Drones Are Changing Warfare

Breakfast with Bwana

Increasingly autonomous drones are redefining warfare, replacing expensive, legacy artillery with precise mass achieved through scalable, low-cost precision attacks

By Anil Madan

The other day, I read that Ukraine can produce up to 10 million drones a year whereas the US can just about manage 100,000. All of Europe combined does not have any more robust production capacity.

Cheap drones — increasingly autonomous or remotely guided — are shifting warfare away from expensive, cumbersome, and touted ‘exquisite’ artillery toward a model of precise mass, achieved by launching large numbers of low-cost, precision-guided weapons and sensors in scalable, systematic attacks.

Drone Warfare. Pic – Karve International

Among the world’s trio of great powers, the United States and Russia no longer have an edge in inventing this useful military technology. China, on the other hand, probably has a distinct advantage because it controls critical chunks of the supply chains necessary for access to components and rare earth minerals.

This shift erodes traditional advantages in airpower, strains defense-industrial bases, and forces militaries to rethink doctrine, procurement, and air defense.

Key features of this new era:

– Low cost, long range: Systems like Iran’s Shahed 136 and Russia’s Geran 2 can reach hundreds to over a thousand miles for tens of thousands of dollars per unit, versus hundreds of thousands or millions for traditional missiles. For example, the Iranian Shahed 136 drone is said to have an estimated range of 940-1240 miles, a payload of 110–330 pounds, and a cost around $35,000.

– Mass and saturation: Iran and Russia routinely launch swarms — hundreds or even over a thousand drones in a week — to overwhelm air defenses. Iran can produce around 10,000 Shahed type drones per month and launched more than 1,000 in the first week of the current Gulf conflict.

– Economics of attrition: Shooting down a $35,000 drone with a $3–4 million interceptor is strategically and fiscally unsustainable. Operation Rough Rider against the Houthis cost nearly a billion dollars largely because expensive Patriot missiles were used against cheap drones.

– Rapid innovation cycles: Ukraine, in particular, has created a feedback loop where frontline experience, startups, and government labs iterate designs in weeks, not years. A product could move from prototype to frontline deployment within weeks. Ukraine’s intense experience allows it to withdraw underperforming drones from the field in short order.

– Doctrinal change: Drones have evolved from niche tools to being central to strike, air defense, logistics, and even naval warfare (e.g., Ukrainian maritime drones pushing Russia’s navy from the western Black Sea).

Implications for the Iran conflict

Iran has embraced drones as a way to offset US and Israeli technological superiority. Tehran unleashed a wave of Shahed drones striking targets in Bahrain, Kuwait, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and, of course, Israel. Iran even struck the US embassy in Saudi Arabia, and critical petrochemical plant infrastructure across the Gulf nations, making drones a critical element of the Iranian strategy for retaliation.

US Central Command head Brad Cooper testified to the Senate Committee on Armed Services that Centcom played a role in regional air defense that helped intercept “more than 6,000 one-way attack drones and over 1,500 ballistic missiles aimed at US forces, Israel, and Arab partners,” during the recent Iran conflict.

The implications of drones in warfare are obvious and profound:

– Regional vulnerability: Gulf states’ critical infrastructure — energy facilities, ports, airports, hotels — are now within reach of cheap, long-range drones, making strategic depth less meaningful.

– Cost imposition on defenders: US and allied forces are burning through expensive interceptors and high-end air defense systems to stop cheap drones, risking both budgetary strain and inventory depletion.
Given its production capability, Iran could flood the area with thousands of drones per day. This would cause the United States and its partners to not only spend immense sums of money and put them at risk of running out of air defenses. For example, the US has already fired about 400 Tomahawks in the Iran conflict — roughly 10 percent of its inventory — at a cost of $800 million.
The same money could have produced 23,000 LUCAS drones (the US variant of the Shahed).

– Arms race in cheap drones: Ukraine’s success with drones is legendary. But Iran has built its own arsenal and also supplied Russia. In a curious twist, both Russia and the US have emulated Iranian technology for drone manufacture.

Strategically, the Gulf War is becoming a live laboratory for drone-on-drone and drone-versus-missile dynamics, with both sides experimenting with saturation attacks, layered defenses, and cost-imposition strategies.

Implications for the war in Ukraine

1. Ukraine as the world’s drone warfare incubator

In addition to being the leader in offensive use of drones, Ukraine is also the leader in drone interception, layered air defense, electronic warfare, and unmanned systems, after four years of conflict with Russia.

– Scale of use: By early 2025, Ukrainian soldiers were using drones in “80 to 85 percent of all frontline strikes.”

– Cost and volume: First person view (FPV) drones costing $500–$2,000 are used to hit tens of thousands of targets each month.

– Range and reach: Some Ukrainian drones can strike Russian bases and oil refineries up to 1,800 miles away.

– Diverse domains: Ukraine excels in: (i) interceptor drones, (ii) maritime drones that have effectively ended Russia’s naval dominance of the western Black Sea, and (iii) unmanned ground vehicles transforming logistics and casualty evacuation.

This has turned Ukraine into a “defense tech cluster in combat,” where soldiers, startups, and government agencies form a single ecosystem with extremely rapid feedback loops.

2. Russia’s drone saturation and attrition warfare

Russia, drawing heavily on Iranian designs, has embraced drone saturation:
By March 2024, Russia was launching 130 Shahed type drones a week, and six months later more than 1,100 per week. Some estimates are that Russian strikes on Ukrainian infrastructure now average around 143 attack drones per day at peak periods.

The implications are twofold. First, air defense systems face severe overload; even with interception rates around 80 percent, the sheer volume of attacks ensures that thousands of munitions still find their targets. This operational strain directly creates economic pressure, forcing Ukraine and its partners into the same lopsided cost-exchange dilemma seen in the Gulf — where expensive interceptors are spent against cheap drones — ultimately pushing them to develop more affordable counter-drone solutions

3. Ukraine as Europe’s “untapped arsenal”

With its technological advantage and scaled production, Ukraine holds $25–40 billion in defense related production capacity that is underused for lack of capital. Ukraine could be viewed as Europe’s untapped arsenal, capable of producing up to ten million drones per year.

The implications for Europe are profound. Opportunities for industrial partnership with Ukrainian drones co-produced in Germany, France, Italy and the UK, would allow Europe and its NATO component to rapidly scale unmanned systems without starting from scratch.

In turn, as President Trump pushes Europe to be more self-sufficient on defense and as US attention and resources are pulled toward the Indo-Pacific, Europe’s ability to deter Russia will increasingly depend on strategic autonomy which can be achieved by integrating Ukrainian drone expertise and production into its own defense posture.

Implications for a potential Chinese invasion of Taiwan

Drones are already central to thinking about a Taiwan contingency, even if they have not yet been used at the scale seen in Ukraine or the Gulf.

China has the industrial base, electronics supply chain, and AI capabilities to field massive numbers of cheap, long-range drones and loitering munitions:

China could use swarms of drones to overwhelm, by saturation, Taiwanese and US/allied air defenses, clear paths for its missiles and aircraft. Attack drones could be used to target radars, airfields, and logistics hubs.

Maritime drones — akin to Ukraine’s sea drones — could be used to harass or overwhelm Taiwanese and allied naval forces, mine sea lanes, or target amphibious staging areas.

Persistent drone surveillance would help China find and fix mobile targets on Taiwan and at sea, feeding data into long range missile and artillery systems.

The logic of precise mass — high volume, low cost, precision systems — appears to give China a decided edge. Given the vast distances in the Pacific Ocean and the limited range of drones, sophisticated and expensive US systems will be overwhelmed by cheaper munitions, with catastrophic consequences.

The implications are profound:

The US cannot rely solely on F 35s, B 21s, Tomahawks, and other exquisite systems in a Taiwan fight; it needs large stocks of cheap drones and loitering munitions to absorb attrition and maintain pressure.

The US will require massive supplies of drones to sustain a long conflict in the Western Pacific.

Taiwan and the US will need layered, cost-effective counter drone defenses: interceptor drones, electronic warfare, directed energy weapons, and AI enabled detection and tracking.

A doctrinal change will be required. Just as Europe must integrate drones into doctrine and training, US and Taiwanese forces must treat drones as standard munitions and sensors, not boutique assets — baking them into every level of planning, from infantry squads to fleet operations.

Strategic stability and escalation

Drones complicate escalation dynamics in a Taiwan scenario:

– Lower threshold for use: Drones can be used for probing, harassment, and gray zone operations (e.g., around Taiwan’s ADIZ or offshore islands) without the political cost of manned aircraft losses.

– Attribution and ambiguity: Covert or deniable drone attacks — like Ukraine’s Operation Spiderweb, where drones were smuggled into Russia in trucks — could be mirrored in cyber physical operations against US or Japanese bases, raising questions about proportional response.

The through line: from Iran to Ukraine to Taiwan

Across the Gulf, Ukraine, and a hypothetical Taiwan conflict, the same pattern emerges:

1. Power is shifting from quality alone to quality plus quantity. Cheap, precise, and increasingly autonomous drones allow states with smaller budgets — or those facing sanctions — to impose real costs on more advanced militaries.

2. Industrial capacity is now a front line. Who can build tens of thousands of drones (and counter drones) per month matters as much as who has the best fighter jet.

3. Defense economics are being rewritten. Firing multimillion dollar missiles at $35,000 drones is “as unwise as it is unsustainable.” The side that solves the cost exchange problem — through cheap interceptors, electronic warfare, and mass produced drones — will have a major advantage.

4. Doctrine and institutions must catch up. Ukraine shows what happens when a military fully internalizes drones; NATO exercises show what happens when others have not. The same lesson applies to Gulf states and to any future coalition defending Taiwan.

Cheerz…
Bwana

Mauritius Times ePaper Friday 22 May 2026