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It Won’t Be Built By The Big Five Defense Primes
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Editor’s note: Erez will be sitting down with Porter this Wednesday for a timely analysis of a little-known company the two of them describe as one of the most asymmetric of their careers.
What they’ve uncovered is the rare type of asymmetric investment that usually only gets recognized after the big money has been made. But not this time… this time they’ve identified it early.
Click here to be part of the conversation and listen to them discuss this opportunity and the future of Biotech Frontiers.
Ukraine’s low-budget mission with a billion-dollar kill… Modern warfare and the economics of asymmetry… Stealth bombers cost $2 billion each… Drones cost thousands… Anduril Industries is a U.S. leader in drones… Delinquencies are on the rise… People think unemployment will jump… |
Table of Contents
On a frigid dawn over Russia’s heartland less than 90 days ago, the old calculus of military power collapsed.
It didn’t happen through a clash of conventional tanks or fighter jets, nor through the deployment of futuristic, next-generation hypersonic weapons that Russian President Vladimir Putin has touted. It didn’t involve a Hollywood-style commando raid of the kind that has lionized SEAL Team Six.
Instead, on that cold morning, Ukraine’s special intelligence services launched Operation Spider’s Web, sending a swarm of remote-controlled, unmanned drones – small, inexpensive, and disposable – deep into Russian territory. The drones destroyed over 40 of Russia’s most prized strategic aircraft and wreaked havoc at four military bases so far inside Russia that Putin’s top brass had regarded them as untouchable. For the first time in modern warfare, a nation’s most advanced defenses and weapons were rendered porous not by greater firepower, but by the economics of asymmetry.
Historians may one day mark this day – June 1, 2025 – as the moment the nature of warfare changed. As University of Pennsylvania Professor Michael Horowitz has written, the future belongs to “weapons of precise mass” – systems that combine surgical accuracy with cheap ubiquity. Operation Spider’s Web offered a live demonstration: drones that cost Ukraine perhaps tens of thousands of dollars pinpointed, overwhelmed, and destroyed advanced Russian assets worth billions. This is the logic of disruption applied to the battlefield.
The strategic significance of Operation Spider’s Web is hard to overstate: By puncturing the illusion of invulnerability that military assets deep inside Russia had enjoyed, Ukraine showed how technological leverage can invert the balance of power. Nations that once relied on the most expensive, sophisticated weaponry for their security must now grapple with a world where a decisive edge may come from networks of cheap, smart weapons. Spider’s Web wasn’t just a successful raid – it was the moment war itself tilted on its axis.