Wladimir van Wilgenburg recorded video in Erbil, in Iraq’s Kurdistan region, pointing out incoming drones high in the sky. In the footage of the opening days of the U.S.-Israeli strikes on Iran, U.S. defenses intercept several, each ending in a puff of smoke and delayed explosions on the ground. Van Wilgenburg says Iran-launched drones have become a daily occurrence over the city — and so have the interceptions. “Most of these drones … don’t reach their destination,” he says.
That reality highlights two urgent questions as Operation Epic Fury stretches into its third week: how long can U.S. defense systems keep fending off these attacks across the Middle East, and did the U.S. underestimate Iran’s drone threat?
Cost asymmetry is central. Iran’s Shahed-136 class attack drone costs roughly $20,000 to $50,000 to produce; U.S. interceptors such as Patriot missiles and THAAD interceptors cost millions each. That mismatch lets Tehran drive up the financial and logistical cost of defending against its strikes. U.S. officials told reporters they are concerned about a possible shortage of interceptors and may need to draw stockpiles from outside the region.
The attacks have been persistent and consequential. In the opening days, six U.S. service members were killed when an Iranian drone struck a U.S. operations center in Kuwait. Petroleum facilities in the UAE have been hit. Two Iranian drones struck the U.S. embassy in Riyadh, starting a fire. The U.S. embassy in Iraq has also been struck. Across the Gulf, countries report large numbers of engagements: one Gulf state said its air defenses had engaged hundreds of missiles and more than a thousand UAVs since the conflict began.
Drones vary wildly in cost and capability. At the high end are systems like the U.S. RQ-4 Global Hawk, a high-altitude surveillance drone with a roughly $130 million price. At the lower-cost, widely deployed end are expendable strike UAVs such as Iran’s Shahed family and versions copied or adapted by others. The Shahed design has been copied: the U.S. built a Shahed-like drone, LUCAS, and Russia developed its own variant, the Geran. Even cheaper are consumer quadcopters repurposed as loitering munitions — a hallmark of conflicts from Ukraine to Gaza.
Drones’ battlefield role has expanded since early U.S. uses in Afghanistan. They now dominate fighting in Ukraine, Gaza and the Gulf, and they enable smaller states and nonstate groups to project aerial force against more traditional air powers. The technology shifts the geometry of vigilance: soldiers once worried about threats from the ground and sides; now they must look up.
Ukraine’s experience has been particularly influential. Faced with superior Russian firepower, Ukrainian forces adapted off-the-shelf first-person-view (FPV) drones to strike tanks and armored vehicles, with notable success. That innovation spurred Russia to buy Shaheds from Iran and later to produce its own variants; Russia has launched tens of thousands of these loitering munitions in the four-year war. Ukraine developed many countermeasures — mobile guns, electronic jamming, and inexpensive intercepting drones — and claims a high kill rate against Shahed-type systems. Kyiv offered to share those lessons and systems, but U.S. leaders rebuffed some offers of direct assistance.
Even sophisticated U.S. missile-defense networks have not stopped every Shahed. The weapons are small, fly low, and can appear over the horizon late, making detection and interception difficult. U.S. officials say strikes on launchers and production sites have reduced Iranian capacity, and some defense leaders have touted a sharp drop in drone activity since the campaign began. But experts caution that a reduced tempo could reflect many factors, including tactical recalibration, and does not mean the threat is eliminated.
The present fighting has produced, effectively, two concurrent air campaigns. At higher altitudes, U.S. and Israeli jets and long-range strikes aim to suppress Iran’s air defenses and degrade production and leadership. At low altitude, Iran’s Shahed attacks have been the more disruptive, threatening bases, infrastructure, shipping lanes and civilian population centers. The result: civilians in Gulf cities increasingly shelter from drone strikes, and governments scramble to harden facilities and field layered defenses.
Experts argue the U.S. had ample warning that cheap strike UAVs would be a central feature of future conflicts. The lessons from Ukraine — where cheap drones reshaped tactics and required countermeasures — were widely discussed in U.S. military circles. Yet those discussions did not uniformly translate into deployed, layered defenses at many bases and critical sites in the Gulf. A layered system includes long-range interceptors and fighter aircraft but also point defenses close to the ground: simple, inexpensive measures such as machine guns, short-range interceptors and active systems dedicated to catching low-flying drones. It is that final layer, point defense to catch “leakers,” that many experts say was insufficiently emphasized.
Ukraine’s experience also offers tactical innovations for countering loitering munitions: small intercepting drones, low-cost sensors, and dispersed mobile defenses. Some U.S. leaders have been reluctant to adopt foreign-developed systems or assistance; others point to the rapid improvisation under way in theater to fill gaps.
Beyond tactics, the broader implication is strategic: drones can change roles currently performed by humans, freeing personnel for tasks requiring judgment while machines handle repetitive or high-risk missions. Yet proliferation of drones has not produced decisive victories; rather, in many cases it has contributed to grinding attrition, as seen in Ukraine. The Shahed’s prominence illustrates that it is not any single drone that is transformative but the broader availability, adaptability and low cost of unmanned systems.
As drones proliferate, they are opening a new chapter in air power and air defense. Nations facing cheap, expendable aerial threats must weigh investments in expensive interceptors against fielding low-cost, layered defenses and developing tactics that match the economics and tactics of modern unmanned warfare.