Iran is using technical and tactical feedback provided by the Kremlin from the Ukraine war to maximise the strike rate of the drones it is using to cause havoc across the Middle East in response to US-led bombing raids.
Iran has launched more than 1,000 Shahed 136 drones at targets ranging from a landmark Dubai hotel and housing in Qatar to Britain’s RAF Akrotiri base in Cyprus as Tehran seeks to widen the conflict by striking at multiple targets in US-allied Gulf states and beyond.
The deployment of the distinctive delta-shaped drones, which have a range of up to 2,000km and carry a 50kg warhead, represents a dramatic widening of their use to a second theatre of war after the Iranian-designed weapon became a mainstay of Russia’s bombardment of Ukraine.
Technical innovations flowing from Moscow to Tehran
Under a $1.75bn (£1.3bn) deal signed early in 2023, Tehran has supplied Moscow with blueprints, technical advice, and components for the Shahed drone to help Russia build its own version at a purpose-built plant some 600 miles east of Moscow.
But intelligence sources and defence experts told The i Paper that the flow of this vital information has since been reversed, with Russian tactics from the Ukraine battlefield and Moscow’s own technical innovations being passed on to help Tehran sharpen the performance of its drones.
A Russian Iranian Geran-2/Shahed-136 drone featured as an exhibit in an open-air exhibition of destroyed Russian equipment in Kyiv (Photo: Sergei Supinsky/AFP)Iran’s bombardment of its Gulf neighbours has copied a technique developed by Russia of combining the use of hundreds of Shahed drones with a smaller number of ballistic missiles to maximise aerial damage. It is widely thought that Moscow is using its drone production facility – known as the Alabuga Special Economic Zone (ASEZ) – to pool knowledge with its allies in China, Iran and North Korea, the so-called Axis of Resistance.
Daria Massicot, a Russian defence expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a US-based think tank, said: “Iran is using similar targeting tactics as Russia, launching hundreds of its Shahed drones against US bases and facilities, as well as bases and critical infrastructure of coalition nations in the Gulf. This is likely the result of shared learning between Russia and its partners.”
John Caves, senior research associate at the Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control, which monitors Iranian military activity, said it would not be surprising if Russia was allowing technical information about how to optimise the lethality of drones to flow back to Tehran.
He said: “Passing along information about successful battlefield innovations is a low-cost, low-risk way for Russia to assist Iran.”
Iranian drones ‘most dangerous threat’ to US and allies
While the Iranian regime and its military infrastructure have suffered withering losses since the start of the American and Israeli bombing campaign last weekend, the Shahed drone has emerged as the cut-price spearhead of Tehran’s response.
A large fire engulfed the US consulate in Dubai after it was hit in a drone attack (Photo: Nick Sortor/X)The weapons, characterised by the “moped-like buzz” of their low-tech piston engines, have been witnessed striking targets including American military bases and diplomatic facilities in Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia.
A Shahed 136, which landed at RAF Akrotiri, seemingly after penetrating enhanced defences put in place in recent weeks, is thought to have been launched by the Iran-backed Hezbollah militia from Lebanon.
According to data supplied to The i Paper by ACLED, which monitors weapons strikes in conflicts around the world, there have so far been at least 33 successful Iranian drone strikes since the start of the war, where the weapon reached its target.
One expert this week said the Pentagon now considers the Shahed to be “the most dangerous threat” posed by Iran.
At around $35,000 (£26,000) per unit, the Shahed’s cost a fraction of an offensive ballistic or cruise missile, which costs between £1.6m and £9.7m each. But crucially, they also cost far less than the advanced interceptors used by America and its allies to knock incoming projectiles out of the sky. A single Patriot air defence missile costs $3m (£2.25m).
Technological arms race
The technological arms race between Ukraine and Russia, where each side seeks to leapfrog the other in terms of drone and counter-drone capabilities every few weeks, has seen the Russian version of the Shahed significantly refined since Iran first provided the weapon to Moscow.
Weapons specialists say there is evidence that this knowledge has been passed back to Tehran, which in turn has made adjustments to its version of the weapon and sent it back to Ukraine to be tested in battlefield conditions.
A Russian-made Geran-2 drone, a variant of the Iranian Shahed drone (Photo: Scott Peterson/Getty)Ukrainian drone experts last year reported finding the remains of a crashed Shahed drone that contained improvements, including an advanced camera, an AI-powered computing platform and new Iranian-made anti-jamming technology. It was assessed that the drone had been manufactured in Iran.
A Western intelligence source told The i Paper it was a reasonable assumption that the drones being used by Iran against the US and its allies contained similar and further refinements – putting them at the cutting edge of so-called kamikaze drone technology.
The source said: “It is highly likely that Russia and Iran are actively exchanging information and components via the ASEZ. The weapons being launched [by Iran] in recent days are the fruit of that cooperation.
“They have been engineered to try to defeat the counter-measures deployed by Ukraine and the Ukrainians are acknowledged to have the best counter-measures out there. On that basis, we should be alarmed but not surprised that the latest Iranian drones are to some extent getting through.”
Military authorities in the UAE revealed on Tuesday that 812 Iranian drones had been launched at the country since last weekend, of which 755 had been intercepted. This suggests that 57 were able to circumvent air defences – a success rate of about seven per cent.
Iranian drone stockpile ‘may have reached 80,000’
Experts have voiced concerns that the US and its Gulf allies face an unequal race to sustain the number of interceptors available to defeat Iranian drones. At the same time, for its part, Tehran needs to maintain its rate of fire from its stockpile of Shaheds and other missiles. According to one estimate by the Stimson Centre, a Washington-based think tank, for every $1 (75p) spent by Iran on a Shahed drone, it costs the US and its allies up to $28 (£21) to intercept it.
Kelly Grieco, a senior fellow at the Stimson Centre, said: “The question is becoming who runs out of missiles first. If the Iranians are able to launch with the kinds of numbers they have been launching over the past 48 hours over the next four to five weeks, that does not seem sustainable from an interceptor perspective.”
Iran has previously supplied Shahed drones to Russia that have been heavily used in Ukraine (Photo: Middle East Images/AFP/Getty)Estimates of the number of Shahed drones Iran possesses vary. According to Israeli intelligence, Iran may have amassed as many as 80,000 drones, bolstered by a manufacturing capacity of up to 400 units per day. Among the targets hit by the US and Israel this week are manufacturing facilities belonging to HESA, the state-owned aviation corporation responsible for building the Shahed drones.
Mr Caves said it is likely Iran has been manufacturing the Shahed 136 since at least 2019 and stockpiling them for precisely the sort of conflict it is currently pursuing. He said: “They’ve had a lot of time to build up their arsenal… Iran likely has been storing up Shahed 136s for a fight in the Persian Gulf, which is what they’re now in.”
Lessons from Ukraine
If the war continues much beyond the current scale of up to five weeks, it is likely that the Gulf states will themselves start looking towards the Ukraine conflict and learn from Kyiv the lessons of adopting a “layered” air defence system reliant on weapons systems such as cheap interceptor drones and radar-guided machine guns.
Volodymyr Zelensky, the Ukrainian President, this week said his country would work with the UAE and Qatar on repelling the Iranian drones, and suggested that Gulf states consider a swap deal of Ukraine’s mass-produced counter-drone weapons for advanced missile interceptors needed by Kyiv.
In the meantime, the Pentagon this week paid Tehran a backwards compliment by unleashing its own kamikaze drone directly based on the Shahed-136 back at Iran.
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American LUCAS or Low-cost Uncrewed Combat Attack System drones directly modelled on the Iranian drone were fired at targets in the Islamic Republic.
In apparent recognition of the way that the Shahed has changed the complexion of conflict, the US Central Command said in a statement: “These low-cost drones, modeled after Iran’s Shahed drones, are now delivering American-made retribution.”
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