The Bunker: Air wars, here, there, and everywhere
This week in The Bunker: Hairline cracks appear in a critical element of President Trump’s Golden Dome aerial shield; the Ukrainian military shows how drones are rewriting the rules of war; the U.S. military struggles to protect U.S. bases from drone attacks; and more.
This week in The Bunker: Hairline cracks appear in a critical element of President Trump’s Golden Dome aerial shield; the Ukrainian military shows how drones are rewriting the rules of war; the U.S. military struggles to protect U.S. bases from drone attacks; and more.
AIR WAR 1.0
Gravity takes over
It’s been a year since President Donald Trump launched what eventually became known as his Golden Dome for America. Powered by rhetoric, this multi-layered shield began soaring skyward 12 months ago, armed with a pledge to protect (PDF) the U.S. against all air and space threats. Last week, dragged down by reality, it reached its apogee and slowly began its slow and inexorable plunge back to Earth.
Some will say The Bunker is overreacting to a new report from the Government Accountability Office. After all, the term “Golden Dome” doesn’t even appear in the 62-page document. Yet the probe focuses on the heart of Golden Dome — its ability to detect and track missile launches. Failure’s fingerprints are all over the effort.
That’s not solely due to the rose-colored glasses worn by the defense-industry titans involved, although that’s certainly part of it. Those contractors include Lockheed (the Pentagon’s #1 supplier), Raytheon (#2), Northrop (#3), and L3Harris (#6). More important is the hubris of political leaders insisting on miracles that taxes, talent, tinkering, and time cannot yet produce. “The whole thing is at risk,” an unidentified former senior Pentagon official told Politico about Golden Dome February 2. You’d think someone who had to return to the airport recently because of an electrical problem aboard Air Force One — surely the world’s most-ready aircraft — would be a tad more skeptical when it comes to assaying technology’s wonders, and limits.
Per that new GAO report, the Pentagon’s Space Development Agency is pushing to put a fleet of 300 to 500 satellites into low Earth orbit to detect, warn, and track enemy-missile launches with infrared sensors. The SDA launched the first such satellites in September. This “Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture” (PDF) constellation is projected to cost nearly $35 billion through 2029.
Thirty-five billion.
That’s with a “b,” as in boondoggle.
But SDA “is overestimating the technology readiness of some critical elements it plans to use,” leading to “unplanned work” that “has added to already delayed schedules,” the GAO said (PDF). SDA is rushing to deploy the satellites, meaning it “is at risk of delivering satellites that do not meet warfighter needs” (the rush shouldn’t come as a surprise: the 7-year-old agency’s motto is Semper citius, Latin for Always faster). SDA keeps awarding contracts “irrespective of satellite performance.” And the Pentagon “does not know the life-cycle cost to deliver missile warning and tracking capabilities because it has not created a reliable cost estimate” because SDA only “required limited cost data from contractors.”
The GAO simply lists the problems plaguing the program. It doesn’t reach any conclusion regarding its utility or futility. So, The Bunker will step into the breach, based on decades of covering defense procurement: Golden Dome will never come close to achieving what Trump says it will. Taxpayers, however, will spend (and borrow) as if it can.
One more thing. These satellites last only five years. Current plans, the GAO said (PDF), call for replacements to be regularly launched “in perpetuity.”
AIR WAR 2.0
Ukraine keeps rewriting the rules of combat
The share of Russian targets destroyed by Ukrainian drones now stands at more than 80%, Kyiv’s ministry of defense said January 26. Most of those low-cost drones are produced inside Ukraine. Those two factors — cheap and homemade — are why drones are destroying four of every five Russian targets following Moscow’s invasion of its neighbor nearly five years ago.
Ukraine claims it launched 819,737 drone strikes in 2025, including nearly 240,000 aimed at personnel, 62,000 against light vehicles, 29,000 against heavy vehicles, and 32,000 against Russian drones. “In December 2025, our units neutralized 35,000 occupiers – killed and badly wounded,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said. “Over 10 years of war in Afghanistan, the Soviet army lost half as many troops as the Russians lost in just one month of this war.”
Perhaps. It is important to recall what Aeschylus, the ancient Greek tragedian, supposedly said about truth being war’s first casualty. Nonetheless, regardless of the numbers, Ukraine has shown that drones can enable a smaller, weaker state to repel an attack by a more powerful adversary. That’s a tectonic shift.
Fascinatingly, Ukraine is gamifying warfare by awarding its drone operators points for video confirmation of their kills that they can use to procure new military gear. It’s like “Amazon for the military,” a top Ukrainian official said.
“We clearly record every single hit,” Zelensky said last week. “We also have points awarded for every hit. … Our bonus-based electronic points system is working to scale up the results our defense.”
One way it is trying to scale up its defense is to give its drones the ability to kill without human guidance, according to the January 25 cover story in the New York Times Sunday Magazine. “The era of killer robots has begun to take shape on the battlefield,” C.J. Chivers wrote. “Drones with newly developed autonomous features are now in daily combat use.”
AIR WAR 3.0
U.S. bases exposed to drone attacks
Major U.S. military bases and sensitive defense sites inside the country remain vulnerable to drone attacks, despite policies purportedly requiring their defense. There have been numerous cases of mysterious drones poking around U.S. military installations in recent years. Concern over such attacks spiked following 2025’s Operation Spiderweb, a Ukrainian drone attack on Russian aircraft launched from trucks deep inside Russia.
But there is confusion over which U.S. military facilities warrant drone protection, according to a January 20 report by the Department of Defense inspector general. While nine categories of military bases inside the U.S. — ranging from nuclear deterrence to missile defense — are to be protected from such attacks, there are curious omissions.
Training bases, for example, aren’t automatically on the list. So, Arizona’s Luke Air Force Base, where 75% of F-35 pilots learn to fly the world’s most advanced jet, isn’t protected. “Because training is not explicitly listed as one of the nine covered mission areas,” the IG said (PDF), “DoD officials told us that training is not covered.”
Neither are all sensitive military-production sites. California’s Air Force Plant No. 42 — owned by the Air Force but operated by private companies who are building the B-21 bomber there, as well as maintaining B-2 bombers and RQ-4 Global Hawk drones — isn’t designated for protection from drone attacks, either. Or maybe it is. Best to let the IG “explain”:
“DoD officials could not tell us whether or not it is covered. The Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy (USD[P]) list of covered facilities and assets shows Plant 42 as not covered. However, the Air Force’s list shows Plant 42 as covered, but Air Force officials told us that Plant 42 is not covered. In August 2024, a series of UAS [Unmanned Aircraft System] incursions occurred at the Air Force’s Plant 42. Air Force officials told us that the government-owned, contractor-operated facility was denied coverage during the active incursions.”
Apparently, the fog of war has spread from the world’s far-flung battlefields to that sprawling factory in Palmdale, California, 50 miles north of Los Angeles. While the Pentagon has issued more than 20 policies and regulations governing drone defenses for domestic bases, “most of the DoD documents are secret and therefore cannot be discussed in this advisory,” the IG said (PDF). Besides, “some of the requirements within the DoD documents contradict one another.”
But not to worry! The Pentagon has told the IG it is cleaning up this mess. Just to make really, really, sure, on January 30 it issued new guidance to protect U.S. military bases, and other critical infrastructure, from drone attacks.
WHAT WE’RE READING
Here’s what has caught The Bunker’s eye recently
NATO nations are facing a balloon blizzard from Russian-allied states that are currently smuggling cigarettes but could carry weapons, Aaron Wiener, Mary Ilyushina, and Ellen Francis of the Washington Post reported January 30.
Defense contractors defend their payments of dividends to stockholders while the Trump administration is saying that they should be spending more modernizing their factories, Drew FitzGerald reported February 2 in the Wall Street Journal.
Drones threaten the battlefield primacy of tanks. The U.S. Army just got what might be its final tank model, Dave Phillips reported January 30 in the New York Times.
Tanks for reading The Bunker this week. Please forward this missive on to future readers so they can subscribe here.
Pulitzer Prize-winner Mark Thompson, a national security analyst for the Center for Defense Information at POGO, has been covering the Pentagon for more than 45 years.
