Anushka Saxena
The US-Israel war on Iran, starting February 28, 2026, and spilling over both in terms of geographic scope and intended outcomes, has spotlighted, among other crucial aspects, Tehran’s attritional capabilities against a much-too superior adversary. Its use of uncrewed aerial systems, or ‘drones’, in this regard, has emerged as key in both, explaining Tehran’s strategy, and epitomising the revolution in the global means and methods of warfighting in an era of network-centric, beyond-visual-range, and asymmetric warfare. There are three main conclusions I draw from Iran’s strategy of using its Shaheds:
The Shahed is representative of the accessible proliferation of precision strike capability. Iran has been able to engineer a low-cost UAV and produce it en masse. This UAV has been able to perform nearly as well as much more expensive systems. The Shahed challenges traditional cost-benefit calculations in air defence and enables sustained attritional campaigns against more powerful adversaries.
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