There is a sound that soldiers in Ukraine have learned to dread
above almost any other sound on the modern battlefield.
It is not the crack of artillery.
It is not the Thunder of a ballistic missile.
It is a low, buzzing hump, persistent, mechanical, getting
closer. Ukrainian soldiers describe it
as sounding like a dirt bike engine in the sky.
A moped. By the time you hear it clearly,
it may already be too late. That sound is now being heard
over Bahrain, over Dubai, over Kuwait City, over American
military bases across the Persian Gulf.
The drone that makes that sound was designed in Iran, refined in
Iran, manufactured in Iran, and supplied by Iran to Russia for
using Ukraine. Russia launched 57,000 of them
at Ukrainian cities and infrastructure since 2022.
And now, in the opening days of Operation Epic Fury, the same
drone has become the primary weapon Iran is using to fight
back against the most powerful military on Earth.
This is a bonus episode of Epic Fury, the US Iran War podcast.
This episode is different from our Daily News briefings.
It exists to answer one specific question that has come up again
and again since this conflict began.
What exactly are these Iranian drones?
Where do they come from? How do they work?
How many does Iran have, and how is America fighting back against
them? To understand Iran's drone
program, you have to understand the strategic problem Iran was
trying to solve when it began building drones in the first
place. Iran is a country that has been
under severe economic sanctions for most of its modern history.
It cannot import the most advanced Western military
technology. It cannot buy American fighter
jets or European missile systems.
Its conventional military, particularly its Air Force, is
equipped largely with aging aircraft purchased before the
1979 revolution, supplemented by Russian and Chinese systems that
are themselves not state-of-the-art.
In a straight conventional air to air or air to ground military
contest with the United States or Israel, Iran would lose
decisively in a matter of days. Iran's military planners knew
this. They have always known this.
So Iran built an asymmetric strategy.
Instead of trying to match the United States plane for plane,
missile for missile, and carrier for carrier, Iran focused on
building weapons that are cheap enough to produce an enormous
numbers, simple enough to manufacture under sanctions,
capable enough to threaten high value targets, and expensive
enough for an adversary to intercept.
The drone is the perfect expression of that strategy.
The program began in earnest in the 1980s during the Iran Iraq
War, when Iran realized it needed surveillance and
reconnaissance capability it could not obtain through
conventional procurement. Early Iranian drones were basic,
slow, and limited in range. But the program never stopped.
Through decades of isolation, sanctions, and intermittent
conflict, Iran's engineers iterated, improved, and expanded
their drone arsenal. They reverse engineered captured
foreign systems. They acquired components through
illicit procurement networks that stretched across multiple
continents. They developed their own
guidance and propulsion technology from the ground up.
And by the time Operation Epic Fury began on February 28th,
2026, Iran had one of the largest and most battle tested
drone arsenals of any country on earth.
The most important drone in that arsenal, and the one you've been
hearing about most in our daily episodes, is the Shahid 136.
The Shahid 136 is officially described as a loitering
munition, though military analysts at the Royal United
Services Institute in London have challenged that
classification, noting it is more accurately described as a
one way attack drone. It is delta winged, meaning it
has a distinctive triangular wing shape with a pusher
propeller at the rear driven by a small piston engine producing
approximately 50 horsepower. It is about 3 1/2 meters long
with a wingspan of 2 1/2 meters. From above, it looks almost like
a large model aircraft. From below, it looks like a
flying bomb, because that is exactly what it is.
The drone carries an explosive warhead estimated at between 36
and 50 kilograms depending on the variant and the mission.
For context, 50kg of explosive is roughly comparable to a large
conventional artillery shell. It is enough to destroy a
vehicle, collapse a section of a building or kill everyone in a
medium sized room and cause serious structural damage to a
reinforced military installation.
The Shahid 136 can carry that warhead over a range of between
1000 and 2500 kilometers, depending on its flight profile
and payload configuration. That range means a Shahid 136
launched from western Iran can reach every Gulf state, every
American military base in the region, every major Israeli
city, and targets deep into Saudi Arabia without any
modification whatsoever. Its top speed is approximately
185 kilometers per hour. That is slower than many Second
World War propeller aircraft. It is dramatically slower than a
ballistic missile, which travels at speeds many times the speed
of sound. That apparent slowness is
actually a significant tactical asset rather than simply a
limitation. Slow flying, low altitude drones
are in some ways harder to detect and track than fast
moving ballistic missiles. Radar systems designed to detect
high speed threats can miss a slow moving drone flying at low
altitude below the radar horizon.
And the sheer number of Shahid 130 SI access that can be
launched simultaneously means that even the most sophisticated
air defense network can be overwhelmed by volume alone.
The drone is also extraordinarily simple to
manufacture. Military analyst Francis Tusa
estimated that a single engineer surrounded by the necessary
components could assemble 12 of them in a single 10 hour shift.
There is no advanced manufacturing facility required,
no specialist tooling, no rare earth materials.
The motor is simple. The navigation system is a small
circuit board. The warhead is unsophisticated.
A Shahid 136 can be built in a garage, and that is essentially
where Iran builds many of them small, dispersed production
sites across the country that are extremely difficult to
identify from satellite imagery and impossible to destroy all at
once. The Shahid batteries, typically
consisting of 10 drones each, can be transported and fired
from underground car parks, forest clearings or open fields.
Their launch sites are mobile, temporary and virtually
untraceable until the moment of launch.
This is the central strategic logic of the Shahid 136.
It is not win through speed or stealth.
It wins through numbers, economics and simplicity.
A Shahid 136 costs approximately $20,000 to build.
The interceptor missiles used to shoot one down cost between
1,000,000 and $12 million each, depending on which system is
used. For every dollar Iran spends
manufacturing a Shahid drone, the United Arab Emirates spends
between 20 and $28.00 intercepting it, according to
calculations by Kelly Greco, a senior fellow at the Washington
Bay Stimson Center. If Iran fires 2000 Shahid 130 s
s and the United States intercepts 90% of them, America
has spent between 1.8 billion and over $10 billion in
interceptor costs alone. Iran spent $40 million building
the drones. The mathematics are brutal and
are not in America's favor. The Shahid 131 is the smaller
sibling of the 136, is more compact, carries a lighter
warhead of between 10 and 20 kilograms, and has a range of
approximately 700 to 1000 kilometers.
It's smaller size makes it slightly harder to detect on
radar, and it's lower cost means even larger numbers can be
fielded simultaneously. The 131 and 136 are typically
used together in mixed swarms, forcing air defense systems to
track and engage targets of different sizes, speeds and
flight profiles at the same time, which multiplies the
complexity of the interception problem considerably.
Then there is the Shahid 238. This is the jet powered
evolution of the 136. Unveiled in November 2023, the
238 replaces the piston propeller engine with a turbojet
engine, dramatically increasing its top speed to somewhere
between 500 and 800 kilometers per hour.
At that speed, the 238 is no longer the slow buzzing drone
that Ukrainian soldiers have learned to shoot down with small
arms and anti aircraft cannon. It is something considerably
harder to engage. It has three variants with
different guidance systems. One uses standard GPS navigation
for attacking fixed targets. 1 uses Electro optical and
infrared camera sensors, giving it a heat seeking capability
against military vehicles and radar systems, and 1 uses a
radar detection system specifically designed to find
and destroy air defense radars, a role the military calls
suppression of enemy air defenses.
The 238 is designed to fly ahead of or alongside conventional
drone swarms and destroy the radar systems that the air
defense batteries need to detect and engage.
The drones that follow destroy the radar 1st, and the
conventional Shahid 136 swarm that arrives moments later
becomes dramatically harder to stop.
The Mohedra series is Iran's primary reconnaissance drone
family. The Mohedra 6, the latest and
most capable version, entered service in 2017.
It has an endurance of approximately 12 hours in the
air, a line of sight data range of around 200 kilometers and is
equipped with Electro, optical and infrared sensors for
surveillance and targeting. The Mahedra 6 does not carry a
large explosive warhead in its primary reconnaissance
configuration. Its role is to find targets,
track troop movements and provide real time video
intelligence to ground commanders.
It is the eye in the sky that tells Iran where to direct the
strike drones. The Carer is a faster and more
capable attack drone adopted by Iran in 2010.
It is built on a reverse engineer design based on the
American Beechcraft MQM One O 7 target drone.
The Carer can reach speeds of approximately 900 kilometers per
hour, giving it a performance profile closer to a jet fighter
than a conventional drone. It carries A heavier payload
than a Shahid series and can be used for strikes against fixed
military installations, naval targets and air defense
infrastructure. The Arash is a kamikaze attack
drone that entered service around 2019.
It has a missile like body shape with mid mounted wings and a
single tail fin. Like the Shahid 136, it is an
expendable system designed to fly into its target and detonate
on impact. It is typically used in attacks
on radar installations, command centers, and hardened military
structures. Iran also operates the Shahid
129A surveillance and attack drone that bears a strong visual
resemblance to the American MQ One Predator.
Like the Predator, it has a long endurance of approximately 24
hours, can carry guided missiles, and can conduct both
reconnaissance and strike missions from extended range.
The Shahid 149 closely resembles the larger American MQ 9 Reaper
and represents the upper tier of Iran's drone combat capability
in terms of payload, range, and sensor integration.
And Iran operates the SIG 2 and the Simorg, both of which are
reverse engineer derivatives of the American Lockheed RQ 170
Sentinel stealth reconnaissance drone, which Iran captured in
2011. The fact that Iran captured one
of the most advanced American stealth reconnaissance drones
and then reverse engineered it into its own program is one of
the most extraordinary intelligence windfalls in modern
military history and speaks to the determination and capability
of Iran's defense engineering establishment.
Iran inducted 1000 newly developed drones into its
regular army in January 2026 alone, just one month before
Operation Epic Fury began. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard
Corps has its own separate and substantially larger drone
inventory, with production lines that Western analysts say no
other country outside China and the United States can match its
scale. Iran can build approximately 100
Shahid series drones per month under normal peacetime
production conditions. Under wartime conditions, with
full prioritization of resources and workforce, that number is
believed to be significantly higher.
Iran is also drawn on four years of Russian battlefield
experience with the Shahid in Ukraine.
Russian engineers improved the drones, anti jamming antennas,
modified its warheads and added data links using mobile
networks. Those upgrades were fed back to
Iran and are believed to be incorporated into the variants
now being used across the Gulf. Now let us turn to how America
is fighting back, because the American response to Iran's
drone campaign is one of the most strategically revealing
dimensions of this entire conflict.
The primary American air defense systems deployed across the Gulf
are the Patriot and the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense
System, known as that. Both are made by Lockheed
Martin. Both are designed to detect,
track and destroy incoming missiles and drones before they
reach their targets. Both are extraordinarily
effective and both are extraordinarily expensive to
operate at scale against a weapon that cost $20,000 to
build. The Patriot system has been the
backbone of American ground based air defense for four
decades. Its interceptor missiles,
particularly the PAC 3 variant, can engage ballistic missiles,
cruise missiles and drones at ranges of up to 70 kilometers
and altitudes of up to 24 kilometers.
A single PAC 3 interceptor cost several $1,000,000.
A full Patriot battery with its radar launchers and control
systems cost between 1:00 and $2 billion.
There are a limited number of these systems in the world. the
United States has been deploying them to support allies since
Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2022, and the stockpile of
interceptor missiles has been under sustained pressure for
years before Operation Epic Fury even began.
The United States produces approximately 600 Patriot
interceptors per year, 600 for the entire world's demand.
FAD is the higher tier system designed to engage ballistic
missiles at greater altitude and range than a Patriot.
A single FAD battery cost between 1:00 and $1.8 billion.
There are 9 active FAD batteries in the world as of mid 2025.
Each battery carries 48 interceptors across 6 launchers.
Those 48 interceptors represent the entire high altitude defense
capability of that battery. Replenishing them takes months
of production, integration, testing, transport and
deployment. During the June 20, 2512 Day War
between Iran and Israel, the United States fired more than
150 FAT interceptors, approximately 25% of its total
global FAT inventory. In less than two weeks.
Operation Epic Fury began with that stockpile already
significantly depleted at sea. the United States Navy's Arleigh
Burke class guided missile destroyers use the standard
missile family of interceptors, particularly the SM-3 and SM-6,
to engage in coming threats. This M6 cost approximately $4
million per missile. M6 production has historically
averaged little more than 120 units per year.
Standard Missile 3 interceptors are already running low,
according to multiple analysts, depleted by years of operations
against Houthi missile attacks in the Red Sea and the 2025 Iran
Israel conflict. The stockpile situation entering
this conflict was stressed at every single level of the
defense supply chain. The economic mathematics of this
situation are exactly the strategic problem that Iran's
drone program was designed to create.
Each Shahid 136 costs approximately $20,000 each.
Interception by a Patriot PAC 3 cost several $1,000,000 each.
That interception cost $13 million. the United States is
spending between 50 and 650 times more money shooting down
each Iranian drone than Iran spent building it.
At the scale of thousands of drones per week.
This arithmetic is not sustainable over an extended
conflict. This is what military analysts
call the drone attrition trap. Iran fires cheap drones in
enormous numbers. America intercepts most of them.
America wins tactically by protecting its assets.
But America loses strategically because it depletes its
interceptor stockpile faster than it can replenish it.
Kelly Greco at the Stimson Center put it bluntly.
For 30 years, the United States and other Western air forces had
easily gained air superiority over enemy battlefields and
therefore neglected investing in air and missile defense
capabilities. And what we have found, she
said, is that it is really hard to ramp up this production.
George Barros at the Institute for the Study of War was even
more direct. None of these things are novel
techniques, he said. America had the lessons from
Ukraine in front of it for four years and did not fully apply
them. Iran recognized this dynamic and
adapted its targeting strategy accordingly.
Rather than simply firing drones at military infrastructure,
Iranian forces began targeting the radar systems that make air
defense work at all. Without its radar, a Patriot
battery is blind. Satellite imagery from Planet
Labs analyzed by CNN show that the radar for an American THAD
battery at Mwafaq Salty Air Base in Jordan was struck and
apparently destroyed in the first days of the conflict, more
than 500 miles from Iran. Buildings housing radar systems
were also hit at 2 locations in the United Arab Emirates.
A radar site near Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia was
struck on March 1st, and the Qatari early warning radar
system at Hamda Hall was also damaged.
Iran was not just firing drones at targets, it was using cheaper
drones to systematically blind the expensive systems designed
to stop them. That is a sophisticated and
deliberate strategy. The American response has been
one of the most significant and underreported stories of this
conflict. In December 2025, Defense
Secretary Pete Hegseth ordered the accelerated acquisition and
deployment of cheap autonomous weapons.
CENTCOM established Task Force Scorpion Strike, the first
dedicated one way attack drone squadron in the history of the
United States military. And the drone and deployed is
perhaps the most extraordinary detail of the entire Operation
epic Fury story. The low cost unmanned combat
attack system known as Lucas is a direct copy of the Iranian
Shahid 136. Not inspired by it, not similar
to it, a direct copy. the United States military acquired down
Shahid and Garand drones from Ukraine's armed forces and its
engineers at an Arizona based company called Specterworks use
them as a blueprint. CENTCOM announced the combat
debut of Lucas on February 28th, 2026, the first day of Operation
Epic Fury with a social media post reading these low cost
drones modeled after Iran Shahid drones are now delivering
American made retribution. The Lucas has a range of
approximately 500 miles and carries a payload of
approximately 40 lbs, twice the payload of a Hellfire missile.
It costs $35,000 per unit. Iran designed the Shade 136 to
overwhelm American air defenses with cheap, expendable drones.
The United States copy the design and is now using it to
overwhelm Iranian air defenses. The weapon Iran created to
challenge American military dominance is now being turned
against the country that inspired it.
Ukraine's role in solving the drone problem deserves detailed
attention. In 2025 alone, Russia launched
more than 54,000 Shahid type drones at Ukraine, an average of
150 per day for an entire year. Ukraine had no choice but to
find solutions that did not deplete its finite missile
stockpile faster than the drones were arriving.
Ukraine built a layered defense system from a combination of
technology and improvisation. Electronic jamming vehicles
scramble GPS navigation. Germany's Jeopard anti aircraft
cannon shreds drones at a fraction of the cost of a
missile. Teams with shoulder fired
missiles are dispatched along predicted routes.
Fighter jets using their onboard cannon engaged drones from
behind. Ukraine even sent up vintage Act
52 training aircraft with Gunners firing rifles from open
cockpits to reach targets flying too high for ground teams.
And at the center is a small, cheap Ukrainian built
interceptor drone designed to destroy Shahid's in mid air,
achieving a 68 to 70% success rate and accounting for 30% of
all anti Shahid kills by early 2026.
Ukraine's Minister of Industry Alexander Kamishin summarized
the lesson directly. All of Iran's neighbors faced
the same 2 threats, he said. Missiles and drones,
intercepting them with traditional missile systems is
extremely expensive. In Ukraine, we learned how to
shift that equation. We developed drone interceptors
that are far cheaper and far more efficient for this type of
threat. Trump accepted Zelinsky's offer
to deploy Ukrainian drone specialist to the Gulf.
Those specialists are now operating in the region.
The Pentagon and at least one Gulf government are reportedly
in talks to purchase Ukrainian made drone interceptors
directly. The buzzing sound in the sky
over Bahrain and Dubai and Kuwait City is the sound of a
strategic calculation made in Tehran decades ago playing out
in real time. Iran built a weapon it could
afford an enormous numbers that its adversaries could not afford
to stop in enormous numbers. America answered by copying the
weapon and turning it around. Ukraine answered by building
systems that match the cost of the threat.
And the outcome of this drone attrition war being fought
across the skies of the Persian Gulf will depend on which side
can sustain its rate of production, consumption, and
adaptation over the days and weeks ahead.
This was a bonus episode of Epic Fury, the US Iran War podcast.
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