As the U.S. and its allies face Iran’s response to President Donald Trump’s renewed bombardment of the Middle East, the allied air forces must find a solution to a growing problem: drones.
Cheap and simple to produce, Iran’s Shahed drones are unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) used to overwhelm air defenses in conjunction with other missiles. They have been used to successfully bombard a U.S. embassy, a radar system, an airport and a high-rise, videos on social media show. The issue, experts say, is the long-term ability to intercept them.
“The threat from one-way attack UAVs has remained persistent,” Gen. Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said at a briefing Monday. “Our systems have proven effective in countering these platforms, engaging targets rapidly.”
The U.S. has not released data on the munitions it faced and shot down. Information from the United Arab Emirates’ Defense Ministry shows that Iran has launched hundreds of Shahed drones at the Gulf state, of which just over 90% have been intercepted.
Those interceptions have come at a high cost. The U.S. and its allies generally deploy aircraft or the Patriot air defense system to protect from bombardment, but while the price of one Shahed is estimated to be $30,000 to $50,000, one interceptor can cost 10 times that or more while exhausting already dwindling stockpiles.
“If this goes on longer, they’re probably going to have to find more sustainable ways of doing this,” said Kelly Grieco, a senior fellow at the Stimson Center, a Washington think tank.
Grieco calculated that for every $1 Iran spent manufacturing a Shahed drone, it costs the UAE about $20 to $28 to intercept it, according to the available data.
“A war like this is literally what Iran built them for,” said Kyle Glen, an investigator with the London-based nonprofit Center for Information Resilience.
The U.S. and Israel unloaded a wave of fire on Iran since the military operation began overnight Friday, targeting its naval bases and ballistic missile storage sites to limit its capacity for response. Iran retaliated by launching hundreds of drones and missiles at U.S. bases, airports and energy infrastructure, apparently in an attempt to inflict both a political and an economic cost on the U.S. and its allies.
Iran has always counted on facing a superior military, Glen said. That has pushed it to explore asymmetric warfare, in which smaller or technologically inferior forces look for ways to frustrate or exhaust the enemy.
Drones are a prime example. The Shahed can be made cheaply with dual-use components and launched off the back of a truck. Unlike missiles, which require vast infrastructure, the drones can be assembled covertly.
Russia saw the benefits of the Shahed drones early. In November 2022, it purchased the technology and 6,000 units for $1.75 billion from Iran, according to a report by C4ADS, a Washington-based nonprofit global security organization.
“Russia has put a hell of a lot more development into these weapons than Iran has in recent years,” Glen said.
The Russians have launched 57,000 such drones at Ukrainian cities and infrastructure so far, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said in a video address Saturday. Their telltale buzz has become so ubiquitous in the Ukrainian skies that they have become colloquially known as “mopeds.”
Ukraine has built out a multipronged system involving mobile groups, interceptor drones and other missiles to defend itself against that type of weapon, which Russia has continued to upgrade.
“Thanks to the fact that the Shahed has passed its baptism by fire in Ukraine, they managed to substantially improve it, modernize it, install additional communication channels, protection from electronic warfare systems — that is, test this weapon in battle,” said Col. Yuri Ihnat, a spokesman for the Ukrainian air force.
Despite Ukraine’s unique experience, partners have not directly requested help countering Shaheds, Zelenskyy said in a voice memo responding to reporter questions.
“Regarding our drone and air operators, we have very experienced personnel,” he said. “We are ready to share this knowledge.”
The use of expensive and difficult-to-manufacture methods to knock down such an unsophisticated weapon points to the apparent failure of the U.S. to learn the lessons from Ukraine, said George Barros, a senior analyst at the Institute for the Study of War think tank.
“None of these things are novel techniques,” Barros said.
It puts the U.S. in a vulnerable position as the number of global conflicts grows and allies clamor for Patriot interceptors, of which the U.S. produces only about 600 annually, Barros said.
Grieco of the Stimson Center said: “For 30 years, the United States and other Western air forces had easily gained air superiority — if not air supremacy — over enemy battlefields and therefore neglected investing in air and missile defense capabilities. And what we have found is that it’s really hard to ramp up this production.”
U.S. adversaries, meanwhile, grow their drone production. Even if the majority of drones and missiles are intercepted, the ones that puncture defenses can cause deadly damage. The Iranians can choose to engage in a war of attrition, as the Russians have, firing their cheap munition for as long as they can while watching U.S. defensive stockpiles draw down.
Other countries will take note. Last year, Ukrainian intelligence services warned that North Korea may have received Shahed drone technology from Russia. Iran also provided the weapon to the Houthis in Yemen and the Islamic Resistance in Iraq, according to the Open Source Munitions Portal, a weapons tracking project. Seeing their effectiveness, other cash-strapped regimes may be inspired to create their own versions.
“Everything points to this being a grave threat to the world, to the West, to stability,” said Omar Al-Ghusbi, an analyst at C4ADS and a co-author of the Shahed report. “I don’t see it going away anytime soon.”
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