Low-cost drones and missiles are exposing the vulnerability of pipelines, refineries and power grids, forcing governments and energy companies to rethink how critical infrastructure is designed and defended.
Modern warfare is making energy infrastructure increasingly vulnerable
The growing link between drones and energy security is forcing governments and companies to rethink how critical infrastructure is protected. Modern warfare, increasingly shaped by low-cost drones and missiles, has made energy assets more vulnerable than ever.
Oil and gas pipelines, refineries and liquefied natural gas terminals are fixed facilities with publicly known locations, making them attractive targets. The sabotage of the Nord Stream pipelines in September 2022 offered an early warning of how exposed strategic energy infrastructure can be.
Drone attacks on energy infrastructure in Ukraine
Russia has used drones to target Ukraine’s energy supplies since the beginning of the war. Ukrainian forces have responded with a series of attacks on Russian power plants, gasoline distribution depots and industrial refineries.
By striking Russian energy assets, Ukraine has demonstrated the increasingly sophisticated capabilities it has developed in long-range drone warfare. In recent months, Ukrainian drones have targeted refineries, fuel depots and other energy facilities far inside Russian territory.
The attacks have disrupted fuel supplies and shown that strategic infrastructure can remain vulnerable even when it is located hundreds of miles from the front line.
The Iran war as a case study
Since late February 2026, Tehran has repeatedly used drones and other asymmetric tactics to disrupt maritime traffic through the Strait of Hormuz.
The attacks showed that closing the strategic waterway did not require overwhelming naval superiority. Drones costing only a few hundred or a few thousand dollars were enough to interrupt commercial shipping.
Iranian forces were able to strike facilities across the Gulf. More importantly, the attacks demonstrated how difficult it can be to defend energy infrastructure against low-cost drones and missiles.
Traditional air and missile defense systems are expensive and can be overwhelmed through saturation attacks, in which more missiles or drones are launched than the system can intercept. Only a small number need to get through to disable a critical facility.
Potential defenses include physical barriers such as anti-drone nets, although these are ineffective against missiles, as well as fixed jamming systems designed to interfere with drone navigation and guidance.
New pipelines can create new security risks
Oil and gas pipelines are particularly difficult to protect from asymmetric threats because they are fixed and extend across large areas.
They are also expensive and time-consuming to rebuild. Once a pipeline is seriously damaged, restoring it can require major investment and lengthy construction, even when the political will to proceed exists.
Gulf states including the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia and Iraq are developing alternative routes designed to bypass the Strait of Hormuz. Yet several analyses, including one by Reuters, have warned that expanding land-based pipeline networks may simply extend the area exposed to attack and create a broader range of potential targets.
One possible response is to make energy infrastructure more mobile, smaller and easier to replace.
Tatiana Mitrova, a research fellow at Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy, told Axios that energy infrastructure planning now needs to be fundamentally reconsidered. More distributed energy systems could offer greater resilience, even if they involve trade-offs in cost and efficiency.
In response to Russian attacks on its power grid, Ukraine is already relying more heavily on locally available and portable energy sources. Solar power, for example, becomes more resilient as it becomes more decentralized, reducing the risk that a single strike could trigger a widespread blackout.
“For many decades, throughout most of the last century, the prevailing model was based on geographic concentration and economies of scale,” Mitrova said. “Now, however, the larger the target, the greater the potential damage. That gives priority to infrastructure that is more modular, smaller in scale, faster to build, less expensive to develop and easier to relocate.”
Why energy defense strategies must change
A Modern War Institute analysis titled The Drone Revolution That Isn’t found that drones still depend on vast industrial ecosystems, suffer extremely high attrition rates and are already facing a growing counteroffensive based on electronic warfare and jamming systems.
Even so, NATO members have recognized the scale of the threat and announced $40 billion in investments in counter-drone capabilities over the next five years.
The core problem is the asymmetry of the threat. Relatively inexpensive drones can inflict damage on infrastructure worth billions of dollars. Protecting economies and societies therefore requires a fundamental shift in energy security planning.
The MWI analysis points to three main priorities.
Decentralization and microgrids in high-risk areas
In regions exposed to conflict or hybrid threats, centralized energy systems have become a major vulnerability. If a single large facility is disabled, an entire region can lose electricity or fuel supplies.
Distributed energy networks and local microgrids can limit the damage. When one node is attacked, the disruption remains contained and the rest of the system can continue operating, improving national resilience.
Physical protection for assets that cannot be decentralized
Some strategic facilities, including large power plants and major transmission hubs, cannot be divided into smaller units for technical or economic reasons.
These assets require direct physical protection designed to stop drones before they reach critical components.
Possible measures include blast walls that contain shock waves and prevent cascading damage, as well as metal barriers or heavy protective nets around high-voltage transformers to intercept first-person-view drones or munitions before impact.
Another option is to move critical power lines or control centers underground, shielding them from visual reconnaissance and direct aerial attacks.
Closer cooperation between the military and energy industry
Repeated attacks on electricity and fuel systems have shown that energy infrastructure security is a matter of national security.
Energy companies and military authorities must work more closely to integrate active and passive defense systems from the earliest stages of project design. Protecting critical infrastructure can no longer be treated as an additional measure introduced after construction. It must become a core component of energy planning itself.
