Nowhere Is Safe: Steve Blank on Drones and the End of Surface Security
Source: Steve Blank | Published April 9, 2026
I have been reading Steve Blank for years. He writes about startups and national security with the same sharp candor — a Silicon Valley insider who spent decades building companies and then turned his attention to how the military actually works.
This post hit differently.
The argument is simple. Drones in Ukraine and the war with Iran have changed what it means to be on the surface of the earth. If something is valuable and exposed, it can be found and hit by a cheap drone. That includes things the U.S. military assumed would always be safe: tankers on a runway, command posts, AWACS aircraft sitting on a tarmac.
A Patriot battery is designed to shoot down a handful of ballistic missiles. It is not designed to handle a thousand drones launched from shipping containers.
The Gap
The U.S. is spending tens of billions on counter-UAS systems: detection, tiny missiles, lasers, microwave weapons. That is the obvious response. What we are not spending money on is putting high-value assets out of the line of sight entirely — underground.
Ukraine figured this out. They have installed 500 miles of anti-drone net tunnels over roads. Metal poles and fishing nets. Primitive, yes, but it is a direct acknowledgment that the surface is a kill zone. Their goal is 2,500 miles by the end of 2026. Russia is doing the same thing.
The U.S. is stuck between two options: cheap nets (limited protection) and Cold War concrete bunkers (billions of dollars, years to build). The missing middle is rapidly bored shallow tunnels. Precast segments dropped into a trench. Autonomous boring machines scaled for military logistics, not highway traffic.
The Doctrine Problem
Blank calls out something worse than missing technology: missing imagination. The Air Force spent 30 years assuming air superiority would substitute for physical hardening. The Agile Combat Employment program — disperse small teams to remote bases with minimal defenses — did not account for drones finding those dispersed aircraft. Operation Spider’s Web in Ukraine proved that 117 drones smuggled in shipping containers could strike Russian bombers sitting in the open.
The Army Corps of Engineers is slow. The commercial tunneling industry is not thinking about expeditionary military applications. Nobody is asking what happens if you could cut and cover 100 meters of tunnel segments in a day.
Why This Matters
Oceans on both sides and friendly neighbors have given America a false sense of security. The last foreign force fought on U.S. soil was 1812. That is a long time to get comfortable.
Drones change the math because they are cheap enough to use in numbers that overwhelm any point defense. If a thousand $500 drones can take out a $300 million AWACS, the defender’s cost equation breaks. You cannot build your way out of that with more missiles. You have to change the geometry: put the asset somewhere the drone cannot reach.
Blank argues for a whole-of-nation approach. Not just military assets but civilian infrastructure: oil tankers, data centers, desalination plants, refineries, energy nodes. Anything valuable on the surface is now a target. Protection and survivability need to be part of every weapons system requirement, not an afterthought.
I do not know what the right answer is. But Blank is right that we are not asking the question with enough urgency. Drone swarms are not a future threat. They are a current one, and the surface of the earth is no longer safe.
Crepi il lupo! 🐺