192: Are States Losing Their Monopoly on Force?

June 2, 2025

Ukraine’s Operation Spiderweb and the fragmentation of authority in the age of networks.

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For over a century, political scientists have defined the state as the entity that holds “the monopoly on the legitimate use of physical force” — Max Weber’s tidy formulation of state authority. The idea is simple: violence belongs to the state, and through this monopoly, it maintains order, enforces laws, and deters external threats.

But what happens when that monopoly no longer holds? What happens when force becomes cheap, distributed, and deniable?

Ukraine recently launched Operation Spiderweb — one of the most audacious military actions of the war — and exposed the cracks in that monopoly.

The Attack That Shouldn't Have Been Possible

Spiderweb was not a conventional military operation.

There were no fleets of jets, no hypersonic missiles, no billion-dollar platforms.

Instead:

  • 117 small, first-person-view (FPV) drones

  • smuggled into Russia over 18 months

  • concealed inside disguised truck sheds

  • launched from within Russian territory

  • destroying or disabling over 40 Russian military aircraft across five separate airbases — including a third of Russia’s strategic bomber fleet.

It was a surgical strike executed at enormous range, under Russia’s nose, and at a fraction of the cost of conventional warfare.

In effect: Ukraine used the methods of insurgency against an empire.

The historian Charles Tilly famously argued that war made the state, and the state made war. States emerged by organizing large-scale violence better than any rival; their ability to raise armies, levy taxes, and mobilize mass violence was what birthed modern governance.

But Spiderweb shows that war no longer belongs to the state. The tools of organized violence are now accessible at micro scale. A handful of operatives with consumer-grade drones, custom software, and encrypted communications can achieve what once required entire military-industrial complexes.

The state’s historic advantages — scale, capital, centralization — are becoming liabilities. As the tools of force become cheap and decentralized, violence slips beyond the state’s grasp.

The Age of Networks

Sociologist Manuel Castells calls this shift the rise of the network society. In place of centralized hierarchies, we see power distributed through dense, flexible networks that adapt faster than rigid command structures.

Operation Spiderweb is pure network logic:

  • logistics distributed across time and space

  • hidden supply chains

  • flexible coordination

  • precise execution from multiple decentralized nodes

Russia’s response, by contrast, remains deeply hierarchical: lumbering, reactive, slow to adapt. It was not simply outgunned — it was out-networked.

In this sense, Ukraine’s operation wasn’t just an attack on Russian bombers — it was an attack on the very structure of Russian state authority.

But Spiderweb wasn’t just effective — it was theatrical.

As McKenzie Wark and the Situationists might argue, this was not only an act of war, but a carefully staged spectacle of audacity — designed to embarrass Russian security services, humiliate the regime, and demonstrate Ukraine’s creativity in asymmetric warfare.

The fact that drones were launched from inside Russia — reportedly near Russian FSB offices — is not just an operational detail. It’s narrative warfare: a direct insult to the competence of Russian state security.

In the Society of the Spectacle, Guy Debord warned that modern power is exercised not only through control of force, but through control of appearance — through the management of public perception. In the digital age, even war becomes memeable.

Spiderweb is as much about the optics of authority as about the mechanics of force.

Are States Losing Their Monopoly?

The deeper story here isn’t about Ukraine or Russia. It’s about the trajectory of sovereignty itself.

If war made the state, then the transformation of war may be unmaking it.

  • Violence is becoming decentralized.

  • Authority is becoming performative.

  • Legitimacy is increasingly detached from capacity.

We may be witnessing the early stages of a new geopolitical condition: Micro-Sovereign Warfare — where networks of actors, often small and deniable, can achieve strategic outcomes once reserved for great powers.

The state’s monopoly on force was always contingent. Operation Spiderweb suggests that contingency is collapsing.

The spiderweb is already being woven.

The Spiderweb Playbook

Five principles of post-state, networked force projection.

1. Smuggle Capabilities, Not Weapons
Instead of transporting complete weapons systems, distribute modular components that can be assembled or deployed close to the target. What matters is not what you move, but what you’re able to activate locally. This lowers detection risk, increases flexibility, and allows for extended operational buildup.

117 drones smuggled over 18 months, hiding in truck sheds across Russia.

2. Distribute Risk Across Time and Space
Staggered, compartmentalized preparation creates operational resilience. No single point of failure exists, and operational security improves as no actor holds the full picture. Time becomes a tool of camouflage. This is patience weaponized.

Covert logistics quietly unfolded while Russian security services remained unaware.

3. Exploit the Slowness of Hierarchy
Bureaucratic states are slow to detect and slower to react. Networks move at the speed of encrypted communication and small-team autonomy. Hierarchies struggle against actors who don’t need permission to act.

Russian air defenses and security agencies were blind until the drones were already airborne.

4. Turn Operations Into Narratives
Victory isn’t only material — it’s psychological. The spectacle of audacity becomes its own form of power, amplifying tactical success into strategic messaging. The audience is not just the enemy — it’s the world.

Launching drones from under the FSB’s nose signals Russian weakness to domestic and foreign audiences alike.

5. Attack Materiel and Morale Simultaneously
Physical destruction is paired with reputational and institutional damage. Success is measured not only in destroyed hardware but in shaken confidence, fractured legitimacy, and public humiliation.

$7 billion in losses combined with an implicit message: your strategic depth no longer exists.

This is the emerging grammar of micro-sovereign warfare — where authority is contested not through overwhelming force, but through precision, networks, and audacity.