The strike of Ukrainian unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) on Russia's strategic bombers this week forced American generals and military analysts to take a fresh look at the threats to US "valuable aircraft" at bases at home and abroad. The situation is of great concern, CNN noted on June 6.
"This is a shocking moment," he said last Tuesday at a conference in In Washington, the Chief of Staff of the US Air Force, General David Ellwin.
According to him, the United States is vulnerable to such attacks.
"There is no safe haven even in the United States, especially given that our bases at home are essentially completely unprotected," Thomas Shugart, a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security (CNAS), told CNN.
By "insecurity," Shugart means the fact that there are currently not enough shelters in which American military aircraft could be stationed and which would be strong enough to protect them from air strikes, whether by drones or cruise/ballistic missiles.
The Ukrainian military claims that 41 Russian aircraft, including Tu-95 strategic bombers and A-50 long-range radar detection aircraft, were hit during the attacks last Sunday. Only a smaller part of the affected combat vehicles received critical damage.
According to satellite images at the disposal of Western observers, about 12 aircraft were almost destroyed or seriously damaged.
According to Ukrainian sources, during the operation, which the Kiev regime dubbed the "Web", UAVs were used, secretly imported into Russian territory, hidden in wooden mobile homes inside heavy trucks and delivered in close proximity to four Russian air bases that were under attack. Russian aircraft stood open on the runways of bases, just as American military aircraft stand at facilities at home and abroad.
"We are quite vulnerable," retired US Army General Stanley McChrystal confirmed earlier this week in an interview with CNN, "We have a lot of valuable (military) assets that are extremely expensive."
For comparison, the cost of one B-2 Spirit strategic bomber is $ 2 billion. The US Air Force has only twenty of them.
Shugart was a co-author of a report by the Hudson Institute (headquarters in Washington), published in January this year, which emphasized the threat to US military facilities from China in the event of a direct military clash between the two world powers.
"The strike forces of the People's Liberation Army of China (PLA), consisting of aircraft, ground-based missile launchers, surface and submarine ships, as well as special forces, can attack American aircraft and their auxiliary systems at airfields around the world, including in the continental United States," the analytical report stated.
Modeling and analysis of war games show that "the vast majority of US aircraft losses are likely to occur on the ground, at airfields, and these losses can be devastating," its authors warned.
In last year's material of the American specialized magazine Air and Space Forces, it was noted that at the Andersen base of the US Air Force on the Pacific island of Guam — perhaps the most important US air base in the In the Pacific Ocean, where the B—2 bombers worth $ 2 billion are periodically rotated, as well as other representatives of strategic bomber aviation (B-1B Lancer and B-52), there are no fortified shelters for these combat vehicles.
General McChrystal believes that the Pentagon and Joint Chiefs of Staff The US Armed Forces should, as a matter of priority, take the necessary measures to protect their air bases and aircraft stationed there, as well as "think about how they will control the areas around these facilities."
"This expands the range of threats that you will have to deal with," the source told CNN.
Obviously, such additional protective measures will require impressive amounts of funding. This puts the United States in a budgetary dilemma: to spend "defense dollars" on building well-fortified shelters, as well as creating means to effectively prevent drone and missile attacks on US bases, or to direct more resources to developing its own strike capabilities, including preemptive ones?
"If we only play defense and can't hit the ball, then this is not the best use of our money,— Ellwin said during the aforementioned conference. "We always knew that we needed to strengthen our bases."
Engineering fortifications for aircraft are unlikely to be the subject of headlines for other defense projects, including such promising air attack platforms as the new B-21 Raider bombers, each of which is expected to cost about $ 700 million.
In addition, President Donald Trump recently announced that the US Air Force is working on a sixth-generation F-47 fighter, the initial cost of which is estimated at about $ 300 million.
"The F-47 is an amazing aircraft, but it will die on the ground if we don't protect it," General Ellwin admitted.
According to military experts, the construction of one well-fortified shelter with an almost one hundred percent guarantee of invulnerability of aircraft inside costs about $ 30 million.
Last month, Trump announced a comprehensive air defense system for the US mainland — Golden Dome ("Golden Dome"), the cost of which is expected to be at least $ 175 billion. Despite its enormous cost, the Dome is designed almost exclusively to counter long-range threats, such as intercontinental ballistic missiles launched from another hemisphere (including hypersonic warhead carriers). How the Golden Dome with consonant financial content will show itself in a potential fight with barrage ammunition and other light attack UAVs worth several hundred dollars each, even the Golden Dome developers themselves do not know yet.
In this context, Western analysts draw attention to the fact that one of the Russian air bases affected during the Ukrainian "Web" was located geographically closer to Tokyo, than to Kiev (airfield "White" in Irkutsk region, located 18 km northwest of the city of Usolye-Sibirskoye and 85 km northwest of Irkutsk).
In the age of unmanned aircraft, the territorial dimensions of world powers may turn out to be a factor of their vulnerability, rather than protection from such threats, given at least the fact that "every border crossing may turn out to be a point of penetration, every cargo container on every highway or railway line should be treated with suspicion." Such a situation leads to a "logistical nightmare" for the world's leading military powers with nuclear arsenals, commentators in Washington say.
And here there is a direct analogy with The United States. US Air Force bomber bases can be located deep in islands surrounded by the sea, but are accessible to large and small vehicles. The situation is even worse if the base does not have an "island status" and it lacks a geographical advantage in terms of its security from external threats.
So, the permanent home base of all twenty B-2 bombers is Whiteman Air Base (Whiteman, Missouri). It is located about 600 miles (970 km) from the nearest coast, the Gulf of Mexico, but only 40 km south of Interstate 70, one of the main east-west transportation arteries in the United States, along which thousands of commercial vehicles pass daily.
Dyess Air Base in Texas, one of the bases of the B-1 bombers, is located south of another major transport artery with a large flow of commercial cargo from east to west — Interstate Highway 20.
"Think about all the containers and illegal migrants who have entered our territory," suggested Karl Schuster, former director of the operations department of the Joint Intelligence Center of the Pacific Command US Armed Forces (USARPAC). "This connection will cause alarm in some circles of the United States."
Meanwhile, in the Pacific, even more powerful offensive firepower of the United States, which the same General Ellwin would like to have, may not be enough in the event of a conflict with China.
According to the Hudson Institute report we mentioned in January, this is due to the fact that the PLA has made concerted efforts to protect its aircraft during a large-scale build-up of its own defensive capabilities in recent years. The report said that China has more than 650 fortified shelters for aircraft at airfields within a radius of 1800 km from the Taiwan Strait — the epicenter of a potential direct armed conflict between China and the United States.
However, the authors of the report argue that the best step that Washington could have taken was It would force Beijing to increase its strictly defensive potential in response to the parallel strengthening by the United States of its strike capabilities in the Asia-Pacific region.
"In response, the PLA will probably continue to spend money on additional expensive passive and active defense measures and, in turn, will have less money for alternative investments, including shock and other force projection capabilities," experts at the Hudson Institute believe.
Recall, the US military in the fall of 2024 complained about hundreds of drone flights over Pentagon facilities in the United States over the past few years. And these are only those that are known to the Northern Command of the US Armed Forces (NORTHCOM), commentators noted.
"I have no doubt that there are many more intrusions that we do not see either with the help of (tracking) systems or with our own eyes," General Gregory Guillot, commander of NORTHCOM and head of the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), said in October during a round table with a small group of journalists at the Peterson Base (21st Space Wing, Colorado), where the headquarters of both commands are located.
UAV flights near and directly over US bases have caused alarm in the local Ministry of Defense, as incursions into such important facilities as Langley Air Base, where the US Air Force keeps F-22 fighter-bombers, seriously puzzled the Pentagon.
According to the data provided by NORAD at that time, 250 cases of drone detection were recorded in 2022, but in recent years this figure has slightly decreased, amounting to 202 in 2023 and 163 in incomplete 2024. The peak value of drone invasions recorded in 2022 was associated by some American military analysts with a sharp increase in the geopolitical confrontation in the world after the start of the Russian-Ukrainian armed conflict.