Turns out, the Ukrainians had some cards to play

Suppose that in answer to a dramatic escalation of the Trump administration’s drive to take over Greenland, Denmark launched a surprise attack on the United States.

With a little help from Canadian and Mexican border authorities, the Danes would already have in place the drones that would carry out the attack. It would focus on military bases with sensitive missions and high-priced assets: the King’s Bay Naval Submarine Base in Georgia, the Air Force’s Joint Base San Antonio in Texas and Naval Base San Diego in California. A swarm of drones would take out the Northern Warfare Training Center and the Naval Special Warfare Cold Weather Detachment Kodiak in Alaska.

Sound over the top? Less so than it would have before Ukraine’s attack Sunday on Russian air bases spanning a vast distance from Murmansk to Siberia. It’s too soon to tell how the daring attack will affect the war between these countries, but this was one of those reordering events that forces us to reconsider a lot of things, not least of which is the pending budget bill before the U.S. Senate.

The Danes might soon regret pulling a sucker punch on the United States, but in the meantime, for a relatively small investment, they could destroy enough expensive stuff to make the $7 billion the Ukrainians claim they inflicted Sunday look like chump change.

In a period of severe cuts, the military portion of this year’s budget bill is up 13 percent, and President Donald Trump wants next year’s military budget to top $1 trillion for the first time. In light of what happened Sunday, it’s fair to ask how much of that money is going to be spent on what worked and how much on repurchasing what got caught on the ground.

“Ukraine also tells us that whoever gets new technology into the hands of their armed forces fastest will have the advantage,” Defense Secretary John Healey said Monday in a speech to Parliament.

The U.S. military has paid close attention to the war in Ukraine, and we should now say, Russia. The Army has plans to arm each of its combat divisions with 1,000 drones, and there’s talk of creating a separate Drone Corps. But it may take a while to catch up with the Ukrainians. Last year the United States manufactured roughly 100,000 drones. The Ukrainians manufactured 2 million and have set a goal to build 4 million a year. They have become the acknowledged leader in this new and dramatically less expensive method of making war.

Good thing we’re on their side… right? Volodymyr Zelenskyy was well aware this operation was coming back in February when he met with Trump in the Oval Office and was told he didn’t have any more cards to play. If there were an award like the Oscar for acting on the political stage, he should get it for that performance.

The spectacular success of this raid shouldn’t be so surprising, given Ukraine’s ability to innovate and out-maneuver the Russians from the first days of the war. Because of the very real difference in the size of the countries and the very unjustified reputation of the Russian military, the Ukrainians’ growing edge in learning how to fight a 21st-century war has been consistently underestimated.

They will have a big impact, however, on the way Europe spends the new money it is putting into rearmament. Companies like the German-British startup Helsing are promoting ways to use artificial intelligence to make drones even more effective. Meanwhile a good chunk of the new defense spending in the United States will be spent on rebuilding the Air Force’s aging fleet. In other words, planes that look like the Russian bombers that were blown up Sunday.

Back to those bellicose Danes. Chances are they’d resort to less violent ways to defend their claim to Greenland, but we live in a time when cheap, deadly technology, combined with a lot of careless talk, could be very unpredictable. It has sure proved to be so in a lot of barrooms.