As recently on 18 June 2026, Ukraine launched hundreds of LMs at over a dozen regions, striking the Gazprom Neft Moscow Oil Refinery in the Kapotnya district — among Russia’s largest refineries and only a little over 14 km from the Kremlin, accounting for over a third of the capital region’s fuel market.
How one-way attack and loitering munitions removed the platform bottleneck
Before the spread of one-way attack (OWA) drones and loitering munitions (LMs), long-range precision strike meant mobilizing multi-role fighters or dedicated launch platforms to carry guided munitions such as the Joint Direct Attack Munition (JDAM). That model required acquiring, maintaining and risking high-cost platforms: lose the aircraft and you lose the strike capacity. Defenders could respond by targeting the platform itself, and air-defence scale could be matched against the attacker’s available platforms — the analysis even frames the calculus as “1,000 surface-to-air missiles (SAM) against a fleet of 1,000 fighter aircraft.”
OWAs/LMs removed many of those layers of friction. The munition itself now performs the long-range flight, often launching independently with only a rocket-assisted take-off (RATO) booster or a runway. Range can run from roughly 50 km to more than 1,000 km, and the marginal cost of a guided strike is now driven down to the cost of the munition rather than the cost of a multimillion- or tens-of-millions-dollar launch platform.
The tailless delta as a natural long-range strike option
Across examples from the Iranian Shahed-series to the Russian Geran-2, to LUCAS, China’s Sunflower-200, and Pakistan’s Mudamir-LR/MR and HighMark-25, the tailless delta has emerged as the preferred long-range OWA/LM design. Mark Voskuijl’s 2021 survey of 52 drones — part of the Defence Technology work cited in the record — concluded that the tailless delta offers several practical advantages for long-range missions: a large internal volume for fuel enabled by greater wing area, tolerance for high terminal-dive airspeeds, and a shallow lift-curve slope that yields insensitivity and resilience to gusts.
Those aerodynamic and packaging characteristics help explain why a common visual and structural pattern has become routine for long-range strike munitions in recent conflicts.
Two converging long-range architectures: piston-powered and jet-powered deltas
Within the tailless-delta family, design choices are converging on two distinct long-range flavors. One track favors piston-powered delta designs that minimize cost while preserving range — a low-cost, long-endurance strike option. The other uses jet-powered delta designs where greater speed and long-range are the primary objectives. Both approaches aim to simplify components and production to enable scale: cheaper units deployed in larger numbers rather than expensive, scarce platforms.
Tactical LMs remain diverse: anti-armor, short-range loiter-and-strike, anti-infantry
By contrast, the so-called tactical LM space has not collapsed into a single architectural mold. For anti-armour operations, short-range loiter-and-strike missions and anti-infantry roles, there is significant design variety and configuration options. The analysis stresses that tactical requirements — agility, loiter time over a battlefield, warhead type, or specific guidance modes — drive a diversified set of approaches rather than a single convergent form.
What this means for militaries, procurement planners, and infrastructure operators
- Militaries and procurement planners: Expect the balance to shift toward fielding larger numbers of relatively low-cost munitions. The long-range strike calculus now rewards cheaper, mass-produced tailless-delta designs (both piston- and jet-powered) rather than relying solely on expensive aircraft or specialized launchers.
- Policymakers and regulators: The diffusion of long-range strike capability across lower-cost munitions changes strategic thresholds and complicates defence planning. As the analysis notes, OWAs/LMs “empower and threaten large and small powers alike,” underlining the policy challenge of controlling or mitigating proliferation.
- Infrastructure operators and civilians: High-value fixed infrastructure — refineries, power stations, transport hubs — can be threatened at longer ranges and with larger salvoes, as the 18 June 2026 attack on the Kapotnya refinery illustrates. Proximity to political centers does not alone guarantee insulation from long-range LM strikes.
The latest phase of warfighting driven by OWAs and LMs is simple in concept and consequential in practice: by stripping the expensive platform from the strike equation, designers and operators can scale precision effects through cheaper airframes. That dynamic explains why long-range designs have converged on tailless deltas and why tactical roles remain experimentally diverse — and it leaves defenders facing a recalibrated requirement to match scalable munitions rather than scarce platforms.
