> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.instituteforstrategicintelligence.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # HOW MUCH DAMAGE COULD A FEW CHEAP DRONES DO TO AMERICA'S GASOLINE SUPPLY? - URL: https://www.instituteforstrategicintelligence.com/how-much-damage-could-a-few-cheap-drones-do-to-americas-gasoline-supply/ - Published: 2026-08-24T04:16:00.000Z - Updated: 2026-08-30T04:17:54.000Z - Description: America’s gasoline supply depends on a relatively small number of enormous refineries. What happens when cheap autonomous weapons make critical infrastructure increasingly inexpensive to attack? - Author: Jerry Sutter **STRATEGIC INTELLIGENCE** **ASYMMETRIC WARFARE | HOMELAND VULNERABILITY | CASE STUDY 01** **America's gasoline supply depends on a relatively small number of enormous refineries. They process hundreds of thousands of barrels of oil every day—and much of America's refining infrastructure was built in an era when geography provided substantial protection from military attack.** **Ukraine and the Middle East are providing the warning.** **The question is whether America is paying attention.** --- ## THE ECONOMICS OF ATTACK HAVE CHANGED For most of modern American history, the continental United States enjoyed an extraordinary strategic advantage. **Geography.** Two enormous oceans and friendly neighbors made direct conventional attack on American industrial infrastructure extraordinarily difficult. That advantage helped shape the infrastructure we built. Refineries. Power plants. Electrical systems. Pipelines. Ports. Communications networks. Water systems. Transportation networks. These systems were designed primarily around industrial safety, reliability, weather, accidents, natural disasters and conventional security threats. They were not designed for a world in which relatively inexpensive unmanned aircraft could deliver increasingly precise attacks over enormous distances. That world is arriving. The wars in Ukraine and the Middle East have demonstrated something with implications extending far beyond the battlefields where these weapons are currently being used: **Precision attack is becoming cheaper and increasingly accessible.** The United States is investing heavily in sophisticated counter-drone systems, sensors, electronic warfare, interceptors, directed-energy weapons and broader homeland defenses. Some of those investments are necessary. But before America spends enormous sums trying to destroy every inexpensive weapon approaching a target, there is another question worth asking: > **How much damage could we prevent simply by making the target harder to damage?** America's gasoline refining system is an excellent place to begin. --- ## AMERICA'S REFINING SYSTEM IS MORE CONCENTRATED THAN IT LOOKS As of January 1, 2026, the United States had **130 operable petroleum refineries** with approximately **18.2 million barrels per day of operable atmospheric crude-oil distillation capacity**, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. That sounds like a highly distributed system. Look closer. America's **10 largest refineries alone account for approximately 5.26 million barrels per day of capacity—about 29% of total U.S. refining capacity.** Six of those 10 are in Texas or Louisiana. And more than half of U.S. refinery capacity has historically been concentrated along the Gulf Coast. This does **not** mean that losing one refinery would cripple America's gasoline supply. It would not. The United States possesses an enormous and sophisticated petroleum industry. Inventories, pipelines, imports, alternative refineries and adjustments elsewhere in the system provide resilience. But concentration matters. And we already know what happens when significant refining capacity suddenly becomes unavailable. --- ## HURRICANE HARVEY ALREADY RAN THE EXPERIMENT We do not have to speculate about the economic consequences of refinery disruptions. Weather has repeatedly demonstrated them. When Hurricane Harvey struck the Gulf Coast in 2017, gross refinery inputs in the region fell by approximately **3.2 million barrels per day in a single week—a 34% decline.** Regional refinery utilization fell from **96% to 63%.** Gasoline prices rose. The Energy Information Administration concluded that Harvey caused substantial disruptions to petroleum supply chains and increased petroleum-product prices. The lesson is straightforward: > **Remove enough refining capacity—even temporarily—and the consequences can move rapidly through America's fuel-distribution system and ultimately reach the consumer.** Harvey was a natural disaster. A deliberate attack would obviously be very different. But unavailable refining capacity remains unavailable refining capacity. The economic system ultimately responds to the loss of production—not to what caused it. --- ## THE MIDDLE EAST PROVIDED ANOTHER WARNING On September 14, 2019, attacks struck Saudi Arabia's Abqaiq processing facility and Khurais oil field. The result was extraordinary. Saudi Aramco reported that approximately **5.7 million barrels per day of crude production were suspended**—a massive disruption to one of the world's most important petroleum systems. Saudi Arabia recovered remarkably quickly. That matters. Because the lesson is not simply that energy infrastructure can be attacked. It is that **resilience, redundancy, emergency response and repair speed can be as strategically important as interception.** The objective of infrastructure defense does not necessarily have to be: **Nothing gets through.** That may eventually become economically or technically unrealistic. Another objective is: **Whatever gets through cannot create a strategically significant disruption.** That is a very different way of thinking about defense. --- ## UKRAINE IS RUNNING THE EXPERIMENT AT SCALE Russia provides an even more revealing case study. Ukraine has repeatedly used long-range unmanned systems against Russian energy infrastructure. By the spring of 2024, repeated attacks had disrupted a significant share of Russian refining capacity. A NATO official estimated in April of that year that Ukrainian strikes may have affected more than **15% of Russian refining capacity.** Russia repaired facilities. Operations resumed. Then attacks continued. And the experiment is still running. By August 2026, gasoline shortages had spread across parts of Russia. Fuel stations imposed sales limits. The Russian government restricted fuel exports, relaxed some fuel-quality requirements and turned to imports to stabilize domestic supplies. Reuters reported that Ukrainian attacks on Russian refineries, combined with seasonal demand, were contributing to the shortages. That gives us something much more valuable than a single dramatic incident. We are watching the entire cycle: **ATTACK → DISRUPTION → REPAIR → ADAPTATION → REPEATED ATTACK → ECONOMIC CONSEQUENCE** There is another lesson. **Distance is becoming less reassuring.** Long-range unmanned systems are steadily eroding the protection once provided by geography. That should matter to the United States. --- ## AMERICA HAS A PECULIAR DEFENSIVE PROBLEM Owning critical infrastructure does not automatically give its operator the same authority to defeat a threatening drone that the military possesses. Counter-drone activity intersects with aviation law, communications law, public safety and federal authority. Federal guidance has warned that disrupting, disabling or taking control of an unmanned aircraft can violate federal law unless specifically authorized. That creates an unusual situation. Some of the organizations responsible for operating infrastructure essential to the American economy may have considerably greater freedom to **harden the target** than to **disable the aircraft approaching it.** The federal government recognizes the broader problem. The Federal Aviation Administration is developing a process under which eligible critical-infrastructure facilities can request restrictions on drone operations near their sites. But the FAA itself makes an important distinction: A flight restriction is **not a physical or electronic barrier.** A rule can prohibit a drone from entering an area. A hostile actor, by definition, may not care about the rule. That brings us to the central question. --- ## WHAT IF WE ARE THINKING ABOUT THE PROBLEM BACKWARDS? The United States is extraordinarily good at building sophisticated weapons. That strength can shape how we define problems. A drone appears. How do we detect it? How do we track it? How do we jam it? How do we intercept it? How do we destroy it? Those are legitimate questions. But there is another one: # **WHAT IF THE CHEAPEST WAY TO DEFEAT A CHEAP WEAPON ISN'T ANOTHER WEAPON?** Military fortification is ancient. Walls. Earthworks. Bunkers. Dispersion. Camouflage. Redundancy. Compartmentalization. Barriers. Rapid repair. The technologies change. The principle does not. **Make the attacker's job harder.** For modern industrial infrastructure, passive defense can take many forms: physical protection, separation, redundancy, improved fire protection, rapid isolation of damaged systems, spare equipment, faster repair capability and other forms of facility-specific hardening. Simple physical barriers or overhead protection may be useful in some circumstances and useless in others. We should find out which is which. This research does **not** claim that netting, barriers or any other single inexpensive measure can protect an oil refinery from every conceivable drone attack. They cannot. Nor is passive protection a substitute for effective counter-drone technology. The question is narrower—and potentially much more important: > **Can inexpensive protection force an attacker to use more weapons, more expensive weapons, greater precision, greater complexity or repeated attacks to achieve the same result?** If the answer is yes, the economics of defense begin to change. --- ## THE OBJECTIVE IS NOT INVULNERABILITY America does not need to make every refinery impossible to attack. That standard is unrealistic. A more practical objective is to make critical infrastructure **difficult to disable economically.** If an attacker must expend substantially more money, weapons, planning and operational risk to produce the same amount of disruption, the facility has not become invulnerable. But something important has happened. **The attacker's return on investment has deteriorated.** That matters enormously in asymmetric warfare. The fundamental attraction of inexpensive precision weapons is the possibility of exchanging a relatively cheap system for an extraordinarily expensive consequence. Passive hardening attempts to reverse that equation. **Do not merely increase the cost of the weapon.** **Decrease the value of hitting the target.** --- ## RESILIENCE MAY MATTER AS MUCH AS PROTECTION Russia's experience reinforces another lesson. Facilities can be repaired. Operations can be restored. Production can sometimes be shifted. Inventories can absorb temporary disruptions. The ability to recover quickly reduces the strategic value of attack. That means infrastructure defense should be measured by more than interception rates. We should also be asking: **How much production can an incident remove?** **How quickly can operations be restored?** **How much redundancy exists?** **How effectively can damage be contained?** **How quickly can critical equipment be replaced?** And perhaps most importantly: > **How much economic disruption can an attacker purchase for every dollar spent?** Those questions move the conversation away from **weapon versus weapon** and toward **system versus attacker.** That is where America may possess enormous opportunities for relatively inexpensive improvement. --- ## THIS IS NOT JUST ABOUT REFINERIES Gasoline refining is Case Study 01 because the consequences are easy to understand. Americans see gasoline prices every day. But the underlying strategic problem is much larger. America's electrical grid, ports, pipelines, communications networks, water systems, transportation infrastructure, industrial facilities and rapidly expanding data-center infrastructure were overwhelmingly designed during a period when hostile precision attack against the American homeland was extraordinarily difficult. That assumption deserves reexamination. Cheap drones are only part of the problem. Autonomy is improving. Navigation is improving. Artificial intelligence is improving. Manufacturing costs are falling. Ranges are increasing. The trajectory is difficult to miss: > **THE COST OF PRECISION ATTACK IS FALLING.** That creates a national-security problem if the cost of defending the things being attacked does not fall with it. --- ## THE QUESTION AMERICA SHOULD BE ASKING The United States should continue developing sophisticated counter-drone systems. It should improve detection. It should clarify legal authorities. It should strengthen intelligence and law enforcement. It should develop better electronic warfare and interception technologies. But those efforts should be accompanied by a much simpler question. Before spending enormous sums attempting to destroy every inexpensive weapon approaching American infrastructure: # **HOW CHEAPLY CAN WE MAKE THE WEAPON INEFFECTIVE?** Sometimes the answer will be interception. Sometimes it may be a barrier. Sometimes redundancy. Sometimes separation. Sometimes faster repair. Sometimes the answer may be surprisingly inexpensive. And sometimes there may be no cheap answer at all. **We should find out.** Because the strategic equation has changed. America built much of its critical infrastructure for an era when geography provided protection. **Cheap precision weapons are eroding that protection.** The United States cannot assume that because its infrastructure was difficult to attack yesterday, it will remain difficult to attack tomorrow. The drone wars are providing the warning. # **THE QUESTION IS WHETHER AMERICA WILL LEARN FROM THEM BEFORE THE LESSON ARRIVES HERE.** --- ## SOURCES **U.S. Energy Information Administration** *Refinery Capacity Report — Data as of January 1, 2026* **U.S. Energy Information Administration** *Refining crude oil — refinery rankings — As of January 1, 2026* **U.S. Energy Information Administration** *Hurricane Harvey caused U.S. Gulf Coast refinery runs to drop, gasoline prices to rise* — September 11, 2017 **Saudi Aramco** *Incidents at Abqaiq and Khurais* — September 2019 **Reuters** Reporting on Ukrainian attacks against Russian refining infrastructure and refinery-capacity disruptions — 2024 **Reuters** *Moscow's fuel stations limit sales amid shortages* — August 19, 2026 **U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency** *Protecting Against the Threat of Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS)* **Federal Aviation Administration** *Restricting Drones Near Critical Infrastructure Sites* — 2026 --- *Strategic Intelligence — Homeland Vulnerability examines how inexpensive precision weapons are changing the economics of attacking and defending America's critical infrastructure.*