How Vulnerable Is America to an ‘Operation Spiderweb’ at Home? Very

By Noah Rothman

Friday, March 27, 2026

 

The wars that have raged in Europe and the Middle East over the course of this decade have featured operations in which technically sophisticated powers managed to disable lightly defended targets deep inside hostile nations by using capabilities they smuggled into enemy territory.

 

Ukraine’s “Operation Spiderweb” was a benchmark-setting example of this new way of war. Over 18 months, Ukrainian operators smuggled hundreds of low-cost suicide drones into Russia inside cabins designed to look like shipping containers. Each were ferried to locations outside key Russian airbases throughout the federation. When released, they struck and disabled 40 strategic military aircraft — more than a third of the aircraft Moscow used to deliver missiles and bombs onto Ukrainian targets.

 

Israel executed a similar attack. Well before the outbreak of the Twelve-Day War with Iran last year, Israeli operatives spent months smuggling the constituent parts for explosive quadcopter drones into the Islamic Republic “in suitcases, trucks and shipping containers.” At the start of hostilities, Israeli special forces units assembled those drones and deployed them against Iranian air defenses and missile launchers.

 

America’s enemies, as well as its allies, have access to these capabilities. Operations like these, impressive as they were, nevertheless sent shivers down the spines of the West’s security experts. The United States is vulnerable to a Spiderweb-style attack. And this month, the nation got a sobering foretaste of what a debilitating drone strike on strategic targets from within America’s borders might look like.

 

In an event that wasn’t acknowledged until last week, Louisiana’s Barksdale Air Force Base was targeted by “multiple waves” of unmanned aerial vehicles over the course of a week in early March. Each of the incidents forced the long-range nuclear-capable bomber base to shut down operations and impose a “shelter-in-place” order on personnel — temporarily disabling the base in wartime.

 

“It is the first time a US airbase was temporarily put out of operation in wartime,” the Asia Times reporter Stephen Bryen observed, “something that never happened even in World War II.”

 

According to a statement provided to reporters, “waves of 12-15 drones operat[ed] over sensitive areas of the installation, including the flight line, with aircraft displaying non-commercial signal characteristics, long-range control links and resistance to jamming.” The drone’s yet-unknown operators “may be testing security responses.” After surveilling “multiple points” across Barksdale AFB, “the drones dispersed across sensitive locations on the base.”

 

Security experts believe this was a deliberate — and, possibly, deliberately visible — effort to test the base’s response to a coordinated drone strike on strategic American assets.

 

“The drone waves lasted around four hours each day, an extraordinarily long loiter time for a drone,” Bryen’s report continued. “Barksdale AFB does not have air defenses, nor does it have fighter jets that can take down drones.” Indeed, much like the Russian air bases that Ukraine targeted, Barksdale is home to long-range bombers, cruise missiles, and other assets that contribute to America’s nuclear triad.

 

An incident similar to the one that unfolded at Barksdale AFB also occurred this month at another unspecified American installation, according to written testimony provided to the Senate Armed Services Committee by the head of U.S. Northern Command. “One of these incidents spurred NORTHCOM to deploy its new counter-drone fly-away kit, designed to give installation commanders the ability to detect, quantify, and defeat small drones that they cannot defend against on their own,” The War Zone’s Howard Altman reported.

 

The perpetrators of these attacks have not been identified, much less apprehended, and the drones deployed in it are believed to be more technologically advanced than anything the Ukrainians can deploy, much less the agents of the Islamic Republic of Iran.

 

For most of this decade, defense experts have known that the United States is vulnerable to an indigenous drone attack on sensitive targets both inside America and across the globe. Drone incursions over U.S. bases didn’t begin with Operation Epic Fury, but our ability to defend against those incursions is still clearly unequal to the threat.

 

“Our current radar systems struggle to distinguish small drones from birds or atmospheric clutter,” Defense One’s Charles Hamilton wrote last year. “Our multi-million-dollar missile defense systems, designed to intercept ICBMs and cruise missiles, offer no protection against a $600 quadcopter carrying explosives.”

 

He continued:

 

Consider the vulnerability of our forward operating bases scattered across the globe. From the installations dotting Africa and the Middle East to major command centers in allied nations, American forces operate from facilities designed for previous generations of warfare. Our aircraft sit exposed on tarmacs, protected by limited fencing and human guards trained to repel human adversaries, not swarms of autonomous weapons launched from concealed positions miles away.

 

And suicide drones, potentially devastating though they may be, could also be the least of our worries when it comes to our enemies’ capabilities inside the United States.

 

In 2023, the Chinese operators of a CCP-funded biolab in Reedley, Calif., were charged for improperly experimenting with a variety of deadly pathogens: Hepatitis B and C, streptococcus pneumonia, rubella, HIV, malaria, Covid-19, Ebola, and more.

 

The incident exposed the degree of American vulnerability to a homegrown biological attack. “It isn’t known how many biolabs are operating in the United States because there’s no monitoring system in place,” the Los Angeles Times reported this week. Some members of Congress have introduced legislation aimed at better regulating and monitoring small labs like “Prestige Biotech Inc.,” but the legislature has not responded to the threat with much urgency.

 

They certainly should. At the outset of a conflict with China, for example, those pathogens could be deployed against military or civilian targets, and those drones would be armed with explosives as well as cameras and sensors.

 

The international threat environment is as dangerous as it has been in decades. American lawmakers had better start acting like it and preparing for the worst. After all, our enemies certainly are.