[Editor’s Note: Army Mad Scientist welcomes back T2COM G2 analyst, Mr. Dorsel “Flip” Boyer as today’s guest blogger. In this piece, Mr. Boyer describes the large impact that deployment of Unmanned Systems can have on logistics and sustainment, using the current situation in Crimea as a case study. He then describes how this strategy could proliferate, specifically into the hands of an adversary like the PLA, and how the Army could adopt these successful Ukrainian tactics — Read on!]
The Uncrewed Blockade: Crimea and the Emergence of Multi-Domain Operational Isolation
Blockades and sieges are as old as war itself. Historically, choking out an enemy garrison meant assembling a massive surface fleet, securing total air superiority, or putting enough boots on the ground to physically encircle them. Ukraine is throwing that playbook out. Recent Ukrainian strikes against Russian logistics, air defense networks, command nodes, and maritime assets are more than a conventional interdiction campaign. The cumulative effect of these strikes amount to a multi-domain uncrewed blockade. While traditional blockades imply maritime control, Kyiv is proving that operational isolation can be achieved by converging long-range precision fires, autonomous systems, and persistent surveillance. The result imposes operational friction without requiring conventional superiority in any single domain.
The Geography of Operational Isolation
Crimea presents a uniquely vulnerable operational problem. Although annexed by Russia in 2014, the peninsula relies entirely on a handful of fragile sustainment corridors tying it to the Russian mainland.
Moscow’s grip depends on:
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- Rail and road networks across the Kerch Strait.
- Maritime resupply through Black Sea ports.
- A handful of airfields supporting logistics and combat aviation.
- Exposed command-and-control infrastructure linking local forces to theater headquarters.
Historically, severing these arteries demanded a blue-water navy, control of key terrain on land, and local air superiority. By leveraging asymmetric advantages in drone production and integration, Ukraine is achieving the same effect. The goal isn’t to perfectly destroy every bridge or rail line. Ukraine’s campaign is strangling Russian throughput, reliability, and freedom of maneuver.
The Anti-Siege: The Berlin Airlift vs. Crimea
To understand how radical this “uncrewed siege” is, look at the ultimate anti-siege: the 1948 Berlin Airlift.
When the Soviets blockaded West Berlin, the Allies bypassed the geographic choke point with brute-force physical capacity—flying in millions of tons of supplies through uncontested air corridors. The airlift proved a traditional siege fails if the defender has deep pockets and safe transit routes.
Ukraine’s “middle strike” campaign clearly demonstrates how technology has limited the utility of the Allies’ brute force solution. Russia is attempting to maintain its own logistics bridge to the peninsula while its supply corridors are heavily contested. By using cheap, persistent uncrewed systems to constantly harass airfields, hunt ships, and destroy rail hubs, Ukraine threatens to raise the logistical tax of holding Crimea to an unsustainable high. The Allies won in 1948 by absorbing the cost of a physical siege. In Crimea, Ukraine is proving that networked autonomous systems can make breaking a siege too expensive for a modern military to afford.
The “Middle Strike” Campaign
Ukraine’s evolving strike campaign engineers exactly this friction. Data-centric, UAS-enabled targeting of fuel depots, rail hubs, and ammunition dumps creates cascading dilemmas for Russian commanders.
Individual strikes are rarely decisive. Rail lines get repaired (even if imperfectly). Command posts relocate. But layered together, these strikes impose a compounding tax. Moscow must divert security forces to guard the deep rear. Air defenses must be pulled from the frontline. Supply runs take longer and burn more fuel. The objective isn’t absolute destruction, it is increasing the fog and friction of war while seeking to bleed Russia logistically and starve Russian commanders informationally.
Punching Holes in the Sky
The systematic dismantling of Russian integrated air defense systems has enabled Ukrainian success at operational depth. Traditional military doctrine insists that air superiority enables interdiction.
Ukraine’s “middle strike” campaign uses cross-domain interdiction to punch holes in the sky. Ukrainian forces create intermittent gaps in Russian defensive networks allowing heavier follow-on strikes to slip through. So far Kyiv hasn’t needed permanent air superiority. Localized access allows Ukraine to penetrate Russia’s protective umbrella, challenging both logistics and industrial targets that enable prolonged occupation.
Maritime Denial Without a Fleet
Ukraine’s Black Sea operations mirror this approach. Despite lacking a conventional blue-water navy, Ukraine routinely threatens Russian surface combatants with explosive maritime drones and long-range missiles. As a result, the Russian Black Sea Fleet largely abandoned Crimea for Novorossiysk. Classical naval theory dictates that a blockade requires physical ships occupying physical space. Ukraine substituted physical occupation with distributed risk. Kyiv denies the Black Sea Fleet control of the Black Sea without requiring a conventional force to challenge their naval overmatch.
Information and C2 as Sustainment
Operational isolation goes beyond beans and bullets. A modern headquarters is useless without data. Western embargoes on systems like Starlink amplify the effects of kinetic strikes on communication relays. Because the modern battlefield is overwhelmingly data-centric, these strikes have an outsized impact. Ukraine’s goal isn’t only leader decapitation. Disconnecting sensors from shooters and delaying critical decisions is just as effective as blowing up a convoy. Future blockades will encompass cyberspace and the electromagnetic spectrum as heavily as they target ports and highways.
Toward the Uncrewed Operational Siege
The Ukrainian experience signals a major shift in operational warfare: the multi-domain uncrewed blockade. Where historical sieges surrounded a fortress to physically starve it, the uncrewed siege achieves the same outcome through different means:
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- Persistent surveillance to map vulnerabilities in real-time.
- Networked sensors and effectors enabled by distributed mission command architecture.
- Long-range strikes to bleed sustainment networks.
- Maritime drones to sever sea lines of communication.
- Electronic warfare to blind command and control.
The target physically controls terrain but becomes functionally isolated, making further occupation untenable.
Scaling the Siege: China and the First Island Chain
The People’s Liberation Army (PLA) has invested in learning and applying lessons from the Ukraine conflict. Maturation of the multi-domain uncrewed blockade concept presents the PLA with two options:
First, Ukraine’s uncrewed siege playbook to functionally isolate Taiwan without immediately committing to a highly contested, massive amphibious invasion. Partnering uncrewed systems with China’s expanding naval power, Beijing can hold sea lines of communication at risk with swarms of low-cost USVs, blind early warning radars with attritable UAVs, and sever undersea data cables to enforce informational starvation while limiting risk exposure to expensive traditional naval assets.
Second, the PLA can integrate inexpensive autonomous systems to increase the effectiveness and lethality of planned long-range fires and a traditional joint blockade campaign that supports a larger joint island offensive campaign. In the context of China’s systems warfare approach the integration of low costs systems with long-range fires and exquisite detection platforms exponentially unbalances the means available and risks associated with defending the status-quo inside the first island chain.
Implications for Future Warfare and the U.S. Army
Ukraine’s operational campaign to starve Crimea is the first large-scale proof of concept. It demonstrates that temporal and localized isolation can be achieved by coordinating relatively cheap, networked, uncrewed systems. The era of requiring total multi-domain dominance to isolate an adversary is being rapidly challenged. Over the next decade, the U.S. Army could adapt its Doctrine, Organization, and Material (DOM) to operate within—or break out of—uncrewed operational sieges.
Doctrine: The Army could shift from assuming continuous, secure theater sustainment to planning for prolonged functional isolation. The Multi-Domain Operations (MDO) framework must rapidly mature to incorporate “siege-breaking” and “siege-survival” operations. Army formations must be trained to fight and maneuver when their supply lines, air cover, and data links are systematically degraded by swarms of cheap, attritable sensors and effectors.
Organization: Over the next ten years, it could be worth it for the Army to radically distribute its formations. This would require shrinking tactical command nodes, pushing organic counter-UAS and electronic warfare capabilities down to the platoon level, and organizing maneuver units to operate independently for weeks without reliance on centralized, highly visible logistics hubs.
Material: The era of relying solely on exquisite multi-million-dollar interceptors to shoot down twenty-thousand-dollar drones has proven unsustainable in 21st century warfare. Material development must aggressively pursue cost-per-kill symmetry. To punch through—or establish—an uncrewed blockade, the Army requires mass-produced directed energy weapons, localized kinetic drone interceptors, and its own autonomous resupply platforms that can survive the friction of a highly contested rear area.
If you enjoyed this post, check out the T2COM G-2’s Operational Environment Enterprise web page, brimming with authoritative information on the Operational Environment and how our adversaries fight.
About the Author: Mr. Boyer is an experienced intelligence and defense policy professional with 23 years of experience in the field as both a uniformed service member and defense industry partner. He currently works as a threat environment analyst for the United States Army Transformation and Training Command (T2COM). His focus has been the Black Sea and its littoral and has worked directly in the field since 2015 supporting United States European Command, United States Special Operations Command, and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Mr. Boyer has published several studies for T2COM, the U.S. Army Center for Lessons Learned, and currently supports the T2COM G-2 Wargaming Team.
Disclaimer: The views expressed in this blog post do not necessarily reflect those of the U.S. Department of War, Department of the Army, or the U.S. Army Transformation and Training Command (T2COM).
