Much has been said about how drones are changing the character of war. Ukraine and Iran offer different versions of the same lesson: relatively inexpensive, precise, long-range weapons are democratizing attack. They allow states that lack a traditional air force—or cannot employ one freely—to reach targets once protected by distance and geography.
Ukraine has adapted with remarkable speed, using long-range drones to strike oil refineries, fuel depots, military production sites, and more deep inside Russia. Those attacks have not yet decided the war, and it is premature to say that the tide has turned. But Ukraine’s adaptability is imposing costs, complicating Russian logistics, reducing energy supplies and revenues, and demonstrating that Moscow cannot insulate its population—or its war machine—from attack.
Ukraine’s achievement is not replacing airpower with drones but rather adapting its means of strategic attack to what is available. Drones are a substitute for a larger, better-equipped air force.
Iran’s campaign offers a different lesson. Its missile and drone attacks on U.S. bases, Gulf population centers and ports, and commercial shipping are an attempt to splinter regional alliances and pressure neighbors to back down. Striking key military enablers and infrastructure, Iran seeks to wear out Western political patience.
Despite major losses to its leadership and conventional forces, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps appears to believe that time is on its side. That logic resembles the attrition strategies used by North Vietnam. Avoid decisive defeat, keep imposing costs, and wait for the adversary’s political will to erode.
But Iran’s reach is broader than Hanoi’s or the Taliban’s. Its proxies, missile arsenal, nuclear ambitions, and ability to disrupt the Strait of Hormuz mean its actions impose consequences far beyond its borders. Roughly one-fifth of the world’s oil moved through the strait before the conflict, making freedom of navigation there a global, not merely regional, interest.
A durable settlement must address more than a cease-fire: It must constrain Iran’s ability to threaten its neighbors and support terrorist proxies; end its pursuit of nuclear weapons; and dismiss, permanently, its claim to control the Strait of Hormuz.
Back to drones and airpower: What we are witnessing in Iran and Ukraine is the sudden democratization of precision attack. Commercial satellite imagery shared foreign intelligence, China’s BeiDou space-based navigation as an alternative to U.S. GPS, and artificial intelligence can now enable almost anyone—whether a nation-state or even a well-funded terrorist cell—to reconnoiter and target fixed bases.
The cost of attack has diminished. Not only did Iran identify and strike military command centers, but it also monitored the locations where U.S. aircraft would be parked, to destroy them on the ground.
To be sure, the risk that Iran might strike its Gulf neighbors was always there. The Gulf is a compact geographic region, and U.S. installations have long been within range of regional missiles and aircraft.
What has changed is the combination of reach, precision, volume, and affordability. Iran’s missiles and drones damaged aircraft, radars, satellite-communications nodes, command facilities, and other infrastructure at bases across Kuwait, Bahrain, Oman, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Qatar.
Also clear is that Iran has effectively adapted elements of the anti-access/area-denial playbook often associated with China—persistent surveillance, precision strike, saturation, and attacks on command and control and logistics. Iran could not stop the U.S. and its allies from gaining air superiority, but it did impose real costs and constraints.
U.S. and allied missile defenses have performed impressively, intercepting the great majority of incoming threats. But no defensive system is perfect, and an attacker needs only a small percentage of weapons to get through to cause serious damage.
Large salvos also create an unfavorable exchange rate; cheap threats defeated with costly interceptors make for bad economics.
Confoundingly, some military theorists continue to misread the democratization of precision attack as somehow negating the value of airpower and air superiority. They get it backward: Drones are airpower in another form. By lowering the entry cost to conduct aerial attack, drones do not eliminate the need to control the air domain but instead make doing so even more essential.
Air superiority is not about platforms—it is about achieving the freedom to attack while limiting an enemy’s freedom to do the same. While cheap precision weapons change the cost curves, they do not alter its strategic requirement.
The force that can integrate aircraft, missiles, drones, space capabilities, cyber effects, and surface-based defenses—and deny the enemy the same integration—will hold the advantage.
Drones drive up the urgency of defending air bases.
Here’s what drones and missiles do achieve: driving up the urgency of defending air bases. For decades, many U.S. overseas installations operated as relative sanctuaries from sustained precision attack. That era is now over. Anyone can target an air base, in any number of ways.
Yet aircraft remain concentrated and out in the open and squadrons operate predictably from known locations.
Nearly five years after then-Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. C.Q. Brown signed the Air Force’s first Agile Combat Employment doctrine, the service’s ability to disperse, sustain, and protect forces from multiple operating locations remains uneven. Counter-drone and air base defense capabilities are improving, but still experimental, scarce, and insufficiently integrated.
The Air Force needs a new operating architecture that combines ACE and dispersal with hardened shelters, camouflage and deception, redundant communications, enhanced fuel and munitions distribution, rapid runway repair, layered active defense, and training to ensure USAF can operate while under attack. ACE is still a concept and unproven in combat.
At the Global Air and Space Chiefs Conference in London in July, Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Kenneth Wilsbach spoke plainly: “Air and space superiority are fundamental to military success,” he said. “The most effective airpower is combined airpower.”
Operating together, Wilsbach said, creates “options, dilemmas, and effects that no nation can generate independently.”— Gen. Kenneth Wilsbach, Chief of Staff of the Air Force
America’s network of allies has long been among its greatest strategic advantages. But in addition to shared aircraft and intelligence, compatible tactics and command and control, access, basing, and overflight are essential components of partnership.
Partners that deny access during a crisis undermine the coalition’s ability to defend them.
Access, basing, and overflight are the fundamental elements of shared defense and foundational for projecting airpower.
Modernizing to counter advances in drone warfare, from layered defenses and ACE to new weapons and capabilities, cannot escape this undeniable fact: Responsive airpower depends heavily on access, basing, and overflight rights. Flexibility may be one key to airpower, but access, basing and overflight are every bit as important.
The U.S. has deployed key new electronic warfare aircraft overseas that would be critical for a large-scale operation against Iran as President Donald Trump publicly weighs resuming a full-scale air campaign. Two EA-37A Compass Call electronic attack aircraft deployed from Davis-Monthan Air Force Base, Ariz., to RAF Fairford, U.K.