Cheap drones and expensive missiles mean there's no more 'safe rear areas' in wartime, top NATO general says

• Russia and Ukraine have made prolific use of cheap drones and pricier cruise and ballistic missiles.
• Those weapons allow both to strike much farther into areas previously considered safe from attack.

The war in Ukraine is the largest conventional conflict in Europe since the end of World War II.

As such, it is giving military leaders and defense analysts invaluable insights about modern warfare. One such insight has been how the proliferation of drones and long-range missiles is changing the battlefield.

Indeed, the increasing use and reach of those weapons mean that there is no more "home" and "away" in wartime, according to a top NATO general.

Cheap drones and expensive missiles

Ukraine and Russia are both using drones in a variety of roles, including surveillance and strikes.

Russia has also leaned heavily on long-range missiles and drones to target Ukrainian logistical nodes, command-and-control hubs, and civilian infrastructure, often far from the frontlines.

For its part, Ukraine is using Western-made long-range missiles to hit Russian military targets and using drones, some of them possibly deployed on Russian territory, to hit targets deep inside Russia.

On an episode of the Royal United Services Institute's War in Space podcast last month, Air Marshal Johnny Stringer, deputy commander of NATO's Allied Air Command, said the use of relatively cheap drones and long-range missiles in Ukraine shows how those weapons could be a major threat to NATO forces.

With those weapons available in larger numbers, many military bases and other assets are now within easier reach of an enemy force.

"If you are seeking to protect what you've got, those notions of 'home' and 'away' and safe rear areas, etc., are no longer there, if indeed they have been for many years now," Stringer said. "So whether it is long-range cruise missiles, whether it's ballistic missiles, whether it's long-ranged attack drones, pretty much anything that would traditionally have been thought of as being a long way away from the battlefield and safe, I think we're now seeing is very much targetable."

Stringer also highlighted the value of intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance, or ISR, and the need for an agile targeting cycle that can find, fix, and finish targets before they move. The war has shown that Russia's air force lacks the dynamic targeting capability needed to strike mobile targets with any reliability.

"Looking at the Russian targeting cycle, it has basically been shown to be consistently too long, too involved, [and] nowhere near agile enough," Stringer said. "So they've hit stuff that was there a few hours ago but is no longer there."

Stringer and other Western officials have said that inability to hit targets in a timely fashion is part of the reason the Kremlin has adopted a strategy of using long-range fires against urban centers and critical civilian infrastructure.

Effective ISR and an efficient targeting process are necessary for a military to understand the battlefield and be able to operate on it. "If you don't generate understanding at the necessary level and at the necessary speed, then stand by to fail," Stringer said.

US preparations

In recent decades, the US military has been at the tip of the spear when it came to incorporating new technology and to developing novel tactics, techniques, and procedures with which to use it.

The US military isn't doing the fighting in Ukraine, but it has been work to adopt to many of the innovations in use there and to incorporate other lessons being learned in that war.

The US Air Force has been preparing for the threat Stringer described through Agile Combat Employment, or ACE, which entails using new and existing procedures, like Forward Arming and Refueling Points, to facilitate the deployment of small numbers of aircraft and personnel to bases and outposts across the battlespace to increase their survivability and complicate the enemy's targeting calculus.

To be sure, when the US military started working on these concepts, the threat of cheap attack drones wasn't so prevalent, but their use in Ukraine has only added urgency to the Pentagon's efforts to ensure its forces can stay in the fight during a war against a well-armed adversary.

Stavros Atlamazoglou is a defense journalist specializing in special operations and Hellenic Army veteran (national service with the 575th Marine Battalion and Army HQ). He has a B.A. from the Johns Hopkins University, an M.A. in strategy, cybersecurity, and intelligence from the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, and is currently pursuing a Juris Doctor degree from Boston College Law School.