Neros Technologies CEO: inside Ukraine's Operation Spiderweb and the future of drone warfare

Summary

Ukraine's Operation Spiderweb last weekend was, in military terms, a first: short-range FPV drones operated 4,000 km inside Russia, striking strategic bombers on the ground at an air base deep in Russian territory. Saurin Shah, co-founder and CEO of Neros Technologies — which he describes as America's highest-rate drone production line — breaks down what made the operation technically distinctive and what it signals for the future of drone warfare.

How it worked

FPV drones are almost always a front-line weapon, effective within roughly 30 km of the zero line. The Spiderweb drones were physically transported inside the tops of shipping containers driven into Russia, then launched from within Russian territory. Crucially, they operated over cellular networks rather than the low-latency local radio links typical of FPV systems. That single design choice is what defeated Russia's electronic defenses: the air base had GPS jamming active (you can see GPS drop out in the footage as the attack begins), and it likely had jamming for common FPV control frequencies in the 915 MHz and 5.8 GHz ranges. Cellular was unblocked.

The drones themselves were purpose-built for this mission. Rather than the standard forward-facing warhead-and-camera configuration, these carried two pipe-shaped warheads mounted between the motors and a gimbal camera pointing straight down. That let them descend flat onto the fuel tanks of the bombers rather than dive in forward — a configuration that also made them easier to pack flat inside the shipping containers. They ran ArduPilot firmware, not the Betaflight racing firmware typical of FPV drones, enabling full position hold under high-latency cellular control. Shah is confident from watching the footage that the drones were manually piloted throughout, not autonomous — a deliberate choice given the one-shot nature of the mission and the risk of trusting unproven terminal guidance on a new target set.

The bombers were parked in the open partly as a legacy of START-1 (signed 1991), which required strategic nuclear delivery vehicles to be kept at satellite-observable locations. Russia suspended the treaty in 2023, but the infrastructure habit remained. Shah's bluntest observation: strategic bombers should be inside hangars.

Why the US has no reliable defense against this

Shah says he has never seen a US-made jammer that can reliably defeat FPV drones, and argues the US is far behind in practical electronic warfare against local radio-frequency threats. The cellular vector compounds the problem — shutting down cell coverage across an area is technically possible but requires coordination with carriers like Verizon and AT&T and introduces enormous collateral disruption. Effective defense will require layered systems combining electronic warfare, interceptor drones, and kinetic systems like automated gun turrets. Shotguns wielded by personnel are, he notes, technically the last-resort backstop — and they can work against an FPV drone, but are not a strategy.

Where autonomy is heading

Full autonomy in a GPS-denied, cellular-denied environment requires visual navigation: matching camera imagery to a preloaded map to determine position. Neros specs its autonomy to run on hardware small and cheap enough not to compromise the FPV drone's form factor — no Nvidia GPU onboard. Shah describes the near-term capability as a drone that flies to an area, scans targets, identifies them, and then surfaces a human go/no-go decision before striking. That loop is close. The deeper autonomy question — whether a drone can independently decide to take a human life — remains legally unresolved, though Shah's practical view is that drone strikes are more precise and cause fewer civilian casualties than conventional munitions, which sets a different moral baseline than the framing of "autonomous killing" implies.

Neros's production picture

Neros currently ships around 1,500 drones per month, a rate Shah describes as stable after a painful early production ramp that exposed high failure rates in custom electronics sourced from a board house in Arizona. The core product is Archer, an FPV drone built on an allied supply chain and DoD-certified for cyber and supply chain security. Archer Strike integrates the warhead system. Ground stations come in two configurations: Crossbow (tactical, portable) and Longbow (maximum range, maximum anti-jam).

The sharpest supply chain constraint is brushless motors. China dominates both motor production and the underlying neodymium supply chain. Neros is working with a non-Chinese partner to scale capacity, but that partner is already struggling to keep pace with current and planned volumes. The US has no brushless motor manufacturing cluster — Shah notes the contrast with China's model, where DJI-scale winners and dozens of component suppliers operate within walking distance of each other. El Segundo is beginning to develop something like that density for US defense tech, but it is early. Solving brushless motors is a problem no single drone company can fix alone.