Iran is not winning the war that the United States and Israel are waging against it. But the way it is responding militarily may be changing the rules of how wars are fought, and Ukraine could have the answers the United States and its allies will need to respond.
Since the war began, Tehran has departed from its usual closely calibrated tit-for-tat escalation manual. Instead of concentrating firepower on a single, decisive target to overwhelm air defenses, their first retaliatory attacks were dispersed in both type and geography. The first bombardments with drones and missiles hit airports, energy infrastructures, military bases and hotels in the Gulf. Israeli cities and American military and diplomatic assets in the region followed, followed by radar systems used to track incoming threats. Ships transiting the Strait of Hormuz are in the crosshairs. Over the weekend there were attacks on docks, ports and oil storage tanks.
The shift in strategy has weakened the sense of security long cultivated by the Gulf states, while inflicting psychological pressure on civilian populations across the region and shaking global markets and sea lanes. It is also prompting a rethinking of conventional air defense mathematics. Combined missile and drone attacks have become a defining feature of modern warfare. Cheap drones and relatively inexpensive missiles can force defenders to spend much more expensive interceptors, tilting the offensive-defensive balance toward attackers capable of producing unmanned weapons at scale.
Why do we write this?
Iran has shown that it can cause a lot of damage to US and Israeli assets – and its regional allies in the Gulf – through missile and drone attacks. But one country can offer its deep experience on how to counter such a bombardment: Ukraine.
But that dynamic is already well understood in Ukraine, particularly in cities that spent years fending off waves of Iranian-designed and Russian-launched drones. Kyiv has already begun sharing those lessons with the United States’ partners in the Middle East. Teams of Ukrainian specialists have reportedly been sent to the Gulf States and Jordan to advise on anti-drone defenses and explore cooperation on battlefield technologies such as electronic warfare.
“They basically have a PhD in anti-drone warfare,” says Patrycja Bazylczyk, associate director and associate member of the Missile Defense Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “They have really perfected their art of intercepting drones by many means.”
“Quality over quantity”
Since the start of Operation Roaring Lion, Iran has launched about 1,400 missiles and nearly 4,000 unmanned aerial vehicles across the region, attacking Israel, the Gulf States, Iraq, Jordan, Oman, Turkey, Cyprus and Azerbaijan, while forces based in Lebanon aimed more than 400 rockets at Israel, according to a March 15 data summary compiled by the Institute for National Security Studies. (INSS), an Israeli think tank.
“There is a quality to quantity,” says Grant Rumley, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and a former Middle East policy adviser. “If large numbers of one-way attack drones can be produced cheaply, they can overwhelm an adversary’s air defenses and inflict damage that may not be as destructive as a missile attack, but can still have a significant psychological and economic impact.”
The United Arab Emirates, for example, had spent huge sums of money over the past decade building a layered air defense network centered on expensive Patriot and Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) missile systems, which are extremely expensive to operate. A single Patriot interceptor costs around $4 million and a THAAD interceptor more than $12 million. The systems themselves — batteries of about six truck-mounted launchers carrying dozens of missiles — cost about $1 billion each.
However, even those sophisticated defenses have been weakened as the United Arab Emirates endures the highest volume of Iranian projectiles among the Gulf states (309 missiles and 1,600 unmanned aerial vehicles, according to INSS data as of March 15). The Emirates’ Apache helicopters scrambled to shoot down Iranian drones in the air last week. Previously, in Riyadh, the Saudi capital, an alleged Iranian drone attack hit a CIA station. Iran also used drones to attack a French military base in Iraq, killing a soldier.
“Iran has been able to impose high costs on both Israel and the United States and the Gulf States by pursuing this cost-imposition strategy, even if they are the weaker adversary,” Bazylczyk says. “They are able to impose costs even when the United States is really raining (ammunition) on them.”
For the Gulf States, the psychological impact may matter as much as the military one. “Iran may not be piercing the air defenses of the Gulf states, but it is piercing the veneer of stability that is so crucial to the Gulf states and their theory of statecraft,” Rumley says. “For the Iranians, the ability to pierce that veneer is perhaps more valuable to them than actually defeating the air defense systems.”
Ukraine’s defensive ability
The experience of Israel and the Gulf States has been the lived reality of Ukrainians for years, Bazylczyk says. “Ukraine has been the world’s unwitting laboratory for drone warfare for the past four years, for better or worse.” And it has inspired the ingenuity they can bring to defend against Iranian attacks, and benefit Ukraine by reducing the Middle East’s need for expensive air defense missiles, such as the American-made Patriot interceptor, which kyiv has been urgently requesting from Western allies for years.
One of Ukraine’s main advances is interceptor drones: small, fast drones are piloted remotely by operators who direct them directly towards incoming UAVs. They cost between a few hundred and a few thousand dollars and provide a much cheaper way to stop weapons like the Shaheds.
“Up to 35% of the Shaheds we destroy are destroyed by interceptor drones,” says Serhii “Flash” Beskrestnov, one of Ukraine’s best-known drone warfare specialists and an advisor to the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense. Most of the remaining Shaheds (almost 95% in total are destroyed, he says) are neutralized by a layered defense that combines electronic warfare, interceptor drones, helicopters, ground fire and traditional missile systems.
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For analysts, the drone arms race underscores the importance of developing a wide range of countermeasures. “People talk about very expensive missile interceptors that cost millions of dollars,” Ms. Bazylczyk notes. “And then they talk about really cheap drones, but there are a lot of intermediate solutions.”
Beyond jamming, he points to defensive networks and directed energy weapons. The nets, a Ukrainian innovation, have been deployed like canopies over roads across the country, entangling Russian drones and preventing them from hitting Ukrainian targets. (However, the networks might be less suitable for a flatter, less war-torn environment like the Gulf.) As for directed energy weapons, they use concentrated energy in the form of lasers or microwaves, rather than bullets or missiles, to eliminate targets. The key is for anti-drone advocates to become comfortable with new technologies so that they are just another tool in the toolkit they use.
“When a drone comes at them, they have to feel confident reaching for that weapon and knowing that it will work,” Bazylczyk says.
Still, supply chains remain a problem. The Ukrainian wartime drone industry relied heavily on commercially available components that were cheap and easy to obtain, many of them manufactured in China. U.S. defense planners are cautious about building critical military systems around foreign-made parts and are increasingly pushing to expand domestic manufacturing capacity, he notes.
Air defense lessons from the current Gulf crisis and the Ukraine conflict are also important beyond active war zones. Russian drone raids are a reality in European countries, including Poland and the Baltic States. Whether it’s cheap drones or high-end missiles, or long or short windows for interception, successful air defense strategies are driven by numbers.
It’s a bit like “a mathematical equation,” Rumley says. “How do you defeat an air defense system with eight interceptors? You shoot nine missiles at it.”
