The ‘Shahed’ Belt: A strategic miscalculation by the US in the war with Iran will cost the world dearly

The core element of ‘mosaic defence’

While the intensity of Iran’s ballistic missile launches has fallen to a minimum, low-cost Shahed-type strike drones have become the principal weapon of the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) in its war against the United States and its allies in the Middle East.

In particular, Shahed drones have been used to damage or completely disable several expensive American radar systems in the Persian Gulf region. For instance, a drone struck the AN/FPS-132 early-warning radar at the US Al Udeid base in Qatar, according to an official statement. Such radars are designed to track multiple targets simultaneously, and the system costs up to $1 billion, according to The Wall Street Journal. In addition, Iranian drones appear to have damaged two AN/GSC-52B radars at the US Navy’s Fifth Fleet headquarters in Bahrain (each estimated to be worth $20–40 million).

Neighbouring Arab states have also suffered substantial losses as a result of Shahed strikes. Since the start of the operation, Iran has launched an average of 200–400 drones per day against targets in the Persian Gulf and Israel. The most detailed statistics have been published by the authorities of the UAE, which has been subjected to the most intensive attacks by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. As of 10 March, 262 ballistic missiles had been launched, of which 241 were intercepted, 19 fell into the sea and two reached land. Of the 1,475 drones launched, 1,385 were intercepted, while 90 reached various targets. On 11–12 March, a further 16 ballistic missiles and 65 drones were recorded as launched, although interception rates were not reported. TThus, the intensity of ballistic missile use is lower than at the beginning of the conflict, while the intensity of drone attacks is higher than the average during the first ten days. According to Kateryna Bondar, an expert at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), the United Arab Emirates has become the primary target of the campaign because of its high concentration of commercial centres, logistics infrastructure and other valuable military and economic assets. The 90 drones that have struck their targets have been sufficient to create a significant destabilising effect. On the morning of 13 March, for example, the Dubai International Financial Centre (DIFC) was struck.

In Saudi Arabia, drone strikes have targeted energy and military infrastructure, including the oil refinery at Ras Tanura. In Qatar, which had sought to maintain diplomatic neutrality, civilian aviation infrastructure near the Al Udeid air base has come under attack. Iranian strikes have also targeted port infrastructure in Oman. As Foreign Policy notes, although the attacks do not always cause extensive physical destruction, they undermine the reputation of the Gulf states as politically stable and secure environments, a reputation that has largely underpinned their role as the economic engines of the Middle East.

The most significant blow delivered by Iran so far has been against the security of shipping in the Strait of Hormuz, one of the world’s main oil and gas arteries. Since the beginning of the conflict, around 20 vessels have been struck there, including five on 11 March alone. Transit traffic in the Gulf has almost disappeared, according to maritime analytics firm Winward. As a result, oil has been trading above $90 per barrel despite assurances from the International Energy Agency (IEA) that strategic reserves would be released onto the market. A special IEA report dated 12 March states that Gulf countries had been forced to cut production by 10 million barrels per day due to the risk of exhausting available storage capacity. Further prolongation of the operation is therefore likely to trigger another surge in prices.

The maximum and destabilising expansion of the conflict zone, the paralysis of shipping in the Strait, and the autonomous actions of various military units of the regime are all elements of a plan developed during Khamenei’s lifetime, which representatives of the Iranian regime themselves sometimes refer to as the ‘mosaic defence’ plan. Within this framework, Shahed drones play a central role in the asymmetric warfare envisaged by the plan.

Resource asymmetry and the threat of a ‘reverse Ukraine’

As noted by the renowned missile technology expert Fabian Hoffmann, Iranian long-range drones, including the Shahed, are in theory relatively easy to neutralise. They are slow, follow predictable trajectories and lack advanced stealth capabilities. However, the region’s entire air defence architecture has been optimised primarily to counter Iranian ballistic missiles, which had long been regarded as the principal threat to the Gulf states. As a result, during the first ten days of the operation the missile threat from Iran largely subsided. According to calculations by the monitoring project Shrike News, based on open sources, Iran launched 350 ballistic missiles on the first day of the conflict but only 25 by the tenth.

Yet the Shahed drones have become precisely the vulnerability in the attack plan against Iran that has largely offset the strategic success achieved in the opening days of the conflict. Compared with the military technological power of the US–Israeli coalition, the Shahed systems might appear insignificant. However, two asymmetries prove to be the decisive factors.

The first concerns cost. To intercept Iranian drones, the United States is forced to deploy systems that are far more expensive than the average strike drone, which various media outlets estimate to cost between $20,000 and $35,000. According to Hoffmann, one hour of flight time for an F-15E fighter costs around $30,000. Each APKWS rocket launched from such an aircraft against Shahed drones also costs approximately $30,000, while an AIM-9X Sidewinder missile costs between $400,000 and $500,000. Interceptions carried out by Patriot air defence systems are even more expensive, with launches costing up to $5 million, while a single THAAD interceptor missile costs more than $12.8 million, notes The Atlantic.

The second asymmetry lies in the vastly higher rate at which drones can be produced compared with the systems used to intercept them. Experts estimate that Iran has accumulated between 80,000 and 100,000 Shahed drones. The decisive factor, however, is the ability to replenish these stocks. Although the US military has already identified drone production facilities as a primary target and has reported successes in destroying them, the simplicity of such production makes a comprehensive solution extremely difficult. Most experts acknowledge that drone manufacturing is decentralised and organised in small workshops where assembly relies largely on inexpensive locally produced components. Shahed drones do not require specialised launch systems, which makes strategies based on detection and pre-emptive strikes against launch infrastructure largely ineffective.

Anusar Farooqui, a financier and author of the Policy Tensor blog, has constructed a mathematical model of ‘drone warfare’ in Iran based on conservative assumptions that the country possesses a stockpile of 20,000 drones and operates 50 factories producing 100 Shahed drones per month each. His calculations suggest that even in a worst-case scenario for Tehran, in which the United States destroys 90% of Iranian drone production capacity each month and those facilities cannot be restored, Iran would still be able to sustain a high level of attacks for the next four months.

However, four months of disruption in the Strait of Hormuz would turn the military operation against Iran into an economic nightmare for the entire world. In a more pessimistic scenario, Iran could replenish its drone arsenal to some extent almost indefinitely. For this reason, the financier describes the current situation as a ‘reverse Ukraine’ and a ‘strategic defeat’ for the United States.

Moreover, the IRGC most likely still retains a certain missile capability, although its scale cannot be assessed following the series of strikes against missile depots and production facilities. This remaining arsenal could be employed at a moment when air defence systems, heavily used to counter drones, are approaching exhaustion.

Incompetent arrogance

As Middle East military analyst Daniel Mouton notes, as far back as 2019, the Pentagon’s Defence Intelligence Agency drew attention to Iran’s significant progress in the production of unmanned aerial vehicles, which Tehran supplied to the Houthis in Yemen and to Shia militias in Iraq and Syria. In 2021, however, US Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin publicly congratulated Saudi Arabia on intercepting almost 90% of UAV and missile attacks launched by the Houthis and promised that joint efforts would eventually achieve a 100% interception rate. At the same time, the asymmetry of defensive capabilities had already become evident during the US campaign against the Houthis in the summer of 2025, when American forces were forced to rely on costly interceptors to destroy relatively inexpensive drones, as The Atlantic points out.

The publication observes that US military planning remains based on traditional assumptions about threats. After the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Pentagon concentrated on the prospect of a potential conflict with China, in which strike drones were not expected to play a decisive role. Hoffmann suggests that the underestimation of the Iranian drone threat may also partly reflect Israel’s earlier success in intercepting Iranian Shahed drones in 2024 and 2025, when none of the hundreds launched by Iran reached their targets. Yet that success was largely determined by geography. The distance between Iran and Israel requires approximately ten hours for a Shahed drone to traverse, which made it easier to intercept the drones long before they reached Israeli airspace. In the current conflict, Iran’s targets lie much closer to the launch points of the drones.

The failure to take this factor sufficiently into account in planning military operations against Iran is striking. Analysts have been discussing the risks of drone warfare and the role of Shahed drones as an almost unbeatable ‘weapon of the weak’ for nearly two years, drawing on the experience of the Russia–Ukraine war (→ Re:Russia: David’s Slingshot). During this period Ukraine succeeded in creating a relatively effective system for countering kamikaze drones, consisting of three layers: electronic warfare tools, mobile fire groups equipped with heavy machine guns and man-portable air defence systems, and low-cost interceptor drones. In the summer of 2025, the White House reportedly ignored a proposal from the Zelensky administration to use Ukrainian technologies, Axios reported. At a closed-door meeting on 18 August the Ukrainian president presented a proposal for a network of ‘military drone hubs’ in Turkey, Jordan and the Persian Gulf states hosting American bases, designed to counter the Iranian drone threat. Officials in the White House reportedly dismissed the presentation, assuming that Zelensky was engaging in self-promotion, sources within the US presidential administration told the publication.

This episode perhaps most clearly illustrates the decision-making process within the US administration, where professional expertise can be displaced by intuitive judgements made by the president and his closest advisers. As a result, the underestimation of the Shahed problem became a direct and avoidable strategic miscalculation, placing the entire Israeli–American military operation at risk.

Strategic deadlock and the cost of delay

As Zelensky told The New York Times, the US has formally approached Ukraine for assistance in countering drones. Kyiv responded by rapidly dispatching interceptor drones and a group of experts to help protect American military bases in Jordan. According to a report by the Associated Press, the United States also plans to deploy the Merops counter-drone system in the Middle East, which incorporates Ukrainian technological developments. Merops was deployed in Poland and Romania in November last year after Russian strike drones repeatedly entered NATO airspace.

Another anti-drone development from Ukraine, whose demand has risen sharply since the outbreak of the war with Iran is the P1-Sun interceptor, presented at the end of last year. Produced by the company SkyFall, the drone has demonstrated a high success rate in intercepting Shahed drones while remaining inexpensive. It features a modular design with a fuselage produced using 3D printing. After the war began, several Middle Eastern states reportedly attempted to purchase these interceptors from Ukraine ‘at any price’, according to the BBC Ukrainian Service, but were refused. Since 2 March, the Ukrainian Export Control Service has suspended permits for the export of arms and military equipment to countries in the Middle East and the Persian Gulf.

Officials cited the risk of ‘negative consequences and harm to Ukraine’s national interests’. However, sources interviewed by the BBC Ukrainian Service suggested that the refusal may reflect a political calculation by Zelensky. In effect, the Ukrainian president appears to be offering a form of barter to Middle Eastern states, proposing to supply anti-drone technologies in exchange for PAC-3 interceptor missiles for Patriot systems, which are indispensable for countering Russian ballistic missiles.

Be that as it may, the war launched by the US and Israel has now reached a strategic deadlock. Donald Trump may be partly correct when he claims that there are ‘no targets left’ in Iran for American forces. The necessary qualification, however, is that there are no targets left that the United States and Israel can realistically reach. Neither the expectation of regime change nor the assumption that the capabilities of the IRGC to conduct aerial strikes could be fully suppressed has proved justified. These attacks continue to disrupt the transport and economic infrastructure of the region.

The proposal advanced by Ukraine to construct a ‘wall of interceptor drones’, with Kyiv claiming it could raise annual UAV production to 2 million units, may well be technically feasible. However, such a system would take considerable time to establish. Meanwhile, the disruption of shipping in the Strait of Hormuz is increasing the economic and political costs of the war on a daily basis. According to the logic of the ‘mosaic defence’ strategy, these mounting costs are intended to compel Trump to retreat. If the current strategic deadlock persists, such a scenario may indeed become plausible.