This is how vulnerable an F-35 Stealth Fighter is. How exposed fuel tanks, ammunition bunkers and radar emplacements are. How easily a general, politician, celebrity or CEO can be assassinated.
The video is from Iraq.
Specifically, it’s the United States Air Force Victory Air Base outside Baghdad.
It was released by the Iranian-backed militia Kata’ib Hezbollah over the weekend.
It shows a grenade-carrying quadcopter drone swooping over an armed guard tower and tall concrete boundary walls.
Its operator is clearly using its first-person-view (FPV) camera to look for targets of opportunity.
First, it flies over a concrete-walled bunker. Then the fuel trucks parked nearby.
It moves up a road, past an open-air physical training and sports facility and then a water treatment pond.
It peeks into several shipping-container-filled compounds.
Looks into a covered parking bay.
Circumnavigates an enormous hangar in search of an opening.
Moves on to the entrance of an earth-covered, armoured bunker.
Then a warehouse.
Finding no open doors or tempting targets, and with time running out, it then plunges towards the back door of a helicopter hangar.
And blinks out at the moment of detonation.
For more than two minutes, the drone had been flying among the air base’s barracks, repair shops, and administration centres. And the US Air Force personnel below had been unable to do anything about it.
Such tiny drones have changed the face of war.
How do you spot them?
How do you stop them?
How do you catch their operators?
“The drone threat is no longer theoretical. It is here, it is accelerating, and it will only grow more challenging,” warn US defence analysts Theodore Bunzel and Tom Donilon.
“Government must act fast to eliminate regulatory gaps, build a layered defence, and find the political will to fund and deploy counterdrone systems at scale. If it does not take these steps by choice, it will be forced to take them — and more — in the wake of a preventable tragedy.”
Weaponised fun
First-person drones are not uncommon. You’ve probably been buzzed by one of these $1000 toys at the beach or park. Or even thrown stones at one hovering above your backyard.
They can be used for racing. Operators pit their skills against one another, using game controllers and the quadcopter’s camera to navigate an obstacle course at scale.
They can be used for business. They can observe crops, cables, roofs and traffic flows.
But simple kits sold online for as little as $30 can modify an off-the-shelf flying FPV camera to carry small but heavy objects. They’re marketed as water bombers. But it could as easily be a grenade. Or a homemade pipe-bomb.
For a time, the solution was to jam them. To clutter their frequency-jumping radios with directed energy.
But Russia solved that problem in 2024.
Which is why the drone above Victory Air Base was untouchable.
It was carrying a spool of fibre-optic cable, far finer than fishing line.
Intelligence analyst Vlad Sutea says fibre optic links gave Russia the edge when it came to expelling Ukraine from Russian territory. It had seized part of the Kursk province in the hope of forcing a negotiated ceasefire. But new fibre-optic guided drones gave the embattled Russian army an edge.
The physical link meant Ukraine’s drone-jamming devices had no effect.
“The result is an effectively unjammable drone capable of striking at a range of over 30 kilometres with pinpoint precision and a crystal-clear video feed,” Sutea writes for the Atlantic Council think-tank.
Russian operators were able to seek targets uninterrupted and look for vulnerable openings into which they could fly. Soon, many of Ukraine’s US-supplied M1 Abrams tanks and M2 Bradly fighting vehicles were smouldering wrecks.
Now both sides are using them.
“Their use has since expanded to such an extent that vast swathes of Ukrainian farmland and forest are now littered with fibre-optic cables shed by drones,” Sutea explains.
The Ukrainian government says such FPV camera-guided drones are now responsible for 70 per cent of all its frontline casualties.
Clear and present danger
The Iranian militia drone could have as easily been targeting a civilian airliner packed with hundreds of passengers. Baghdad’s civil international airport was just a few hundred meters away.
It’s a threat that has led to several European airports closing over the past year or two. Suspected Russian drones had been seen manoeuvring through the crowded airspace.
Moscow knows how effective these small drones can be as weapons.
In June, Ukraine’s Operation Spiderweb launched 117 “Wasp” FPV quadcopters from the backs of trucks deep inside Russia. They were controlled via phone network Wi-Fi. Their footage shows at least 10 (and possibly up to 40) Tu-95 “Bear”, and Tu-22 “Blinder” bombers destroyed.
“Skilled drone pilots can guide their payloads into the open hatch of a tank and have been recording such attacks to score propaganda points for Kyiv or Moscow,” Bunzel and Donilon write for Foreign Affairs.
“Mounting a defence, meanwhile, has been difficult, with neither Russia nor Ukraine able to find scalable and broad countermeasures to protect itself against the onslaught.”
The threat extends far beyond Ukraine and the Middle East.
Langley Air Force Base in Virginia, United States, was subject to an aerial incursion that extended over 17 consecutive nights. It was forced to evacuate its F-22 Raptor fighter aircraft to safety.
“But despite weeks of investigation, the FBI, the Pentagon, and NASA were not able to identify the operators,” Bunzel and Donilon report. “Over the following year, more than 350 drone incursions were detected across 100 different US military installations.”
Australia’s RAAF Base Williamtown, north of Newcastle, is home to most of Australia’s 72 F-35 Stealth Fighters. And the Royal Australian Navy is tied up at open ports in and around Sydney and Perth.
Like the fuel reserve crisis, successive governments have been aware of this vulnerability for decades. But done little about it.
Maximum exposure
FPV drones are easily accessible to lone wolves, criminal organisations and foreign government “sleeper cells”.
“In July 2024, for instance, a 20-year-old used one to survey the rally grounds in Butler, Pennsylvania, before taking aim at Donald Trump during a campaign appearance,” Bunzel and Donilon note.
Modification components are easily available online. Or 3D printing. And improvised explosives are a favoured weapon of terrorists, resistance fighters and gangs.
“States can use them to sow economic disruption or to spy on sensitive sites, lone-wolf actors can use them for political violence, and hobbyists can accidentally crash them into critical infrastructure,” Bunzel and Donilon warn.
But few countermeasures are available.
Legislative attempts to make commercial drones identify themselves have failed. Licencing is erratic. Supply remains unrestricted.
Defences are being explored.
“There is no silver bullet to neutralise the threat posed by these unjammable drones,” Sutea warns. “Countermeasures range from last-resort shotgun blasts and physical barriers to radar trip-wires, acoustic sensors, and experimental AI-assisted detection systems….”
Lasers and microwaves are options. But these risk frying sensitive military equipment as much as taking down a hostile drone.
GPS spoofing and jamming work for Wi-Fi drones. And remote hacking takeover options are being developed.
“But these systems can run into the tens of millions of dollars,” the analysts warn. “By contrast, the drones they are combating often cost just a few hundred dollars — an unsustainable asymmetry.”
So far, the best defence Ukraine has come up with is fishing net. It’s being suspended over suburban streets and vulnerable structures.
Quadcopter blades get tangled, preventing them from being guided into their target.
