Name: How Iran’s Cheap Suicide Drones are Threatening the U.S. and its Allies Around the World
Uploaded: 2024-08-28T04:01:00Z
Duration: 7 min 22 s
Description: Iran’s Shahed drones have disrupted Red Sea shipping, threatened U.S. troops in the Middle East, and caused chaos in Ukraine. These cost-effective, precise suicide drones mark a major shift in drone warfare.

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Iran’s Shahed drones have disrupted Red Sea shipping, threatened U.S. troops in the Middle East, and caused chaos in Ukraine. These cost-effective, precise suicide drones mark a major shift in drone warfare. Photo Illustration: Getty Images

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Iran’s Shahed drones have disrupted Red Sea shipping, threatened U.S. troops in the Middle East, and caused chaos in Ukraine. These cost-effective, precise suicide drones mark a major shift in drone warfare.

How Iran’s Cheap Suicide Drones are Threatening the U.S. and its Allies Around the World 

Narrator: This is an Iranian-made Shahed drone. These suicide drones are cheap, precise, and hard to shoot down. Unlike traditional reusable drones, these are designed for one-time precision strikes. In just the past year, Shahed drones hit commercial ships in the Red Sea, threatened the lives of U.S. troops in the Middle East, and wreaked havoc in Ukraine. And Iran's willingness to share them with its allies poses an increasing threat to the U.S. and its global partners. The Iranian Shahed head is a family of Kamikaze drones that self-destruct when they reach their target. The family is made up of three types of drones. The first edition, 131, which is the smallest and lightest, the newest, 238, which uses jet power and is believed by experts to be the most expensive, and the most commonly used, 136. The Shahed-136 is 11.5 feet long, weighs 441 pounds, and is made outta relatively cheap materials.

The really comparative advantage of these drones is that it uses commercial parts. It's not that sophisticated. The engine itself is just a regular four-piston engine. The propeller isn't anything fancy. The airframe itself is maybe some carbon fiber to make sure that it doesn't weigh too much. But overall, it's fairly cheap to produce.

Narrator: The drone has a Delta wing configuration and uses a light frame to carry over 100 pounds of explosives. Iran claims it can reach pre-programmed targets up to 1,500 miles away. They're usually used in a salvo launch. That's when multiple weapons are fired simultaneously to overwhelm the enemy's defenses. They're deployed from a truck and they're initially boosted by a rocket, but shortly after, a twin blade propeller and a smaller piston engine take over. The piston engine makes the drone relatively slow-moving and gives it a loud lawnmower sound. The drones fly at low altitudes, making them harder to detect because air defenses tend to be aimed at higher altitude threats, but they can be vulnerable to simpler defenses like anti-air guns. Shahed drones are also quite small and harder to detect with radars compared to their larger counterparts, which fly at higher altitudes. The Shahed-136 has relatively low production cost of around $50,000 has meant that Iran can produce a lot of these.

Iran doesn't have the resources to what we in the military say, "Like gold-plate their stuff." They can't make everything multi-mission and beautiful and exquisite. They have limited resources. They have to use those resources in ways that fulfill their objectives, and so they're able to scrap all these pieces and parts and put them together. And sometimes it works. And a lot of times it doesn't, but in the case of the Shahed drone family, it's been pretty effective.

Narrator: Take the U.S. Reaper drone, for example. When it's loaded to its maximum capacity, it's over 20 times the weight and double the speed of the Shahed-136. Its purpose is not only to strike a target, but to assist in intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance, and combat search and rescue, and it can be used numerous times. But at around $30 million a piece, it costs much more than the Shahed drone. The primary advantage of the Shah-136 is low cost is the ability to keep producing and deploying them on mass without breaking the bank.

Shaan: In salvo launches, you're launching a bunch of missiles, rockets, drones at the same time, hoping that they will penetrate defenses because there's just so many that you have to counter.

Narrator: Still, the Shahed-136 has its drawbacks.

They're not good at not getting shot down. They operate in this space between regular drones and cruise missiles, and so they do have deficiencies operating in that middle space. They're not this golden child that works for every purpose. They're relatively slow. They are very loud, so they can be detected early. So in terms of using a few of these at a time, that's not an option for the attacker.

Narrator: But the Shahed drones have been a critical part of Iran's strategy of proxy warfare. It has shared these drones with militant groups in other countries as a way to challenge its rivals without directly being involved in a battle.

The Shahed drone has made proxies more capable. Iran relies on its proxies for its own security and for its own regional interests. It has historically provided weaponry so that they can remain strong, so that they can remain operating in the region. And so drones are just another means to do so. And now we're seeing it, especially their use by Russia against Ukraine.

Narrator: In 2022, Iranian officials agreed to transfer drone designs and key components to Russia. This enabled Russian forces to create their own new and improved version of the Shahed-136, overwhelming Ukrainian defenses and targeting civilian infrastructure.

Russia has specifically been using these drones in larger salvos against Ukraine, particularly striking against civilian infrastructure. And here, we're talking about oil facilities, electric facilities, the grids.

Narrator: Moscow plans to manufacture 6,000 drone units based on the Iranian Shahed-136 by 2025. These drones are expected to feature improvements such as active-seeking and enhanced resistance against GPS jamming, which will enable greater precision.

Iran has directly sold licensing and training and basically the know-how involved in developing the Shahed drone to Russia. So now Russia is developing an industrial capacity to produce these drones on its own.

Narrator: But in Ukraine, outdated anti-aircraft guns are proving surprisingly effective in defense.

They're old, but they work. Ukrainian military officers and officials, they know how to use them, they know how to get on these guns and shoot drones down. But again, it's hard to know when these attacks are coming and it's hard to shoot down everything when it's coming in large numbers.

Narrator: But defense mechanisms against these drones are continually evolving.

You need sensors that can actually detect and track them and identify whether they actually are a threat, and you need interceptors that are capable of taking them down safely.

Narrator: So countries are investing more money in counter drone technologies and defense measures.

We're seeing the United States invest in a variety of means of missiles, of guns, of counter drone drones, to all of these things to counter this small drone threat. The problem is that we don't have a lot of them today, and we also need to distribute them across areas of interest in which adversaries are using these small drones.

Narrator: But once those defenses are honed.

I think we'll see fewer successes of the Shahed and it's family of of variants. People think that they're invulnerable, but they are not. You can take these drones down. It is just a matter of building up those defenses and spreading that capacity to people who need it.

Narrator: Still. Drone warfare is set to evolve rapidly, with faster jet-powered models like the Shahed-238, creating a diverse and increasingly tough threat.