Why the US is using a cheap Iranian drone against the country itself

Iran invented the relatively simple Shahed 136 attack drone, but now fends off US copies launched against it in combat. Why, when the US military has expensive, cutting-edge and high-tech weapons, does it make flimsy drones powered by a motorcycle engine?

Iranian company Shahed Aviation Industries originally designed the 136. It is 2.6 meters long and can carry 15 kilos of payload over distances of around 2,500 kilometres. It travels at a relatively modest speed of around 185 kilometers per hour – far slower than cruise missiles or bomb-carrying aircraft. But it has the advantage of extremely low cost—perhaps as low as $50,000 per unit.

Shahed are now used by the hundreds in daily attacks on Ukraine by Russia, requiring layers of air defenses – including fighter jets, machine guns, missiles and interceptor drones – to try to bring them down before they hit civilian or military targets. They are even in use by Houthi forces in Yemen.

Iran has used Shahed drones as well as a variety of other hardware in attacks around the Gulf this week in retaliation for US and Israeli strikes. In return, the US military has used its Low-cost Uncrewed Combat Attack System (LUCAS), manufactured by Arizona-based Spektreworks, in combat for the first time against Iran, which is a reverse-engineered copy of the Shahed 136. This means that Iran’s own design is now being used against it.

LUCAS is modular, so that reconnaissance or communication equipment or a warhead for ground attack can be mounted. Spektreworks calls it the FLM 136, apparently a nod to the Shahed 136, whose design it was cloned from.

The U.S. is said to have reverse-engineered the drone after capturing units from Iranian-backed militias in Iraq and Syria, and it was successfully test-launched from a U.S. Navy ship last year.

Anthony King of the University of Exeter, UK, says cheap, relatively simple attack drones like the Shahed are essentially modern versions of the “doodlebug” – the V-1 planes that Nazi Germany used to bomb Britain in World War II.

Such munitions are cheap and easy to produce on a large scale, and can be used in numbers that overwhelm an opponent, sucking even highly sophisticated anti-aircraft defenses until they fail, or so that they consume enormous resources and make a fight untenable. This leaves an opponent vulnerable to further attacks.

“You’re knocking them out of the sky with ammunition that’s much more expensive, not only than Shahed, but sometimes more expensive than what Shahed actually hits,” King says. “There have been many cases where the target Shahed hits is cheaper than the Patriot missile (used to take it down). The appearance of this kind of crude but effective remote system changes the economic calculus of war in an interesting way.”

Interestingly, there is reason to believe that Iran copied the original design for the Shahed 136 from a Cold War unit. A 1980s project between Germany and the US for a similar device that could hit Soviet radar stations or soak up air defenses to protect other aircraft led to the Dornier design called Die Drohne Antiradar – literally “the anti-radar drone”.

Ian Muirhead of the University of Manchester, UK, who previously spent 23 years in the military, says that Shahed drones will never replace manned aircraft or highly advanced missiles, but that they are increasingly finding a place in combat and that Western militaries are learning lessons from the war in Ukraine and adopting similar weapons.

“A lot of modern weapons are extremely complex and expensive, and if you have big conflicts like this, it’s more efficient to have a lot of cheap, expendable weapons – especially if you don’t have big armies anymore,” says Muirhead. “If you can send a thousand of them, you can overwhelm the defense with cheap ammo.”

“It’s just economics: if it costs you 10 times more for your defense than it does for your attackers, you’ll never be able to outplay the other side,” says Muirhead.