Ukraine's Wake-up Call...to America

After Russia initiated a wide-scale attack on Kiev the weekend of May 25, 2025 with over 360 drones, Ukraine responded with a carefully prioritized series of attacks over multiple days and multiple targets culminating in what many are terming an attack that amounts to Russia's Pearl Harbor – an attack that destroyed nearly one third of Russia's second strike nuclear bomber capability. Most astute reporters have gone beyond explaining how Ukraine's latest move drastically alters the balance of power and risk in the specific battle of Russia versus Ukraine – one that as of May 25 had been looking very badly for Ukraine – to explain how Ukraine's strike serves as a huge benefit to the NATO mission. These observations are entirely correct but still omit a much more ominous implication of this attack on America's defense. Understanding that implication is easier with a summary of the events over the past week.

Things Were Looking So Good

As of the weekend of May 25, 2025, Vladimir Putin had to believe he had regained the upper hand in his war on Ukraine after dropping bombs across Kiev with an estimated 360 drones. This constituted one of the biggest sustained attacks of the war and, true to Putin's tendencies, focused nearly exclusively on civilian targets and public utility infrastructure to maximize civilian terror and inconvenience. The attacks certainly had those effects on Ukrainians. However, Ukraine responded with a series of counterattacks that, considered separately, appear like a collection of independent special ops gambits that all paid off. However, when considered as a group, they reflect a level of innovation and strategic thinking that are unprecedented, both due to Ukraine's unique existential peril and the technology now available. Between May 28 and June 1, Ukraine landed all of the following blows on Russia, IN RUSSIA:

• destroyed a plant near Moscow manufacturing traditional munitions as a follow-up to an earlier attack on April 22, 2025 which destroyed an estimated 264,000 tons of munitions, drones and missiles stockpiled at Russia's 51st arsenal in the Vladimir Oblast
• destroyed a different plant near Moscow that was one of Russia's primary manufacturing plants for drones with roughly equal capabilities to those Russia has been using from Iran
• destroyed two different bridges carrying rail routes in Russian regions bordering Ukraine, blocking them for potentially months from being used by Russia to move heavy equipment and supplies
• used drones to drop a bomb on one of Russia's nuclear submarines while docked in Russia's Arctic port, putting the submarine completely out of commission for years, if the vessel can be salvaged at all
• used drones to bomb facilities on the base housing that submarine, destroying one of the key command and control hubs in Russia's military
• staged hundreds of drones within modular shipping containers with remote-controlled, removable roofs, hauled those containers into strategic positions within Russia MONTHS AGO, then, via remote control, opened the roofs of those containers, piloted the drones up and out of the containers and navigated them to Russian air bases where at least 41 Russian bombers were destroyed or rendered incapable of flight
• used drones to destroy a handful of Russian tanker jets used to refuel long-range bombers
• used drones to destroy a handful of Russian radar monitoring planes (somewhat equivalent in functionality to America AWACS planes) used to monitor airborne threats, coordinate defenses and attacks and provide the ability to operate command and control functions from the air

Russia's Pearl Harbor

Any ONE of these operations by itself would constitute a major success for Ukraine but taken as a whole, they are an indication of a much more important shift not only in the course of the war in Ukraine but wars in general. Most commentators have highlighted how tightly these actions interacted to drastically impair Russia's immediate ability to sustain war against Ukraine by

• destroying existing stockpiles of munitions and drones, already in short supply due to Russia's unsophisticated approach of simply bombing anything that looks civilian
• destroying physical transportation infrastructure at key bottlenecks to prevent backfill of destroyed supplies close to the front from armories further away
• destroying the plants that manufacture munitions and weapons, making it impossible for the Russian military to fill the enormous void created by the destruction of existing supplies

Most commentators have also thought through these impacts on the larger security situation between Russia and Europe and pointed out the following limitations Russia faces:

• Destruction of 41 nuclear-capable bombers not only limits Russia's ability to bomb Ukraine, it virtually eliminates Russia's ability to reach any part of Western Europe via the air
• Destruction of the tanker jets further impairs Russia's ability to use long-range bombers located in its eastern provinces to attack Europe
• Destruction of the "AWACS-like" planes has further crippled Russia's abilities to monitor its airspace to defend against attacks, abilities that have already been shown to be far below what anyone previously would have expected for a nuclear power
• Destruction of established command and control bases further impair's Russia's ability to defend its perimeter and airspace – even if all of the military personnel survived the attacks, the communications equipment needed to perform their mission is likely unusable and cannot be reproduced in a new location overnight

In a nutshell, the common conclusion reached by virtually every commentator has been that Russia just experienced its own Pearl Harbor of the twenty first century. By some estimates, this coordinated attack has eliminated roughly thirty to forty percent of Russia's war-making capacity. One obviously hopes the rest of the Pearl Harbor analogy won't hold true and that Russia will not wake up from this shock, magically reconstitute its domestic manufacturing capacities and somehow return to a position of power to crush its attacker. That would seem to defy all current economic signs in the country. Most of the planes destroyed haven't been manufactured in two decades so there's no assembly line in mothballs waiting to be resurrected into service. Many of the younger educated Russians needed to manage a turnaround in Russian manufacturing fled the country at the beginning of the war to avoid being conscripted into service. Most importantly, Russia lacks the economic wherewithal to fund such a turnaround. Sanctions are preventing them from generating any income from oil and any effort they make to destroy power cables, communication cables and pipelines into Europe in an attempt to bully Europe into ceding to Russian demands only cripples economic growth that generates demand for Russian oil.

Ukraine's Wake-up Call to America

While most news reports cover the Ukrainian and European angles to these recent military attacks executed by Ukraine against Russia, most analysis leaves perhaps the most important impact unaddressed. America has racked up TRILLIONS of dollars in debt over forty years to design and manufacture extremely complex weapons systems based upon modes of military conflict that are sixty to eighty years old. In current 2025 dollars, America has evolved from military plans relying on $22 million dollar F4 phantoms to $60 million for an F16 and from $84 million for a B-52 bomber to $700 million for a B1 bomber and $2.13 billion for a B2 Stealth bomber. America has spent over $6 billion on new Nimitz class aircraft carriers which require a complete overhaul within 10-15 years whose cost can equal their original purchase price. The absolute latest class of aircraft carrier, the Gerald Ford class, has cost $13 billion to date. America has spent $100 billion dollars on a fleet of Littoral Combat Ships ("little crappy ships") that are being removed from service before even a majority were completed.

The argument for continuing America's defense strategy and consequent spending is based upon archaic concepts of projecting power and securing the seas for trade. In a world where shipping paths might be blocked by an enemy operating submarines or surface ships in proximity to a path, having the ability to position an aircraft carrier with thirty fighter jets aboard might act as a deterrent. In a world where an enemy might impair shipping lanes by flying jets from island bases one hundred miles away, having long-range bombers capable of avoiding radar detection that can take out those island bases and return home might be a deterrent. But the world is no longer solely imperiled by symmetric, high-cost military capabilities. Technology created a world that has essentially "democratized terror" and made it more affordable for use by rouge nations and stateless actors alike.

The current budget bill being pushed through Congress includes ONE TRILLION DOLLARS for defense spending, an increase of $150 billion over the current 2025 budget. $25 billion dollars of that is being assigned to a new program termed the Golden Dome, a new missile defense system with desired capabilities very similar to the infamous Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI or "Star Wars") program launched in 1984. That program spent between $50 and $100 billion (apparently no one knows exactly how much) and pretty much confirmed most of the technologies required for success were at least twenty years in the future so very little value came from it.

In 2025, we might have 10,000-fold increases in computing power, memory and communication speeds to make many tracking functions envisioned in 1984 possible but the nature of the threat is now completely different. An existential threat isn't limited to arriving atop an ICBM that cost billions to design, manufacture and operate. The Ukrainians just demonstrated an existential threat can be trucked into the country in dozens of semis over months of time, parked within minutes by air of strategic infrastructure driving the power grid, pipelines, chemical factories, etc., then unleashed en masse via remote control with no obvious external actor to counterattack if any response capabilities even exist after the first round.

Is a $13 billion dollar aircraft carrier carrying thirty F35-C fighters costing $110 million each a meaningful defense against one hundred "first person visual" (FPV) remote-controlled drones costing about $400 each that can carry a one pound high-explosive bomb? Think through the math. For the cost of a single advanced F35-C stealth fighter on a carrier, a country could purchase 275,000 drones. Increase the size of the drone and the bomb payload capability and assume the drone price is $10,000 instead of 400. Now the $110 million buys 11,000 drones. How is a single fighter going to shoot down 11,000 individual targets that are only a few feet in circumference and weigh virtually nothing? How are such small objects going to appear on radar? If they DO appear on radar, how useful is that radar image going to be to targeting algorithms with DOZENS or HUNDREDS flying in a veritable swarm?

The last week of conflict wasn't just a Pearl Harbor for Russia. It should be a Pearl Harbor Redux for America. Our military spending is already far past the point of providing actual security commensurate with the cost. Our military spending is already insane given the insolvency it will likely create as we increase defense spending while cutting taxes and every program providing meaningful benefits to education, public health, science and care for the elderly. But to spend this insane amount of money on weapons and strategies which have been proven in front of our eyes to be completely useless in future conflicts? That's indescribable insanity.

Are Americans in general capable of learning the right lessons from an enemy's losses? Maybe. Is America's President, Donald Trump, capable of learning the right lessons from an enemy's losses? Absolutely not. Trump has never demonstrated the ability to learn anything from anyone. He's far less likely to do so when he thinks the enemy doing the learning the hard way is his friend. Are Republicans in control of the entire federal government capable of learning anything? Not in the present logical, ethical and moral vacuum created by Trump. And here we sit, watching one of the most painless but crucial lessons ever taught play out in front of us, while every leader in a position to react and change course appropriately is isolated from reality in a self-imposed bubble of ignorance. This is not looking good for America's future.

WTH