A flotilla of US Navy ships pass through an open waterway near the Strait of Hormuz circa April 2026. The advent of cheap anti-ship weapons has given weak nations and substate actors a powerful weapon against larger, more powerful navies. (Shutterstock/Somkanae Sawatdinak)

How to Fight the US Navy on the Cheap

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Ukraine’s recent strikes against Russian tankers in the Sea of Azov are instructive on how a weak power can stand up to a stronger one—for good or ill.

We inhabit a strange age of naval warfare. Nowadays a coastal state—or even a substate belligerent—doesn’t need a navy to perform naval functions, sometimes to heavy-hitting effect. Such a combatant merely needs to equip itself lavishly enough with cheap, shore-based anti-ship missiles and drones of various types to stymie or even vanquish a great navy.

Exhibit A: Ukraine’s defeat of the Russian Black Sea Fleet. In April 2022, less than two months after the beginning of the war, Ukrainian shore defenders deployed an artful combination of drones and missiles to sink the Russian cruiser Moskva, the Black Sea Fleet flagship. The rest of the Black Sea Fleet stood off from Ukrainian shores. 

But high-seas battle is not everything. A contender like Ukraine can also harry commercial shipping within missile and drone range, mounting a sort of non-naval blockade to pinch its foe economically or demographically. Ukraine has been doing just that in the waters circling the Russian-occupied Crimean Peninsula—in the Sea of Azov in particular.

The Sea of Azov is the body of water to the peninsula’s immediate east. It connects Crimea to Russia by water. Reuters is all over the story of how the Ukrainian armed forces deployed drones to attack dozens of Russian “shadow fleet” tankers trying to run oil into beleaguered Crimea via Azov—11 alone since the start of the week.

The Atlantic Council defines a shadow fleet, a.k.a. “dark fleet” or “ghost fleet,” as “a large and growing group of ships that sail outside the official shipping system” to evade........

© The National Interest