When Iranian Shahed drones began tearing through the Gulf in the opening hours of Operation Epic Fury on February 28, killing American service members and overwhelming allied air defenses, Washington faced an uncomfortable revelation. The most powerful military in the world was flying into its first major drone war, having studied the problem primarily from afar, and had recently dismissed an offer from the one country that had been living in it for four years.
Nearly seven months before the bombing of Iran began, Ukrainian officials had offered the United States their battle-tested technology for downing Iranian-made attack drones. The Trump administration passed. American officials now describe that decision as one of the costliest tactical mistakes of the war. They prepared a detailed presentation displaying a map of the Middle East with a stark warning: Iran is improving its Shahed one-way-attack drone design.
The Trump administration dismissed the offer, then reversed course after Iranian drones began killing Americans.
The cost was measured almost immediately in blood and treasure. In the first two days of the war alone, the U.S. burned through a reported $5.6 billion in munitions. The Pentagon fired more than 850 Tomahawk missiles in five weeks of Operation Epic Fury alone — roughly a quarter of the total United States inventory, according to analysts at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, at a cost of approximately $3 billion, given a unit price of up to $3.6 million per missile.
Washington initially ordered 350 Tomahawks for 2026, which it has since increased to more than 1,000 annually under new framework agreements with Raytheon. However, timelines for achieving that rate remain unclear, and the U.S. has already expended more than 850 Tomahawks in the first five weeks of the campaign alone.
The economics were brutal from the start: shooting down $20,000 drones with multimillion-dollar interceptors is unsustainable against a comparatively modest adversary like Iran and becomes completely unthinkable in a scenario involving China or Russia.
The new drone powers — and America’s place among them
Low-cost, mass-produced drone warfare is reshaping every modern battlefield — and America is not leading it. Iran, Russia, and Ukraine have each shown they can turn out drones by the tens of thousands annually, in some cases pushing toward millions. The United States has not come close.
Iran’s Shahed-136 loitering munition, costing between $20,000 and $50,000 per unit, has become one of the defining weapons of the 21st-century battlefield. Iran supplied the design to Russia, which built its own production ecosystem. Russia’s domestically produced variant has since taken on a life of its own — navigation systems upgraded, warhead capacity expanded, and by early 2026, Starlink connectivity folded in. Moscow has set a production target of up to 1,000 Geran-2 drones per day.
Ukraine, forced into innovation by necessity, became the world’s most experienced practitioner of both drone attack and drone defense. More than 160 drone manufacturers operating in Ukraine have pledged to deliver 8 million first-person-view drones in 2026 alone. Over 80 percent of Russian battlefield casualties are now inflicted by Ukrainian drones, while a drone-dominated kill zone stretching roughly ten miles either side of the front lines makes any major offensive operation extraordinarily hazardous.
America went into the Iran war with its own version of the Shahed — a drone called LUCAS, built by Arizona startup SpektreWorks from a reverse-engineered Iranian airframe, priced at $35,000 a unit. It saw its first confirmed combat use on February 28. Full-rate production, however, had not yet begun.
The strategic irony was not lost on analysts: America struck Iran using a weapon derived almost entirely from Iran’s own signature strike platform.
Kate Bondar, a fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, tells The Cipher Brief the gap, however, runs deeper than raw production numbers.
“The gap is very real, especially in the category that matters most in modern attritional warfare: cheap, expendable, and rapidly replaceable systems,” she said, noting that to truly integrate first-person-view drones into operations, “volumes need to reach into the millions.”
Current U.S. plans for roughly 300,000 small drones by 2027 are a step forward, Bondar observed, but “still fall short of what this kind of warfare demands.”
The Ukrainian classroom
While Washington spent years deliberating over acquisition timelines, Kyiv was building the most combat-tested drone force on earth. Ukraine’s intercept rate against Shahed-class drones now approaches 90 percent — and Kyiv is aiming for 95.
Russia has launched nearly 57,000 Shahed-type drones at Ukrainian cities across four years of war. The low-cost defensive solutions Ukraine developed, however, were never replicated across Gulf nations or by the American military in the region. When Iran’s drones began arriving in mass, the United States was left improvising.
One Ukrainian drone specialist, speaking to The Cipher Brief at the Ground War symposium in Washington, explained that only three countries on the planet can fight with drones efficiently — Iran, Russia, and Ukraine.
“Americans have helped to produce these interceptors, but they don’t have the experience of applying them,” the military specialist, identified only as Yuri, noted. “Only those engaged directly in warfare, like Ukraine, have the understanding and intuition of how to apply new technology. And it’s changing every single day.”
Yuri, who came to the Ukrainian military with a background in IT and cybersecurity, described a feedback loop that American procurement culture has never had to replicate.
“The best way is close communication between manufacturers and the military,” he continued. “After using different types of drones or technologies, they need to provide fast feedback to manufacturers. These cycles of upgrades need to take a very short time. That’s why our drones are always up to date.”
Ukraine has now deployed 228 counter-drone specialists across five regional partners — Jordan, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait. Ukrainian specialists have also been dispatched to protect American military bases in Jordan, with Zelensky confirming that more than ten countries had requested Kyiv’s assistance. Trump initially rebuffed the offer.
“We don’t need their help in drone defense,” he told Fox News. “We know more about drones than anybody. We have the best drones in the world, actually.”
Days later, Washington reversed course.
Catching up — at war speed
To its credit, the Pentagon has moved with unusual urgency since the gap became undeniable. Travis Metz, the Pentagon’s drone dominance program manager, told senators that the Defense Department has committed $1.1 billion to buy drone systems over the next 18 months, including 30,000 small, one-way attack drones to be delivered to military units over the next five months. The broader Drone Dominance Program aims to acquire more than 300,000 low-cost drones by 2027, with the FY2026 defense budget allocating $13.4 billion for autonomous military systems.
Bondar, however, warns that ambition and production are different things.
“Success in this space depends on constant iteration,” she pointed out. “Russia has introduced dozens of modifications to Shahed systems and their employment over time. The United States moved too slowly for too long, and is still not operating at the scale or speed required.”
Lt. Col. Jahara Matisek, a non-resident research fellow at the U.S. Naval War College, tells The Cipher Brief the deeper problem is organizational.
“Russia and Iran treat drones as a consumable and design their whole kill chain around adaptation and attrition,” he said. “The U.S. spent too long with a boutique mindset: exquisite platforms, slow procurement, and drones as ISR accessories.”
In Ukraine, drone warfare doctrine doesn’t update on a doctrinal cycle; it updates on a survival cycle.
“Every three to four months, a new jamming technique or counter-drone tactic forces units to rewrite how they fight,” Matisek explained. “Squad leaders brief new engagement protocols after a single bad day.” In the U.S., doctrinal updates take years.
The China dimension makes all of this even more urgent. Matisek points out that a war in the Indo-Pacific would be a drone-and-missile volume fight at a scale that dwarfs anything seen in the Gulf, with China holding dominant positions across the upstream supply chain — batteries, optical systems and rare earth minerals.
Ukraine has worked hard to wean itself off Chinese drone components — the share dropped from roughly 97 percent at the start of the war to an estimated 38 percent by 2025, per the Ukrainian Council of Defense Industry and the Snake Island Institute. But Chinese supply chains still run through both sides of this conflict.
The United States faces the same dependency at precisely the moment it is trying to scale up: China controls an estimated 90 percent of the global commercial drone market and dominates production of the batteries, motors, cameras, and flight controllers that underpin virtually every small drone system in use today.
“What I think is most worrying,” Matisek continues, “is that the U.S. military in four weeks of the Iran war has basically spent four to five days’ worth of precision-guided munitions that it would need in a war with China. If a war with China broke out next month, the U.S. would only have enough PGMs for three days of fighting, at most.”
The model for getting this right already exists in American history. During World War II, eleven factories built the M4 Sherman tank using standardized engineering documentation, producing nearly 50,000 units between 1942 and 1946. The question now is whether, a generation into the drone age, the United States can do it fast enough.
“What matters now,” Bondar adds, “is whether these initiatives produce not just inventory, but a repeatable ecosystem: rapid procurement, operator training, software iteration, battle damage feedback, and industrial learning loops.”
The Cipher Brief is committed to publishing a range of perspectives on national security issues submitted by deeply experienced national security professionals. Opinions expressed are those of the author and do not represent the views or opinions of The Cipher Brief.
Have a perspective to share based on your experience in the national security field? Send it to Editor@thecipherbrief.com for publication consideration.
Read more expert-driven national security insights, perspective and analysis in The Cipher Brief
