Effectiveness of deep strike
On average, deep-strike drones cost around $100,000, and I’m actually understating it, since some run close to $200,000, yet no direct link between price and effectiveness has been observed.
Just as there is no direct correlation between the warhead power of a drone and its effectiveness, since what matters most is not the cost of the drone or the size of its warhead, but the ability of the drone (and the crew operating it) to get through air defenses and electronic warfare, reach the target, and strike it. If you miss by 100 meters, such an attack is pointless, even if the drone is carrying a 100-kg aerial bomb with a fragmentation radius of only 90 meters.
However, both at the highest levels of government and among commanders and society, there is a misconception that the bigger the drone, the heavier the warhead it carries, and the higher it flies, the better and more expensive it is. But that is not the case.
First of all, deep-strike drones should not fly at high altitudes; on the contrary, they must fly at extremely low altitudes to reduce the chance of being detected and destroyed by air defenses.
Secondly, when it comes to the cost of a drone, the airframe size, engine power, and engine type account for no more than 20%. The real expense lies in the electronics, the autopilot, onboard computer, sensors, radar, altimeter, satellite navigation antenna, optical navigation system, software, as well as the development and testing of all this, which can be extremely costly.
Corruption-driven markups can also add significantly to the price. An effective and an ineffective corruption-tainted drone can look absolutely identical or even an inefficient one, built solely to siphon off state or partner funds, may appear just as flashy as a Las Vegas casino. Yet this has no bearing on its combat effectiveness.
On March 11, 2025, 400 Ukrainian drones were launched toward Moscow. Not a single one reached the city limits. A few hit residential buildings, a railway crossing, and a parking lot near a supermarket. The cost is about $40 million (just for the drones), the effectiveness is practically zero, apart from press coverage and several airports being shut down for a few hours.
On March 14, 2025, about two dozen drones were launched toward Moscow. Half of them crossed into the city, and several even flew beyond the Garden Ring. In both cases, no significant enemy targets were hit: some drones were shot down, others jammed. Still, it is clear that the second strike was more successful than the first, even though it went completely unnoticed by the "telethon." This example shows just how difficult it is to assess the effectiveness of deep-strike operations.
If, over the course of a month, Ukrainian long-range drone attacks cause four oil refineries to catch fire and temporarily halt operations, that is certainly a success, the enemy feels a fuel shortage, and gas prices in Russia rise.
But if achieving such a result required launching around 1,500 drones at an average cost of $100,000 each, the total comes to $150 million, or about $40 million per refinery. That is expensive weaponry. It would be more cost-effective to use cruise and ballistic missiles, or to launch FPV drones from trucks inside Russian territory.
The effectiveness of deep-strike operations can only be assessed comprehensively, taking into account the cost of the drones, their quality, and their performance, how many are launched, how many reach the target in percentage terms, and how many actually hit the target.
It is also necessary to evaluate the direct damage inflicted on the enemy, bombers destroyed on airfields, burning oil depots, and the indirect, secondary damage: the number and cost of surface-to-air missiles fired to shoot the drones down, losses from airport closures and mobile network outages, and the psychological impact on the population.
And the main criterion of effectiveness is this: if drones reach well-defended regions such as Moscow or St. Petersburg, overcoming the most powerful air-defense and electronic-warfare system in the world, that is one story. If they fly to areas where defenses are practically absent, typically the remote hinterland of the empire, that is a completely different story. The first case is extremely difficult, the second relatively easy.
But in the media, and in the perception of the general public and the military-political leadership, it is often the other way around: "Ukrainian drones penetrated 1,000 kilometers!", a great victory, the cost of which was nothing more than a bigger fuel tank, a wider wingspan, and a slightly more powerful engine.
The problem is that the effectiveness of deep-strike missions is most often judged "by the picture": if there’s a striking image of a burning oil depot — bravo, medals all round; but if a bomber is hit on an airfield and no one sees it, they’re branded "the bad guys."
In deep-strike operations, unlike the FPV-drone war on the front line, it is very rare to obtain adequate, objective, and fully reliable information about target hits, the enemy is in no hurry to disclose losses (just as we aren’t), social media is censored, and we have few intelligence assets in the enemy’s rear.
As a result, units that perform well, that literally hunt high-value military targets, don’t get support and fade, overshadowed by the successes of other units chasing media effect. Awards, posts, ranks, bonuses, vehicles, drones, and other perks more often go to those in the spotlight.
And this redistribution of benefits, from the effective to the media-savvy, affects not only the units themselves but also the senior leadership, which, seeking publicity encouraged at the political level (at General Staff briefings, at meetings of the Supreme Commander-in-Chief’s Staff, or simply in the President’s Office), tends to choose "media" targets instead of using drones to solve military tasks.
And then, this is outright absurd, effectiveness is often judged by the number of drones launched (and written off): the more you launched, the bigger the "well done." Where they reached or failed to reach, what they hit, the command doesn’t care. It’s not uncommon to run into "drone hunters" near the front line or (the northern) border, those who launched strike drones at night just to fulfill the plan, the order from above, and then quietly collected the remnants of their "attack" in the morning, debris that hadn’t even crossed to the other side.
It can also be done in the "simplest" way, when effectiveness is measured by falsification of figures, just like in the Soviet-era collective farms, where labor days, tons of harvested potatoes, or hectares of planted corn were artificially inflated. The same happens now: ten strike drones are launched, but fifteen are recorded, no one will count them anyway.
It’s vile when the results of deep strikes are appropriated by more influential rivals who literally steal others’ successes. Sometimes they even poach a "sheep", a team that knows how to set oil depots ablaze or smash airfields, bring it into their structure, then place it to work alongside their favorite, native but unsuccessful unit; both teams hit the same target, and the credit goes to their own and their cronies.
This practice became especially widespread during large-scale "joint operations," when 200–400 drones are launched at a single target by 3–4 security agencies and 10–20 "launcher" units. Different drones and different crews take part in the strike, but the result is credited to the "right" security agency and the "favored" strike drone, just to justify the redistribution of resources and attention from the senior military-political leadership, and to funnel more money to "their" company for producing drones that never reach their targets but carry a hefty price tag.
That is why the effectiveness of deep strikes, even in terms of media effect, often approaches absolute zero, swallowed up by corruption on a catastrophic scale. Because for top-level corrupt officials, it doesn’t matter how many or what kind of targets are hit; they don’t even particularly need the media effect. Their main goal is to write off substandard yet expensive drones purchased by the state at many times their real value.
We’ll talk more about this next time.
