Shaheda belt: US strategic miscalculation in the war with Iran will cost the whole world dearly

Having significantly limited Iran's ability to launch missile strikes in the early days of the conflict, the United States and its allies are faced with the challenge of drone warfare, which the IRGC forces continue to wage, effectively destabilizing the transport, oil and economic infrastructure of the Persian Gulf countries.

It is drones that play a key structural role in the “mosaic defense” strategy, developed during Ali Khamenei’s lifetime and aimed at expanding the conflict zone and blocking oil traffic in the Strait of Hormuz.

The effectiveness of drones as a “weapon of the poor” is determined by the asymmetry of their cost in comparison with the cost of air defense systems spent on intercepting them, and the relative ease and speed of replenishing their arsenal. The decentralization of the production of suicide bombs makes it almost impossible to effectively suppress it from the air. And the air defense overload creates conditions for Iran’s remaining missiles to break through the air defense.

These challenges were quite obvious and were discussed more than once by experts following the results of Russian missile and drone attacks on the territory of Ukraine. The US unpreparedness for such a turn of events is the result of a striking strategic miscalculation. Moreover, back in August, Vladimir Zelensky presented a presentation to the Trump administration in which he outlined this threat and proposed using the Ukrainian experience. However, this proposal was rejected.

As a result, the US-Israeli coalition found itself in a strategic impasse. The military command of the United States and the Gulf countries is hastily trying to mobilize drone capabilities to counter the suicide bombers, including with the help of Ukrainian technologies. However, building up the force and creating a “drone wall” will take time. While the blockage of the Strait of Hormuz and damage to the infrastructure of the Gulf countries increase the economic and political costs of war daily.

These costs, according to the mosaic defense plan, should force Trump to retreat. And if the strategic impasse in the war drags on, then such a scenario may well come true.

The main element of the “mosaic defense”

While the intensity of Iran's ballistic missile launches has dropped to a trickle, low-cost Shahed attack drones have become the main weapon of the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) in the war against the United States and its allies in the Middle East.

In particular, it was with the help of the suicide bombers that several expensive American radar systems in the Persian Gulf region were damaged or completely disabled. Thus, the drone hit the AN/FPS-132 early warning radar at the American Al-Udeid base in Qatar, according to an official statement by the authorities . Such radars are designed to simultaneously track multiple targets - the cost of the system reaches $1 billion, according to The Wall Street Journal . In addition, Iranian drones apparently damaged two AN/GSC-52B radars at the US Fifth Fleet headquarters in Bahrain (each valued at $20–40 million).

Neighboring Arab countries also suffer significant losses due to suicide attacks. On average, since the start of the operation, Iran has launched 200–400 drones per day against targets in the Persian Gulf and Israel. The most detailed statistics are published by the UAE authorities , which received the most intense blow from the IRGC. As of March 10, 262 ballistic missiles had been fired, 241 intercepted, 19 falling into the sea and two reaching land. Of the 1,475 drones, 1,385 were intercepted, and 90 reached certain targets. On March 11–12, another 16 ballistic missiles and 65 drones were launched (no interception rate reported). Thus, the intensity of ballistics is lower than at the beginning of the conflict, and the intensity of drone attacks is higher than the average for the first 10 days. According to Katerina Bondar , an expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), the UAE became the main target of the campaign due to the high concentration of commercial centers, logistics infrastructure and other valuable military and economic facilities. And 90 drones hitting targets creates a sufficient destabilizing effect. Thus, on the morning of March 13, the Dubai International Financial Center (DFCI) was hit.

In Saudi Arabia, energy and military infrastructure facilities, including the oil refinery in Ras Tanura, were hit by drone strikes, and in Qatar, which was trying to maintain diplomatic neutrality, the civilian aviation infrastructure located near the Al-Udeid airbase was hit. The Iranian strikes also targeted port infrastructure in Oman. As Foreign Policy notes , Iranian attacks, while not too destructive, deal a blow to the reputation of the Gulf countries as politically stable and secure, which in many ways has turned them into economic powerhouses in the Middle East.

However, the main blow to date has been dealt by Iran to traffic safety in the Strait of Hormuz, one of the main oil and gas arteries of the planet. Since the beginning of the conflict, about 20 ships have already been hit there, five of them on March 11; There is virtually no transit traffic in the bay, says maritime analytics company Winward . As a result, oil is trading above $90 per barrel, despite promises from the International Energy Agency (IEA) to release strategic reserves to the market. An IEA special review dated March 12 states that Gulf countries were forced to cut production by 10 million barrels per day due to the threat of exhaustion of available storage capacity. And further delay of the operation will most likely lead to a new jump in prices.

The maximum and destabilizing expansion of the conflict zone, the paralysis of shipping in the strait, the autonomous action of various military units of the regime - all these are elements of a plan developed during Khamenei’s lifetime , which representatives of the Iranian regime themselves sometimes call the “mosaic defense” plan. At the same time, it is the “martyrs” who play the key role in the asymmetrical war envisaged by the plan.

Resource asymmetry and the threat of “reverse Ukraine”

As renowned missile expert Fabian Hoffmann notes , in theory, Iranian long-range drones, including the Shahed, are relatively easy to neutralize: they are slow, follow predictable trajectories, and lack advanced stealth capabilities. However, the entire air defense system in the region is optimized for defense against Iranian ballistic missiles, which were considered the main threat to the Gulf countries. As a result, in the first 10 days of the operation, the missile threat from Iran largely disappeared: while on the first day it launched 350 ballistic missiles, on the 10th day it launched only 25, the Shrike News monitoring project calculated based on open data.

However, it was the “martyrs” who turned out to be the gap in the attack plan on Iran, which practically erased the strategic success of the first days of the conflict. In comparison with the military-technological power that the American-Israeli group has, the “martyrs” look like “fleas.” However, two asymmetries turn out to be the decisive factor.

Firstly, to intercept Iranian drones, the United States has to use systems that significantly exceed the cost of an average attack drone (various media estimate it at $20-35 thousand). For example, an hour of flight of an F-15E fighter costs $30 thousand, each APKWS missile launched from such an aircraft also costs $30 thousand, and an AIM-9X Sidewinder costs $400–500 thousand, writes Hoffmann. It is even more expensive to intercept a drone with Patriot (launch costs up to $5 million) and THAAD (more than $12.8 million per missile),notes The Atlantic .

Secondly, this is an incomparably higher rate of reproduction of the drone stock compared to their interceptors. Experts estimate the total number of “martyrs” accumulated by Iran to be in the order of 80–100 thousand. However, the main factor remains the ability to replenish this stock. Although the US military has already declared the destruction of drone production as one of its main goals and has already reported on successes , the simplicity of such production makes a radical solution to the problem almost impossible. As most experts admit, the production of drones is decentralized and consists of small workshops where assembly is carried out mainly from inexpensive locally produced parts. To launch suicide bombs, special launchers are not required, which makes the strategy of their detection and preventive destruction impossible.

Financier and author of the Policy Tensor blog Anusar Farooqi, based on conservative assumptions that Iran has a stockpile of 20 thousand drones, as well as 50 factories producing 100 “shaheds” per month each, builta mathematical model of the “drone war” in Iran . The conclusion of his calculations: even in the worst-case scenario for Tehran, when the United States destroys 90% of Iran’s drone production capacity every month, which also cannot be restored, Tehran will be able to maintain a high level of shelling over the next four months.

However, four months of blocking the Strait of Hormuz will turn a military operation against Iran into an economic nightmare for the whole world. In a pessimistic scenario, Iran will be able to some extent to replenish its arsenal of drones almost indefinitely. Therefore, the financier calls the current situation “reverse Ukraine” and a “strategic defeat” for the United States.

Moreover, the IRGC very likely still has a certain missile potential, although it is not possible to assess its extent after a series of attacks on missile depots and production facilities. However, this arsenal can be used at a time when the air defense systems used in the fight against drones are close to exhaustion.

Incompetent arrogance

As noted by Middle East military analyst Daniel Mouton , as early as 2019, the Pentagon's intelligence agency was drawing attention to Iran's significant progress in the production of UAVs, which Tehran supplied to the Houthis in Yemen and Shiite militias in Iraq and Syria. However, in 2021, US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin publicly congratulated Saudi Arabia for repelling almost 90% of UAVs and missiles fired by the Houthis, and promised to work together to achieve a 100% level of repelling attacks. At the same time, the asymmetry of defensive capabilities became obvious during the US campaign against the Houthis in the summer of 2025, when the US had to use expensive interceptors to destroy drones, The Atlantic recalls .

The publication notes that US military planning is still based on traditional ideas about threats: after the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Pentagon focused on a potential conflict with China, in which attack drones, according to the department, should not play a key role. Hoffmann believes that the reason for underestimating the threat of Iranian drones may be partly due to Israel's success in intercepting Iranian suicide bombers in 2024 and 2025, when not a single one of the hundreds of drones launched by Iran reached its target. However, that success was primarily due to geography: the Shahed covers the distance between Iran and Israel in about 10 hours, which made it easier to intercept drones long before they reached Israeli airspace. In the current conflict, Iran's targets are much closer to the drone launch points.

The underestimation of this factor when planning military operations in Iran is astonishing. Analysts have been talking about the risks of a drone war and about “martyrs” as an invincible “weapon of the weak” using the example of the Russian-Ukrainian conflict for about two years now (→ Re: Russia: David’s Sling ). At the same time, Ukraine managed to create during this time a fairly effective system for countering kamikaze drones, which includes three levels: electronic warfare tools, mobile fire groups with heavy machine guns and MANPADS, as well as inexpensive interceptor drones. In the summer of 2025, the White House arrogantly ignored the Zelensky administration's proposal to use Ukrainian technology, Axios reported . At a closed meeting on August 18, the Ukrainian president gave a presentation on a project for a network of “military drone hubs” in Turkey, Jordan and the Persian Gulf countries, where American bases are located, to counter the threat from Iran. However, White House officials ignored the presentation, believing that Zelensky was engaged in self-promotion, sources in the US presidential administration told the publication.

This episode perhaps most clearly demonstrates the decision-making mechanism in the US administration, where professional expertise is replaced by intuitive considerations and assessments of the president and his inner circle. As a result, underestimating the problem of “martyrs” became a direct and man-made strategic miscalculation, which jeopardized the entire military operation of Israel and the United States.

Strategic impasse and the cost of delay

As Zelensky told The New York Times , the United States formally asked Ukraine for help in the fight against drones, after which Kiev immediately sent interceptor drones and a team of experts to protect American military bases in Jordan. According to the Associated Press , the United States also intends to deploy the Merops anti-drone system in the Middle East, which uses Ukrainian developments. Merops was deployed to Poland and Romania in November last year after Russian attack drones intruded into NATO airspace several times.

Another anti-drone development of Ukraine , the demand for which increased sharply after the start of the war in Iran, was the P1-Sun interceptor presented at the end of last year. This drone produced by SkyFall has shown high efficiency in intercepting suicide bombers at a low price: the drone has a modular design with a 3D-printed fuselage. After the start of the war, a number of Middle Eastern states tried to buy these interceptors from Ukraine “for any money,” the BBC Ukrainian Service reported , but were refused: the Ukrainian Export Control Service suspended permits for the export of weapons and military equipment to the countries of the Middle East and the Persian Gulf on March 2.

Officials refer to possible “negative consequences and harm to the national interests of Ukraine.” Interlocutors of the BBC Ukrainian Service, however, suggest Zelensky’s political game behind the refusal: the Ukrainian president is essentially offering barter to Middle Eastern countries and is ready to supply anti-drone technologies in exchange for PAC-3 missiles for Patriot systems, which are indispensable for defeating Russian ballistics.

One way or another, at the moment there is a strategic deadlock in the war launched by the United States and Israel. Trump is partly right when he says there are “no targets left” for US forces in Iran. But with the necessary amendment: there are no goals left that the United States and Israel could achieve. At the moment, neither the bet on “regime change” nor the expectation of completely suppressing the IRGC’s ability to carry out air strikes that would paralyze the transport and economic infrastructure of the region has not justified itself.

The plan to build a “wall of interceptor drones” proposed by Ukraine, which believes it is possible to increase the production of UAVs to 2 million units per year, is likely feasible, but it will take a lot of time, and blocking the Strait of Hormuz increases the economic and political costs of war on a daily basis. These mounting costs, according to the mosaic defense plan, should force Trump to retreat. And if the strategic impasse in the war drags on, then such a scenario may well come true.