The US Army absolutely needs fast, cheap, and versatile long-range drones like Russia’s Shahed-style drones, said the commanding general of the service’s 25th Infantry Division out of Hawaii.
Russia has been producing Geran drones, domestically manufactured versions of the Iranian-designed Shaheds, a family of loitering munitions that includes the notorious Shahed-136 initially supplied by Tehran to Moscow. These one-way attack drones are being employed en masse alongside precision-guided munitions like ballistic and cruise missiles in nightly strikes on Ukraine.
The Russians also have decoy Gerbera drones to further complicate the situation for defenders.
The usefulness of Shahed-style drones as a cheap tool for augmenting long-range strike packages is something the US Army has taken note of.
“We are behind on long-range sensing and long-range launched-effect strike,” Maj. Gen. Jay Bartholomees said at the Association of the US Army’s annual gathering in Washington, DC, this week.
Drones like the Shahed, he said, are cheap, easy to produce and assemble, and exactly the type of capability the US and its partners and allies in the Indo-Pacific should have.
Low-cost one-way attack drones like these can overwhelm air defenses at long range, around 1,000 miles depending on type and payload, and that could make them a valuable asset in the Indo-Pacific.
“We absolutely need to build this capability quickly,” Bartholomees said. “We need to test it in our region. We also need to work with our allies and partners to do the same.”
The affordability of the Shahed-style Geran drones has allowed Russia to launch hundreds of them in large-scale attacks on Ukrainian cities. The Geran-2 drones fly at speeds of 115 mph with a nearly 90-pound explosive warhead, but Russia has made modifications to make them faster and deadlier. The Geran-3, as the Ukrainians call it, is a jet-powered version of the drone.
An American-designed version of a Shahed drone showed up at the Pentagon earlier this year, but the US has yet to field anything like these drones. The Army believes it has the right approach to catch up quickly in this space though.
“The good news: I think we can catch up very rapidly by learning from what is happening in Ukraine,” Bartholomees said. Units across the Army, like the launched effects company that the 25th ID is standing up alongside the existing launched effects platoon, are working on different drone capabilities and could integrate something like a Shahed quickly.
Soldiers are building fixed-wing one-way attack drones, but getting the range is still a work in progress. More broadly, the Army — and the US military as a whole — is scrambling to adapt to drone warfare, especially with small uncrewed aircraft. It’s a catch-up game: learning, creating training and protocols, and developing the expertise needed. Unlike Ukraine, the US isn’t fighting a large-scale conflict that’s driving those lessons in real time.
That said, the Army’s top-down push for drones has placed its soldiers in an increasingly fast-paced, innovative environment where they can learn how to build, repair, operate, and modify these drone systems and work closely with defense industry partners and companies to move development forward.
Other key priorities include counter-drone and electronic warfare systems. The Army has deemed these capabilities essential for future war.
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