Why the US is Using a Cheap Iranian Drone Against the Country Itself
Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:
The Shahed 136 drone was invented by Iran and then copied by the US, but was originally a cold war weapon.
Iran invented the relatively simple Shahed 136 attack drone, but is now fending off US copies launched against it in combat. Why, when the US military has expensive, cutting-edge and hi-tech weapons, is it making flimsy drones powered by a motorbike engine?
Iranian company Shahed Aviation Industries originally designed the 136. It is 2.6 metres long and can carry 15-kilogram payloads over distances of about 2500 kilometres. It travels at a relatively modest speed of around 185 kilometres 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.
Shaheds are now used in their hundreds in daily strikes on Ukraine by Russia, requiring layers of air defence - 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 been using Shahed drones as well as a range 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), produced 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.
[...] The US reportedly reverse-engineered the drone after capturing units from Iranian-backed militias in Iraq and Syria, and it was successfully test launched from a US Navy ship last year.
[...] You're knocking them out of the sky with ordnance that's way more expensive not just than the Shahed, but sometimes it's more expensive than the thing that the Shahed is actually hitting," says King. There have been loads of cases where the target the Shahed is hitting is cheaper than the Patriot missile [used to take it down]. The appearance of these kind of crude, but effective, remote systems changes the economic calculus of war in an interesting way."
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