The US military faces a devastating cost asymmetry in its air war against Iran: it is burning through interceptor missiles worth millions of dollars each to shoot down Shahed drones that Iran produces for roughly $30,000 apiece.
As "Hvylya" notes, citing The Atlantic, Iran launched more than 2,000 drones between Saturday and yesterday morning. To counter them, the US and its allies have deployed some of their most expensive assets - Patriot-missile batteries, Apache helicopters, and F-35 fighter jets. The preliminary Pentagon estimate puts the war's daily cost at $1 billion, potentially requiring up to $50 billion in supplemental funding from Congress.
Some of Iran's drones are so basic they run on repurposed lawnmower engines. Yet even if the US had a surplus of Patriot missiles, they are not designed to stop a swarm of attack drones. "There are not great defenses available to the U.S. military to defend against the Shahed," a congressional official said after a classified briefing with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.
The roots of this mismatch go back years. During its counterterrorism campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan, the US never faced cheap offensive drone swarms. It developed the MQ-9 Reaper - a $30 million unmanned aircraft built for precision strikes, not for fighting off low-cost threats. After that, Pentagon planning shifted to a potential conflict with China, focused on long-distance force projection. Meanwhile, Iran quietly expanded its drone arsenal. The semi-official Tasnim news agency reported in January that Iran's armed forces had received 1,000 new drones.
Alternative approaches exist. Lasers could bring the cost of intercepting a drone down to a few dollars. Ukraine has developed AI-enabled interceptor drones that cost as little as $1,000 and achieve a 90 percent success rate against Shaheds. But the US never integrated these solutions before launching its offensive.