For most of its modern history, Australian security planning has been able to treat geography as an asset. The moat is real. An adversary wanting to reach Australian territory, forces or infrastructure by conventional means needs substantial reach, considerable expense, and a willingness to be detected a long way out. That calculation has shaped Australian defence thinking for a century, and against the threats it was built for, it still holds.
Small drones are one of the few threat categories that does not respect it.
The reason is simple enough to state in a sentence. The point of employment has to be near the target, not near the sponsor. A first-person-view quadcopter does not need to cross an ocean. It needs to get within a few kilometres of the thing it is aimed at, which means the relevant distance is not the one between Australia and anyone else. It is the distance between the fence line and the nearest public road.
Ukraine demonstrated the principle at scale on 1 June 2025. In the operation known as Spiderweb, the Security Service of Ukraine concealed over a hundred short-range drones in compartments built into cargo trucks, had them driven deep inside Russia by hauliers who did not know what they were carrying, and released them from positions immediately outside four air bases. One of those bases sits more than four thousand kilometres from Ukrainian territory. Damage assessments vary, and the Ukrainian claim of forty-one aircraft hit is higher than allied assessments support, but the count of destroyed strategic bombers is in double figures on every serious estimate. Those aircraft were not reached by projecting force across four thousand kilometres. They were reached by driving a truck to a layby.
Australia's geography does nothing to prevent that. Whatever distance separates us from a potential sponsor, it does not separate a site from the road outside it.
There is a second-order effect, and it runs in the opposite direction to the one Australian planning assumes. Remoteness, which is protective against conventional threats, is actively unhelpful against this one. Writing in ASPI's The Strategist, DroneShield chief executive Oleg Vornik has argued that northern Australian installations are more exposed for the straightforward reason that remoteness means fewer people are present to notice anything. The same logic applies well beyond the defence estate. A remote mine site, a pipeline pumping station, a cable landing station, an unstaffed substation: these are assets whose isolation has historically been treated as a form of security, and against an aerial threat that isolation is closer to a liability. Nobody is looking, and nobody is nearby if something is seen.
It would be easy to dismiss all of this as a wartime problem. Australia is not at war, and the Spiderweb example comes from one. The difficulty with that dismissal is that the peacetime record now runs against it.
In December 2018 reported drone sightings closed London Gatwick for around thirty hours in the busiest travel week of the year, at a cost to the airport and its airlines of roughly £50 million. No drone was ever recovered. From September 2025, a wave of sightings closed airports and overflew military bases and nuclear facilities across at least five European countries, and produced the first instance on record of a NATO military opening fire on a drone over its own territory. No operator was publicly identified in any of it.
None of those countries was at war either.
Australia now has its own entries in that record. Between 11 and 13 July 2026 the Department of Defence confirmed multiple uncrewed aircraft in restricted airspace over RAAF Base Williamtown, home to the F-35A fleet, and referred the matter to the New South Wales Police Counter-UAS Unit. The investigation was described as complete in August. Days later, police confirmed a second incursion into the same restricted airspace. No arrests, no charges, and no identification in either episode.
That sequence is the point rather than either incident on its own. It happened at a base with more counter-drone authority and capability behind it than any private Australian operator will ever have.
The practical conclusion is not that Australia is uniquely exposed. It is that one of the assumptions doing the most quiet work in Australian security planning does not apply here, and should be taken out of the calculation rather than left in it unexamined. A site's exposure to this threat is a function of what is within a few kilometres of it, what can be seen from the air, and who is present to notice. Distance from anywhere else does not enter into it.
This argument is developed at sections 3.3 and 7.1 of the white paper Distance Is Not a Defence: Australia's Vulnerability to Small Drones, available in full on this site. Every claim in the paper carries a link to its source.