The number of former Soviet ammunition dumps that have gone critical over the years would lead one to almost suspect that it was a planned methodology of theirs for keeping their ammunition stocks up to date; let the old stuff go critical, blow up, and then you don’t have to worry about demilitarizing it or maintaining it. If you ever get a chance to talk to a Western EOD tech who has ever had to work with Soviet munitions, most of them will simply just shudder a little, and ask you not to remind them about the experiences they had with them. Safety features were (and, to a limited degree, still are) a secondary issue for the Soviets and Russians. Where a Western-designed and manufactured munition will be made to default to “not gonna work” when something goes wrong, a Soviet munition is gonna be designed to function no matter what, even if it’s still in the barrel of the weapon. Don’t even ask about things like the AGS-17 30mm grenades… Those bastards have basically no safety features, especially in the older versions. Where the US equivalent has a complex fuse with centrifugal features that require it to rotate a certain number of times under X-acceleration, the Soviet munition has basically got a very simple setback fuse.

The wonder isn’t that Soviet ammo dumps go up with a bang occasionally, the wonder is that they don’t do it more often.

And, as for the drone issue? Stay tuned; you’re going to see an entire ecological system of drone and counter-drone technologies grow up, where there are drones doing damage to infrastructure and drones that hunt drones meant to do damage to infrastructure, with other hunter-killer drones going after those to enable the ones seeking to damage infrastructure.

A lot of our facilities and infrastructure will need to be re-designed and rebuilt, in order to make them more survivable. Imagine what some of those carbon-fiber bombs that we used to take out the Iraqi electrical grid could do to Russia, should they really piss us off. Putin would do well to consider just how poorly Russia is prepared to play this game–Sure, blowing up Ukrainian ammo dumps is child’s play, but his aren’t exactly bastions of security and safety, either. And, once the game is opened up, well… Guess where that rabbit hole leads? People in glass houses with poorly designed munitions stored out in the open should not start throwing drones around haphazardly. Russia will regret this, because the game is played tit-for-tat, and they’re not any better prepared to deal with the consequences than the Ukrainians.

Once — or, rather “if” — someone with a brain figures out this is a viable method of cheap, semi-stealth attack, defeating it won’t be that hard.

Steeply pitched roofs constructed of noncombustible material (e.g., metal) won’t retain thermal weapons, allowing them to roll off onto the ground; separate, smaller, distributed buildings for munitions storage — what used to be common for powder magazines way back when — each with a foot-deep broad sand border around the perimeter, both allow the eggs to be in multiple, separate baskets, and prevent the thermal devices that roll off roofs from continuing to roll toward other buildings.

Protecting highly combustible liquids will be somewhat more difficult, but achievable.

Rocket surgery it ain’t; attention to detail and purpose, it is.