuclear reactors that in turn contaminate the continent and its citizenry with mortal doses of radiation? Bennett says it's 'more likely that Russia would seek to sabotage critical national infrastructure, including nuclear power plants, from within using sleepers,' or Kremlin intelligence agents who have adopted new identities, complete with foreign passports and elaborate cover stories, across Western nations. 'Russia has had over a decade (the origins of the current war can be traced back to Russia's 2014 invasion of Crimea) to insert sleepers into critical national infrastructure installations such as nuclear power plants, gas-powered stations, airports, ports, communications hubs.' 'I think it likely that Russia has in place sleepers across any state it considers hostile,' Bennett adds, 'which, of course, would include NATO member states.' 'Which means that Russia has a head start on us.' 'It is easier to infiltrate liberal democracies than it is to infiltrate authoritarian states like Russia.' 'The former are open,' he says. 'The latter closed.' 'The UK's National Security Act is a belated response to this threat which, as I said, has been building.' This act, Bennett adds, aims to counter 'threats to national security from espionage, sabotage and persons acting for foreign powers,' including the sleepers deployed by Putin, a onetime KGB espionage operative. Putin was stationed in East Berlin when he watched—in agony—as pro-democracy demonstrators pulled down the machine gun-guarded Berlin Wall and freed the millions of East Germans who had been captured behind the shoot-to-kill barricade. Tanks approaching a checkpoint area of the Berlin Wall. Vladimir Putin, a KGB agent stationed in ... More East Berlin until the fall of the Berlin Wall, now dreams of recreating the Soviet Union and its satellite states (Photo by) As this democracy movement ricocheted across Eastern Europe, and communist rulers were toppled like dominoes, these satellites of the Soviets crossed into new orbits around NATO, after the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics itself crumbled. Putin's fever-pitch passion since then has been to turn back time and revive the Soviet empire, even if that means Russian tanks and troops reinvade Eastern Europe and other post-Soviet realms. Peering into the storm-cloud future, Bennett predicts the next world war will erupt within the next decade, even as Putin's sleepers are activated to sabotage atomic stations and 'agencies such as the police service, the fire and rescue service … [and] defense contractors.' Elena Grossfeld, an expert on Russia's intelligence and defense operations at prestigious King's College London, points out that Putin, a world master of espionage and sabotage, like his Soviet forebears Lenin and Stalin, has already had more than two decades in power, ample time to despatch sleeper agents across the West. And the top-echelon sleepers turned out in Putin's 'illegals program,' she tells me in an interview, form just one class of spies. Other agents include Russians recruited during the mass exodus of intellectuals and technocrats since Putin's rise to power and foreigners lavishly bribed to join the Kremlin's intelligence corps. 'With multiple sabotage operations in Europe, Russian intelligence has been using a variety of agents.' Yet the size of Putin's shadow army of spies across Europe and the U.S. is difficult to estimate, she says. If even a handful succeed in infiltrating European or American nuclear power outposts, the potential could arise for this fifth column to sabotage the plants with the outbreak of a war. 'Damaging adversary infrastructure is aligned with Russian military and intelligence approaches,' Grossfeld says. And, whether in Ukraine now or in some future target of Moscow's aggression, she adds, 'The potential destruction of a nuclear power plant could be used to benefit Russia's military plans - as in, creating a denied territory, or some other purpose.'
