After more than three weeks of war in Iran, the United States has destroyed key areas of Iran’s military, including ballistic missile sites and most of the country’s navy.
One advantage that Iran retains, though, is the Shahed-136. Shahed, a one-way, single-use drone, is small, inexpensive and highly accurate. Iran’s drone strikes have resulted the death of six US service membersdamaged oil and natural gas facilities in United Arab Emirates, Qatarand Saudi Arabiaand decreases rapidly American interceptor reserve.
Michael C. Horowitz is a senior fellow for technology and innovation at the Council on Foreign Relations and a professor at the University of Pennsylvania. He says these drones have introduced a a new era of war: “The way I would think about this is like the introduction of the machine gun in World War I,” he said. Today, It’s Explained co-host Noel King.
Noel talks to Horowitz about what drones can do, how the US can deal with them, and what it means for the future of warfare.
The following is part of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s a lot more in the full podcast, so take a listen Today, It’s Explained wherever you find podcasts, incl Apple Podcasts, Pandoraand Spotify.
The US has done damage to Iran’s missile sites and military bases. But Iran still has cheap and easy-to-assemble drones that pose a real threat on the battlefield. Michael Horowitz, senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, tell us about the drones!
These one-way drones, like the Shahed-136, are primarily used as a substitute for a cruise missile. Iran uses them to do things like target US air defense radars, which are necessary to find other drones and shoot them down. Iran uses them to target government buildings like embassies. Iran uses them to target critical infrastructure that Middle Eastern countries use for oil and gas.
What worries someone like me is that US aircraft carriers are generally very well protected. A drone in and of itself could never take down an American airliner. They are very small. But most of them can. And the real danger here is that let’s say you didn’t expel one person, not a hundred, but 500 on an American plane cargo at once. Even if the US could drop 450 of them, that’s still a lot going through.
The scale of these one-way drones that you can launch creates a potential capability to not only target the kinds of infrastructure and things that we see Iran doing, but important military targets as well, including our ships.
Iran may not have an unlimited number of these drones. How many do they really have on hand?
We don’t really know how much Iran has on hand, but we do know that they have thousands. We also know, for example, that Russia is capable of releasing a thousand or more every few weeks of their Shahed-136 strikes.
Iran is likely capable of doing something in that range as well. The US and Israel are obviously focused on their manufacturing capabilities, but Iran has many underground factories, and because you can use commercial factories to build these systems, you can do it almost anywhere.
That’s one of the reasons that made me say so much that the United States needs to invest more in this capability. And why I was pleased, frankly, in the context of this conflict, regardless of what one thinks about the conflict itself, to see America use its first mass system, the LUCAS drone, against Iran.
The US military ranks based on quality over quantity. It depends on having a small number of beautiful, expensive, hard-to-produce systems that are the best in the world, but they were designed to be great products. They were not designed for mass production. The problem is that that is no longer enough.
In a world where you needed to have such expensive and fancy systems to do things like accurately fire weapons at your enemies, then that was a unique advantage for the US military. But because everyone – small states and militant groups – can launch more precise attacks on many different targets, it means that having those kinds of systems is not enough for the United States.
If Iran launches a $35,000 Shahed-136 fighter jet at the United States, and the United States shoots it down with a weapon that costs anywhere between $1 million per bullet and $4 million per bullet, you don’t need to be a defense planner to understand that that cost trajectory is in the wrong direction.
How did Iran get enough weapons?
Necessity is the mother of invention. A country like Iran has felt strong security threats in the region. In part that’s because of Iran’s ideology itself: If you’re going to go around chanting “death to America,” then you need to be ready for America and the region to have questions.
Iran fought a war against Iraq in the 1980s. Iran has been in constant conflict with various neighbors over the years. And so Iran developed a huge military arsenal. It’s nowhere near as good as the United States or Israel, but Iran, in a way because they had to, was a pioneer in developing these low-cost, long-range weapons that they partnered with Russia. And Russia spent hundreds of thousands against the Ukrainians.
Is there a way for the US to defend itself against these Iranian drones without spending that much money?
America has options. It will just take time to get there.
Another country that must have been the mother of invention has been Ukraine, facing Russian invaders now for four years. And because Ukraine is the victim of dozens to hundreds of launches of these Shahds almost every day, Ukraine has introduced low-cost air defense systems using low-cost drones, for example, to take out those $35,000 drones, or even in some cases using old World War II guns.
If a cheap drone can outrun a multi-billion dollar airliner, does the US need to start rethinking the way it fights wars?
One hundred percent. A plan to rely solely on these fancy, expensive, and difficult-to-produce weapons will no longer be sufficient for the United States. That could be true in a war against advanced adversaries that the United States might face like China or Russia.
What the US needs to pursue is what is called a high/low power mix. Some of those advanced systems like the Tomahawk missiles and the F-35s, things that the United States has worked on for a generation, but also the new wave of these low-cost systems that need to be addressed are not the kind of thing that you can hold for 50 years, but much cheaper, can be used, and improved over and over again.
What do you think war looks like a generation from now?
The nature of war is always changing. The way I would think about this is similar to the introduction of guns on a large scale in the First World War. It completely changed the character of war.
The machine gun then became a ubiquitous weapon. Everyone had machine guns. And then in World War II it was a tank. And everywhere since then, there have been tanks.
What we are seeing now between the war between Russia and Ukraine and this war with Iran are these one-way attack drones. Not that they are the only items the military needs, but these will now be part of the arsenal moving forward. And if you don’t have it, and if you can’t defend against them, you’re going to be in trouble.
