Ukraine’s Covert Drone Strike Marks Dire Warning For US

The U.S. is vulnerable to an attack similar to Ukraine’s Sunday surprise drone strikes inside Russian territory, defense experts told the Daily Caller News Foundation.

Ukraine covertly transported containers full of drones deep into Russia over the course of several months, hammering a large portion of Russia’s strategic assets such as bombers and airbases when the drones were activated to attack on June 1. While the U.S. evaluated the consequences of the attack on future peace prospects, America is largely unprepared to defend against the possibility that an adversary could unleash a similar covert drone attack against key assets situated on American soil in the future, national security experts explained to the DCNF.

“We don’t have a good counter-drone system protecting key U.S. infrastructure or military assets,” Jennifer Kavanaugh, director of military analysis at Defense Priorities, told the DCNF. “Obviously, the military is working on it. They’re very aware of this gap. They’ve been studying it for a number of years, and there are some systems, so I don’t want to imply there’s nothing.” (RELATED: Trump Reportedly Thought Ukraine’s Surprise Drone Strike Was Pretty ‘Badass’)

A man examine burned cars parked outside a mall following a night-time drone attack on Kyiv, on May 4, 2025 amid the Russian invasion of Ukraine. (Photo by SERGEI SUPINSKY/AFP via Getty Images)

Ukraine has the advantage of a large land border with Russia, which allowed them to set up the drones months in advance undercover. While the U.S. does not share a land border with any direct geopolitical adversary, a similar attack could still happen due to the high cost of policing smuggling into ports of entry and potential insider threats.

“It’s definitely feasible. It’s definitely possible,” Kavanaugh told the DCNF. “It’s definitely something the U.S. should be thinking about. It’s very difficult to counter. You never have borders that are 100% secure. You can never guard 100% against things being smuggled in. It’s just too hard, especially when the things being smuggled are small and the cost that would be incurred from trying to go through every container in detail is very high.”

China has already engaged in extensive internal espionage operations in the U.S., including the theft of U.S. military information and trade secrets, transnational repression of dissidents of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the existence of a private network run by a Chinese national providing Chinese illegal immigrants with resources to evade border authorities, a DCNF investigation revealed in 2024.

One of the most overt incidents of Chinese espionage in recent memory occurred in 2023, when a Chinese spy balloon flew across the mainland U.S. before being shot down. The balloon contained U.S. commercial equipment on top of CCP technology. Former President Joe Biden opted to not shot the balloon down early on, instead waiting until it had traversed across the continental U.S. to neutralize it.

China, which has emerged as a global leader in drone technology, has already designed trucks capable of launching 48 kamikaze drones from a nondescript container, and it is actively expanding the concept with inspiration from other Western designs. The systems currently in testing can utilize seemingly innocuous small vehicles to launch a swarm of explosives.

Brent Sadler, senior research fellow for naval warfare and advanced technology at the Heritage Foundation, told the DCNF that the CCP is more than equipped to carry out a similar attack should it desire to do so.

“They’ve talked about it. They’ve actually done prototypes, designs of containers carrying missiles as well as drones,” Sadler told the DCNF. “It’s not just a laboratory kind of threat. If you recall, last year, we had drones flying over like New Jersey and parts of the United States, a little bit of hysteria at one point, but we only know after Trump came into office that we kind of got a bottom line, it was an exercise.”

Drone defense remains a large gap in homeland defense due to the relatively limited deployment of anti-drone measures among units and lack of technology targeting smaller devices, according to a Heritage Foundation report published Wednesday.

Currently, the U.S. mainly uses anti-drone missile systems and jamming technology to counter drone swarms and single targets, according to the Congressional Research Service. Many of the current measures are repurposed cold-war weapons, such as the Advanced Precision Kill Weapon System, which repurposes the Hydra-70 rocket used in the Vietnam and Korean wars.

The system has been a staple of U.S. aid to Ukraine, with Kiev utilizing the system extensively to counter Russian attacks. The system’s per unit cost comes out at about $22,000, according to public DOD contracting data.

“We just don’t have the capacity right now, and I don’t think we’ve identified all the places that we have to defend from this type of threat,” Sadler told the DCNF. (RELATED: Pentagon Salivates Over ‘Expensive’ Weapons While China Races Into Future With Iron Grip Over Cheap Drone Tech)

A Ukrainian serviceman from the 24th brigade prepares an FPV drone to launch towards Russian positions in the Donetsk region, on June 10, 2024, amid the Russian invasion of Ukraine. (Photo by GENYA SAVILOV/AFP via Getty Images)

China is a worldwide leader in drone production and research, with most nations relying one way or another on Beijing’s products and parts to make their own drones.

Chinese company Da Jiang Industries (DJI) currently dominates the worldwide commercial drone market, while American drone companies specializing in defense applications rely heavily on Chinese parts to make their products. Many analysts have sounded the alarm on how the lopsided trade relationship could pose a national security risk for American defense manufacturers assembling drones in the U.S.

“This has allowed them to be extremely competitive on price, undercutting most of their competitors and receiving huge benefits from economies of scale. This has been happening for decades,” Bret Boyd, CEO of defense-oriented logistics firm Sustainment, previously told the DCNF.

In conventional war, drones have shown their devastating effect on the battlefield, most prominently in the Russia-Ukraine war. Drones have played a major role in effectively halting infantry and armor advances with their latent threat.

Many drones used in the modern battlefield can cost as little as $300. For homeland defense, a more cost effective system to counter drones will be essential to keep the system scalable.

“It’s just that the unit cost is too high, so the military can’t procure enough,” Kavanaugh told the DCNF. “The process of getting the unit cost down is really one of trying to make the technology simpler, and that is something the military has always struggled with because they like bespoke and fancy systems.”

In a renewed push for homeland defense, President Donald Trump proposed the Golden Dome system as a way to counter ballistic missile threats from adversaries, with the projected cost being at least $175 billion. However, few details about the system have been publicized so far.

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