The traditional architecture of American military power is facing a crisis of geometry. For decades, the United States has relied on air superiority and sophisticated missile defense to secure its assets, but the proliferation of low-cost drones in Ukraine and the Middle East has effectively turned the surface of the earth into a contested space.
The fundamental math of defense has shifted. High-cost interceptors, such as those used in Patriot battery systems, were designed to counter a limited number of expensive aircraft or missiles. They are not economically or operationally sustainable against “swarm” attacks involving thousands of cheap, asymmetric drones. This vulnerability extends beyond the battlefield to critical civilian infrastructure, including desalination plants, data centers and oil refineries, which remain largely undefended against aerial incursions.
While the U.S. Is investing billions into Counter-UAS (C-UAS) technology—including microwave weapons, lasers, and kamikaze drones—there is a glaring gap in the strategy for physical survivability. The current approach focuses on shooting drones down rather than making high-value assets impossible to uncover or hit. As conflicts in Gaza and Ukraine demonstrate, the only true sanctuary from persistent drone observation and attack is the subsurface.
The Failure of Dispersal and Air Superiority
Following the Gulf War, the U.S. Air Force largely moved away from building hardened aircraft shelters, concluding that they were too expensive and vulnerable to heavy bunker-buster bombs. The subsequent strategy, known as Agile Combat Employment (ACE), emphasized dispersing small teams to remote, austere locations to avoid being targeted in a single strike. The theory was that dispersal, combined with total air superiority, would serve as a substitute for physical hardening.
However, the rise of low-cost drones has rendered this “security through dispersal” obsolete. Drones can now locate and strike dispersed aircraft with precision, a reality underscored by Ukraine’s “Operation Spider’s Web,” where drones smuggled in shipping containers were used to target Russian bombers.
The consequences of this doctrinal gap became evident during the 2026 Iran War, where Iranian forces successfully destroyed KC-135 tankers and an AWACS aircraft that were parked in the open. In contrast, adversaries such as China, North Korea, and Iran have continued to invest heavily in hardened underground facilities to protect their most critical assets.
The ‘Middle Layer’ of Survivability
Current U.S. Army and Air Force doctrines treat excavation and protection as two extremes: the individual soldier digging a foxhole with a shovel, or the massive, multi-billion-dollar construction of a Cold War-era concrete bunker. There is virtually no doctrine for the “middle layer”—the ability to rapidly create hardened, subsurface corridors for movement and equipment storage.
Ukraine has attempted to address this by installing anti-drone netting over roads, with a goal of covering 4,000 km of roads by the end of 2026. While these nets stop propellers, they do not protect against the thermal or RF signatures that drones use to track targets.
True survivability requires moving assets 15 to 30 feet underground. At this depth, facilities become invisible to most Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance (ISR) tools and are immune to everything except specialized bunker-buster munitions. The effectiveness of this approach is highlighted by the conflict in Gaza, where reports indicate that despite total air and ground control, Israeli forces have destroyed only about 40 percent of the tunnel network after two and a half years of war.
Comparing Surface vs. Subsurface Protection
| Method | Cost/Speed | Primary Protection | Critical Weakness |
|---|---|---|---|
| Anti-Drone Nets | Low / Rapid | Physical propeller block | Visible to ISR; no RF masking |
| Modular Shelters | Medium / Medium | Shrapnel/Fragmentation | Vulnerable to entry via openings |
| Hardened Bunkers | High / Slow | Direct hits/Bunker busters | Static; extremely expensive |
| Rapid Boring Tunnels | Medium / Medium | Full ISR masking/Overhead cover | Requires new boring technology |
A Needed Shift in National Doctrine
To adapt, the U.S. Must move toward a “Whole of Nation” approach to survivability. This involves not only updating military manuals—such as the Army’s ATP 3-37.34 on Survivability Operations—but also creating incentives for commercial entities to underground critical energy and data nodes.
The potential for innovation lies in modular, pre-fabricated tunnel segments and autonomous boring machines, similar to the technology developed by companies like The Boring Company, but scaled for expeditionary military logistics. Such a system would allow the military to bore protected corridors for ammunition, fuel distribution, and command posts at a rate of hundreds of meters per week.
The current reliance on the Army Corps of Engineers, while stable, is often too slow for the pace of modern asymmetric warfare. The gap is not just technological, but imaginative; the U.S. Has not fought a foreign force on its own soil since 1812, leading to a false sense of security regarding the vulnerability of the American mainland.
The next critical step in this evolution will be the integration of survivability requirements directly into the budgeting and procurement process for all new weapons systems. Protection can no longer be an afterthought; it must be deployed concurrently with the assets it is meant to shield.
Further updates on the deployment of the Golden Dome missile defense system and the establishment of Joint Interagency Task Force 401 will likely provide insight into how the U.S. Intends to balance active interception with passive protection in the coming years.
We invite readers to share their perspectives on the future of asymmetric warfare and infrastructure protection in the comments below.
