A low-cost Iranian-designed drone has unexpectedly become a defining weapon of modern conflict. Adopted or copied by militaries from Russia to the United States, these Shahed drones are complicating how armies fight and defend.
Iran developed the Shahed drone, an inexpensive long-range weapon, for its armed forces and its militant proxies. Russia took it into its war against Ukraine and began making its own version.
And now in the newest major war, as Tehran’s forces lob their missiles and Shaheds at targets across the Middle East, the US military is using its lookalike drones to strike Iran.
These are far cheaper than many conventional missiles and difficult to counter at scale, especially when mixed into traditional missile strike packages — a development that is shifting key cost and defense considerations in war.
The one-way attack drone, also known as a loitering munition, “is a truly revolutionary precision weapon, which challenges the West’s defensive technologies and systems,” Uzi Rubin, a missile and defense technology expert, wrote in a 2023 analysis of the drones for the UK’s Royal United Services Institute.
The weapons changed Russia’s fight
The first notable use of Shaheds was against Saudi Arabia in 2019, with the country blaming Houthi rebels for an attack on oil installations. The Iran-backed militants have since widely used the drones in the Middle East, including to target US forces.
The drones took on a much greater significance in Ukraine, where Russia’s use of them completely changed the fight.
Iran supplied Russia with Shahed-131s and Shahed-136s. Russia later started making its own variant, the Geran, now one of the key weapons supplementing its arsenal of precision-guided munitions.
Russia invested heavily in domestic production, expanding output and regularly updating the drones to improve range, payload, and survivability.
Russia’s use has surged. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said in January that Russia was making around 500 a day, and he said on Saturday that Russia had fired more than 57,000 of the drones since the full-scale invasion began in 2022.
The drones have hit residential buildings, front-line weaponry, power plants, and trains, causing death and devastation.
Warfare experts at the Center for Strategic and International Studies last year described Russia as using “a punishment strategy to force Kyiv into negotiations” that would harm its sovereignty. They argued that the Shaheds were key to that. “This approach increasingly relies on a single weapon: the Shahed drone,” they said.
In his separate assessment, Rubin described the drone as having “achieved a breakthrough in combining precision with affordability.”
“No matter how many of them the Ukrainians shoot down, the few that penetrate their defences cause immense damage, and there are always more of them buzzing in for the next attack,” he said.
Now the US has them
The US attacked Iran on Saturday with its Low-Cost Unmanned Combat Attack System, or LUCAS, drone, which looks almost identical to Shahed drones. The US and Israeli strikes on Iran were the first known combat use of the drone developed by American defense company SpektreWorks.
US Central Command even acknowledged its connection to the Shaheds. It said the “low-cost drones, modeled after Iran’s Shahed drones, are now delivering American-made retribution.”
The weapon that Iran pioneered is now being used against it in a war of long-range strikes not dissimilar to the one being fought in Ukraine today. Iran, likewise, is using its drones, mixing them into its missile strikes as Russia does in Ukraine.
The United Arab Emirates’ defense ministry said on Tuesday that it had detected 186 ballistic missiles fired toward its territory since Saturday, and far more drones, 812 specifically, though it did not say how many were Shaheds.
Missiles and drones are raining down on countries across the Middle East and reinforcing the realization that modern high-intensity wars hinge on deep air defense arsenals.
They are changing the warfare equation
Shahed-style drones pose problems for militaries. They are so cheap that many more of them can be fired than missiles, and they can destroy weaponry that is far more expensive.
They will not all reach their targets and are generally easier to intercept than ballistic missiles. But that trade-off is built into their design: Some will penetrate defenses, create psychological pressure, and force adversaries to expend costly interceptors.
The CSIS analysts argued that “Russia’s dependence on Shaheds is based on attrition logic,” explaining that “each drone costs approximately $20,000—$50,000, whereas even a single modern surface-to-air missile (SAM) battery or interceptor missile can cost several hundred thousand dollars.” Some cost millions.
Russia tolerates high losses because it is using them “in an effort to gradually overwhelm Ukrainian air defenses,” they assessed. “By saturating the skies with low-cost weapons, Moscow wages an attritional campaign targeting both the will of the Ukrainian people and the readiness of its air defense network.”
Air defense is already a challenge, often demanding multiple interceptors for a single threat. And even then, some projectiles still make it through.
Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth said US service members were killed after an Iranian weapon penetrated their defenses. He said most attacks are intercepted, but not all.
Ukraine has developed a host of solutions, and Zelenskyy said last month that it shoots down 90% of the Shahed-style drones that Russia launches. It relies heavily on electronic warfare, mobile gun teams, and interceptor drones — lower-cost layers that reduce dependence on expensive missile defenses.
The US fields sophisticated air defense systems, but relying on expensive interceptors against large volumes of cheap drones raises long-term sustainability questions. It and other allies are increasingly looking to lessons from Ukraine to counter emerging threats, particularly drones.
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