Thread by @TrentTelenko

It's time to revisit how 992 Ukrainian drones and 10 small cruise missiles were used to saturate Russia's Moscow air defenses.

There was a lot of technology, technique & tactics involved.

Drone War 🧵
1/

The first thing that needs to be pointed out is that in 2026 Ukraine has not only replicated, but likely exceeded, the 2018 capabilities of the USAF's Stand-off Munitions Activity Center (SMAC) at at Barksdale AFB.

I've mentioned this before ⬇️
2/

In 2018 a Dallas chapter of the Association of Old Crows gave an award to SMAC & we got an open source brief of what they did to earn the award.

These guys do the evasive routing for integrated cross-service standoff munition attack profiles.

3/

SMAC was developed because the USA had lost it's edge in electronic warfare jamming of peer opponent integrated air defense systems.

Part of what was lost was replaced via better planning & simulation used to target stand off munitions against SAM batteries or what they are defending.

4/

US military decided to replace jamming by putting more killer robots, intelligently directed, into a defended area than defending SAM missiles can deal with.

Ukraine's 1,000 drone raid on Moscow showed that it can exceed US 2018 SMAC capabilities.


5/

This SMAC-like planning capability has been in Ukrainian hands since at least 2024.

What was lacking, until 2026, was high enough production of the correct mix of drones and drone-missiles to pull it off.

6/

In addition to 2024 SMAC-like digital tools, in 2022 Ukraine obtained the X-band ICEYE, plus commercial Sentinel-1A in the C-band, SARsats to play "satellite radar interference location" games with most VKS radars.

X makes the spot⬇️
7/

Ukraine's satellite radar interference tracking (and electronic tools like Cambridge Pixel app below) can predict where Russian radar coverage cannot see low flying drones for drone swarm strikes like the 1,000 drone raid over Moscow.

8/

While I've been talking about a Ukrainian "1,000 Drone raid" on Moscow for over 18-months.

It is clear Ukraine thought it was missing an important capability to pull it off successfully.

9/

My guess [We will have to wait years to know If I was right] was that Ukraine was lacking enough decoy drones of the correct "kinematic profile" to lead a low level, evasively routed, "drone stream" into Moscow

This changed recently ⬇️

10/

These Ukrainian long range decoy drones are cheaper, ground launched, versions of the ADM-160 Miniature Air-Launched Decoy scaled to screen FP-1/FP-2 drone streams.

11/

How many Ukrainian drones raiding Moscow in this drone stream had Starlink/Starshield two-way receivers is also something which will we will have wait for years to find out.

Suffice it to say, "It was enough to do the job."
12/

What the Moscow 1,000 drone raid makes clear is Small/Cheap/Many drone swarms are no longer the "future of war."

Drone Swarms are how modern wars are fought.

And Drone swarms are now hunting top end jet fighters air-to-air as well.

13/13

@threadreaderapp unroll please