Tracing the US military’s learning curve on fighting Iran’s drones: What to know

WASHINGTON– WASHINGTON (AP) — The war in Iran has quickly tested America’s ability to combat the swarms of cheap drones that have become a staple of the modern battlefield after Ukraine and Russia demonstrated their effectiveness.

The Islamic Republic launched so many drones across the region at once that some managed to slip through defenses, including a strike that killed six U.S. troops on an operations center in Kuwait.

Defense experts and officials point out that the U.S. military was successful in shooting down the majority of Iran’s drones and destroying much of Iran’s drone capabilities. But critics said too often missiles costing millions of dollars were used to shoot down small drones costing tens of thousands of dollars.

U.S. forces face a steep learning curve as they work to deploy more cost-effective defenses against Iran’s Shahed drones, which fly low and buzz like mopeds before crashing into their targets.

“We’re crushing them — there’s no doubt about that — but if even one drone passes through our defenses and hurts an American, to me that’s enough to justify solving the problem,” said drone warfare expert Brett Velicovich, who operated Predator drones in the U.S. military and co-founded a drone manufacturing company.

Here’s what you need to know about Iranian drones and the U.S. effort to shoot them down:

Gen. Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said Tuesday that the number of drones launched by Iran has fallen 83 percent since the war began on Feb. 28. Iran launched more than 2,000 drones in the days after the initial U.S. and Israeli attacks, other senior military officials said.

Caine told reporters that U.S. forces were striking military and industrial targets in Iran “to deprive them of the ability to continue to generate these one-way attack drones.”

“We also hit several one-way drone factories to get to the heart of their autonomous capability,” he said.

Hundreds, if not thousands, of Patriot missiles have been used by the United States and its allies in the Middle East to defend against Iranian missiles and drones. But now the United States appears to be relying more on attack helicopters and machine guns as a more cost-effective way to shoot down Iranian drones, experts say, and President Donald Trump has suggested as much.

“We now have low-cost interceptors that effectively combat Iranian drones,” the Republican president said Monday.

The military is also introducing an anti-drone system that has proven effective against Russian drones in Ukraine, similar to those flown by Iran, the Associated Press reported. Known as Merops, the system flies drones against drones, fits in the back of a van and uses artificial intelligence to navigate when electronic communications are jammed.

The U.S. military has taken a keen interest in Russia’s war in Ukraine, but experts say it has been slow to revise its arsenal and tactics to respond to the new threat posed by drone fleets.

“This is going to be a big wake-up call about how the U.S. military defends its citizens and fights forever wars,” Velicovich said. “Because it’s a bit like we’re the best army on the planet, but we’re still missing things.”

Pentagon officials admitted in classified briefings to Congress that they have struggled to stop Iranian drone waves, leaving the U.S. military and its Persian Gulf allies vulnerable. High-profile targets like a Dubai skyscraper and area airports were hit.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said last week that “thousands of Iranian missiles and drones have been intercepted and vaporized.” But he conceded: “That doesn’t mean we can stop everything.”

Available in large numbers, Shahed drones have demonstrated the ability to oversaturate air defenses and inflict painful damage. And while the Shahed flies slowly at 180 km/h (a little over 110 mph), it can travel up to 2,000 kilometers (1,240 miles) and carry a relatively large payload of 40 kilograms (88 pounds) of explosives.

The US military typically uses complex, reusable drones that fire missiles and return to base, such as the Predator. But Ukraine has shown that relying on large numbers of cheap drones, which carry their payloads directly to the target and become nuclear warheads themselves, can be extremely effective.

“There’s going to be a learning curve, but the more the Ukrainians can provide us in terms of advice and expertise, I think the better off we’ll all be,” said Brandon Blackburn, a former CIA targeting officer who led counterterrorism operations across the Middle East.

Ryan Brobst, an expert on U.S. defense strategy at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a hawkish Washington think tank, said social media posts by the U.S. military and its allies have indicated the use of relatively cheaper weapons like aircraft machine guns or laser-guided rockets to destroy drones in Iran.

He cited, for example, a video released by the UAE military, which shows an Apache helicopter firing at a Shahed with a large machine gun.

“The United States has made significant progress in the fight against UAS in recent years,” Brobst said, referring to unmanned aerial systems. “But it is also true that we can still learn more from Ukraine.”

William Reno, a professor at Northwestern University who researches Ukrainian military training for the Pentagon and visits the country regularly, noted that Ukraine has found inexpensive ways to shoot down drones with .50-caliber machine guns mounted on the back of a pickup truck or other fast-moving drones.

“The long-term effect will probably be that it will wonderfully stimulate minds to think more seriously about the cheap products that are floating around in the air,” Reno said.

For decades, U.S. military strategy relied on dominating the airspace above any conflict it was involved in, but the focus was primarily on higher altitudes, where fighters and bombers fly. Now, drones will force the military to think about what it does to control low-altitude airspace.

“Ukraine was a wake-up call,” Reno said.

The U.S. military already has programs focused on inexpensive drones, according to Jerry McGinn, a former Defense Department official who focused on manufacturing and industrial base policy and is now a research fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

One such program is the Low-Cost Unmanned Combat Attack System, or LUCAS, that U.S. forces use in Iran. The US military said in an article on X that the US-made unidirectional attack drones were “modeled after Iran’s Shahed drones”.

“Their effectiveness or how they were used is not made public,” McGinn said. “But the United States is working to learn from the Ukrainian experience.”

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Funk reported from Omaha, Neb.