Practically every account of Ukraine’s spectacularly successful June 1 sneak attack that destroyed or disabled as much as a third of Russia’s long-range bomber fleet invoked the adjective “audacious” to describe how the ingeniously devised plan was pulled off without a hitch.

More than one observer noted the “Trojan horse” quality of the scheme, which involved hiding swarms of cheap, but deadly accurate, first-person view drones in wooden containers disguised as mobile homes, driving them on truck beds deep into Russia, parking near military airfields, and then lying in wait for months. Until, at the appointed hour, the roofs of the “homes” opened remotely while operators thousands of miles away guided the drones to their targets.

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“I’m Greek American, so I’ve got to give you this. It’s kind of the Trojan horse,” former NATO Supreme Allied Commander James Stavridis said on CNN. “It’s really quite a remarkable military feat.”

Ukraine claimed that Russia lost more than 40 large planes in the highly choreographed operation, including several bombers that were fueled, armed with cruise missiles, and about to be launched for another attack against Ukrainian cities.

“A brilliant operation was carried out,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky crowed afterward. “It took place on enemy territory and was aimed exclusively at military targets — specifically, the equipment used in strikes against Ukraine.”

The operation code-named “Spiderweb,” which took 18 months to plan, was both a tactical and technological triumph. It displayed Ukraine’s ingenuity while spotlighting Russia’s failure of imagination, its high command never thinking its planes at four bases thousands of miles from Ukraine were sitting ducks.

Furious at the failure, Russian military bloggers quickly labeled the embarrassing debacle “Russia’s Pearl Harbor” and exploded in paroxysms of profanity on social media, cursing Russia’s inept air defenses and calling for revenge.

Commentators looked for historical analogues to the outside-of-the-box thinking, such as the World War II Doolittle raid on Japanese cities, in which American B-25 bombers took off on a one-way mission from an aircraft carrier to which they could not return.

“This is the Ukrainian equivalent of the September 2024 pager attack in which Israel annihilated nearly all of Hezbollah’s active forces,” Bernard-Henri Lévy wrote in the Wall Street Journal. “It is one of those operations of crazy audacity and unparalleled ingenuity that make military history. It will be taught for ages in war schools.”

Like the booby-trapped pagers that took years of painstaking deception, the Ukrainian masterstroke is a one-off, unlikely to work a second time, and, like the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, it is unlikely to be the decisive event of the war.

Nevertheless, the Ukrainians have succeeded in rewriting the rules of warfare, said Max Boot, a military historian, in the Washington Post. “This attack confirms the lesson we’ve been learning for more than three years in Ukraine: Drones are the future of warfare.”

A humiliated Russian President Vladimir Putin told President Donald Trump in a phone call three days after the attacks that he “will have to respond,” but considering he’s already throwing everything he’s got short of nuclear weapons at Ukraine, he has few options.

“For the Russians, it makes them fighting mad … and so, you have to expect that this leads to an intensification of the conflict,” former NATO Supreme Allied Commander retired Gen. Wes Clark said on CNN. “He’s going to come back hard against Ukraine and probably go after the civilian populace in Kharkiv and Sumy. That’s his strategic plan for the summer. He wants [to take] Odesa on the ground. He thinks he can do it.”

Boot said, “There is not much Putin can do that he hasn’t already done,” adding, “Of course, the Kremlin will claim some big air attack on Kyiv as ‘revenge,’ but they’ve been mounting air attacks since the start of the war. It’s not like Putin would be going easy if the Ukrainians weren’t hitting back.”

At the same time, Boot is among the army of analysts pointing to another obvious takeaway from Operation Spiderweb: that what happened to Russia could happen to any country, including the United States.

In recent years, efforts by Chinese companies to purchase farmland near U.S. military bases have raised concerns about spying or sabotage, alarming the Defense Department and members of Congress.

In 2022, a Chinese food manufacturer bought 370 acres of land just 12 miles from the Grand Forks Air Force Base in North Dakota to build a mill, but after the Air Force said the project would be “a significant threat to national security,” the local city council rejected the plan.

But you don’t need a farm to hide a drone base.

As Ukraine’s Operation Spiderweb has demonstrated, small, cheap drones that can be assembled or hidden almost anywhere near an air base could pose a threat to aircraft parked in the open or even in a hangar. There are plenty of videos online of Ukrainian drones flying into buildings or shelters to destroy their targets.

“It used to be that you needed to build long-range missiles to have long-range strike capacity. No longer. Now you can achieve the same result with ultracheap drones that can be reconfigured to carry explosives in a ramshackle workshop; terrorist groups could easily manufacture them,” Boot said in a published discussion.

Trump’s “Golden Dome for America,” which carries a price tag of $542 billion over the next two decades, will at some point include a counterdrone element, but not anytime soon.

Boot argued that some of that money would be better spent catching up in the drone revolution, in which the U.S. lags woefully behind.

“The Trump administration would be better advised to focus on building lots and lots of cheap drones,” Boot wrote in a column last month. “The Defense Department estimates that the United States has the capacity to manufacture 100,000 drones a year. That sounds like a lot, but actually it’s a pittance. Last year, Ukraine produced 2.2 million drones, and this year it’s aiming to build 4.5 million.”

The extra $156 billion in defense spending included in Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” has $25 billion earmarked for exquisite missile defenses such as space-based lasers and $9 billion to upgrade the fighter jet fleet — projects that take time as well as money.

But it also includes $16 billion for “innovative low-cost, next-gen weapons like drones, and counter-drone tech.”

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“We have learned, as so many of you have, from the conflict in Ukraine that warfare is changing rapidly. It is iterating in real time,” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told the annual Shangri-La defense conference in Singapore last month. “This idea that we can conduct defense procurement the way we have in the past, waiting months and months and years for the perfect system that delivers five years down the road, over time and over budget, it is not possible.”

There is something else we have learned from Operation Spiderweb, namely that when Trump was roughing up Zelensky in the Oval Office, berating him for “not having the cards,” Zelensky had something up his sleeve he couldn’t talk about — an ace in the hole that turned out to be his trump card.