Republished with permission from Lucian K. Truscott IV

While the United States of America is busy with its plans for the next generation F-47 fighter, which will cost somewhere in the vicinity of $300 million a pop, Ukraine launched its remote-controlled attack on Russian airfields last weekend, using warhead-loaded drones that cost around $500 a piece. The drones were not supplied by the fickle Trump administration. They were manufactured right there in Ukraine by Ukrainians.

The future of warfare is already happening in Ukraine, where military experts now say that fully 70 percent of casualties on both sides are being inflicted by remote-controlled and unmanned drones built with off-the shelf parts, carrying warheads taken from weapons already in Ukrainian and Russian stockpiles.

Ukraine is said to have manufactured 2 million drones last year and plans to manufacture 4.5 million this year. Russian drone manufacturing capability is unknown, but it has been reported that China, which has cornered 90 percent of the commercial drone market, has been providing Russia with computer chips and other materials for making drones.

The F-35 is our current highest-tech jet fighter. It’s so expensive to produce that the plane was never used in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan for fear that one would be shot down. I looked up the F-35 manufacturing trajectory to see how long it took to develop the aircraft and get it in the military’s inventory. The so-called Joint Strike Fighter program was conceived just after the end of the Cold War in the early 1990’s. The manufacturers of the airframe and engine were picked in 1997. The first flight of the prototype took place in 2000. The first flight of one of the three variants of the F-35 took place in 2006. The aircraft has had endless problems. Its airframe was prone to cracks. Its fuel tanks were very vulnerable to lightning strikes. The “heads-up” display for the pilot, newly designed to be part of the helmet, had many flaws and glitches. Cost overruns proliferated.

By 2023, a quarter century after the F-35 was conceived, the program was almost 100 percent overbudget and 10 years behind its production schedule. The F-35 suffered many delays due to costly redesigns and changes in its weaponry, avionics, and design for use on aircraft carriers. The plane had to be constantly grounded because of its problems. The program’s cost ballooned from a projected $200 billion in 2005 to $400 billion in 2017. The entire program is now expected to have a cost in excess of $1.5 trillion over the lifetime of the aircraft acquired by the three services that use them, the Air Force, Navy, and Marines.

Overbudget under-equipped frequently in the shop F-35 fighter.

Those numbers, which come from Wikipedia, are probably bullshit by now. Next year’s defense budget will surpass $1 trillion for the first time in American history, and that’s not even including Trump’s birthday tanks. Ten years from now, if I’m still around, I’ll probably be writing about the problems of the $3 or $4 trillion F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, after I’ve gotten finished covering the new zillion dollar boondoggle, the F-47, the cost of which could no doubt pay for the healthcare of most Americans for their lifetimes.

The F-35 and upcoming F-47 are “stealth” fighters, which means they cannot be seen by radar and are thus more difficult to shoot down. Do you think the F-35 could have been flown into Russia and destroyed 40 bombers and other combat aircraft as the Ukrainians just did? Ha! All those zillions of dollars spent on the F-35 and the B-2 stealth bomber and the older B-1 bomber, not to mention all the other fighters in our inventory like the F-14, the F-18, the A-10—none of which we have provided to Ukraine, by the way—and not one of them could be used in the first ground war being fought in Europe in 75 years.

So, what did we spend the money on, and why? Very good questions. Max Boot in the Washington Post reported that the U.S. has the “capability” to produce 100,000 drones a year. Got that? Ukraine, with a population 10 percent the size of ours, and a GDP less than 1 percent the size of ours, produces 45 times as many drones as we do.

Stack of drone airframes being manufactured in Ukraine

These numbers do not make sense. Sure, we are one of the largest countries in the world with one of the largest populations, economically we sit right at the top, and we have the largest defense budget in the world by something like a factor of ten. For what? So, F-35’s can sit in repair shops and defense contractors can line up to feed at the multi-trillion trough that will be the F-47, while the rest of the world prepares for a future that will be remote controlled and, God help us, powered to some unimaginable degree by AI?

Look at what Ukraine did. Over a period of what they say was 18 months, they planned an operation that seriously damaged Russia’s ability to strike them with cruise missiles and glide bombs, the two weapons Russia has used its bomber force to hit Ukraine with.

We don’t know how they did it, but the Ukraine operation inside of Russia is reminiscent of Israel’s use of remotely-detonated pagers and cell phones to hit Hezbollah last year. In that operation, Israeli spies infiltrated Hezbollah deeply enough that they convinced its leadership to buy a load of pagers that Israel had manufactured as hand-held bombs.

Ukraine has not given details about how it managed to get drones into locations within Russia thousands of miles apart to attack Russian airfields. It has emerged that trucks and containers were used to transport the drones close to the Russian air force bases. Then the tops of the containers were remotely opened, and drones flew out of false ceilings within the containers. The drones appear to have been FPV, or “first person view,” each controlled by an individual who flew them into the targets where their warheads exploded.

Ukrainian drones hidden in container false ceiling inside of Russia

That alone is an amazing bit of technological magic. One report said that Ukraine released as many as 150 drones to strike and destroy what turned out to be 40 bombers. That means 150 separate and distinct radio or satellite frequencies were used to control the drones. One video depicted a drone being flown over an already burning Russian bomber to strike the wing of the next bomber in line. The wing was targeted because wings contain the fuel tanks that would cause the largest explosion doing the most damage, even using the small warhead that was likely carried by a Ukrainian drone.

Screenshot from Ukrainian drone flying over burning Russian bomber

It is probable that the drones were remotely controlled from within Ukraine. Reports say that the trucks were driven to locations close to the airbases by Russian drivers who were hired, probably by Ukrainian agents. The Russian drivers clearly did not know what they were carrying, and even if they checked the containers mounted on their trucks, they would not have seen the drones hidden within false ceilings.

Ukraine obviously smuggled the components of its drones into Russia. The drone airframes were put together by Ukrainian agents, mounted with motors and rotors, equipped with control modules and batteries and fixed with warheads. It is likely that a different group of spies bought the containers and modified them. Still another group of spies rented the trucks and hired the drivers. Then the Ukrainians smuggled themselves out of Russia. After the trucks had been delivered to the places chosen near the Russian targets, remote control operators inside of Ukraine took over.

The whole thing would make a great spy movie, wouldn’t it? But it wasn’t a movie. It was the future of warfare. It was elaborate, it was cheap, it was extremely effective, and it did great damage—all qualities that our bloated Pentagon and defense establishment totally lack.

I have read that ICE agents and military units on the border with Mexico have been using surveillance drones to monitor the movement of undocumented immigrants as they attempt to cross the border. But undocumented immigrants are not shooting back at our forces. They don’t have the kinds of jammers and high-tech anti-drone stuff that Russia is using against Ukraine and Ukraine is using to stymie Russian drones and either shoot them down or cause them to crash harmlessly.

I’m sure Stephen Miller is impressed by our drone surveillance on the border. Good for him. But you want to know who’s not impressed? Russia. China. Iran, which has its own drone manufacturing capability that is so well developed, they have taught the Russians how to manufacture drones.

On the battlefield in Ukraine and among unfriendly nations and actors across the globe, including Yemen, our enemies are probably rubbing their hands together with glee as they read stories about the hundreds of billions we’re getting ready to waste on the F-47. Max Boot of the Post reported that if the U.S. just copied Ukrainian drone production, using the same materials and similar technology and warheads, we could manufacture 43 million drones for $25 billion, a fraction of the cost of one of the gigantic contracts for obsolete-before-they-even-take-off manned fighter aircraft like the F-35 or the still-in-some-defense-dreamer’s-imagination F-47.

We’re supposed to be getting ready for a land war in Europe—where, by the by, one is already happening—and some kind of war someplace with China. We already know that Russia has developed a combat drone capability that is killing tens of thousands of Ukrainian soldiers and civilians without endangering a single Russian soldier. We know that China already totally dominates the commercial drone market, so they won’t have any trouble coming up with instantly-deadly battlefield drones.

Where are we in all this? Stuck in Stephen Miller’s obsession with infant-carrying immigrant moms wading across the Rio Grande and Pete Hegseth’s interminable babble about “war fighting” and “lethality.”

In other words, we’re in the past as the rest of the world comfortably cruises into a cheaper and more quickly manufactured and more deadly military future. We could be spending $500. Instead, we’re spending $500 million for weapons systems that we’ll still be waiting on when China decides to attack Taiwan and Putin decides that Poland looks like a good place to grow Russian wheat.

While the rest of the world stars in a spy movie, we are extras on the set of “Dumb and Dumber IV.”