Iran's plans for its drones may be much different than how Russia is using them in Ukraine
AP Photo/Roman Hrytsyna
- Russia's use of Iranian drones in Ukraine has been framed as Iran trying to test out its hardware.
- But Russia has so far been using those drones in a manner different than Iran would likely use them.
- That disparity means the implications for military dynamics in the Middle East also remain clear.
The news that Russia has begun to employ Iranian military equipment, particularly kamikaze attack drones, in its war against Ukraine has led some observers to frame that conflict as a proving ground for Iran's military technology.
While the impact of these weapons on the trajectory of the Russia-Ukraine War will be subject to extensive debate, the implications for military dynamics in the Middle East are also far from clear, as Russia has so far employed its Iranian drones in a manner that Iran itself may not.
To understand the implications of these developments for Iran's military posture vis-à-vis the United States, Israel and Gulf Arab states, it is important to appreciate the context in which Iran developed its drones and how Iran and its nonstate allies have employed these systems to date.
For all the attention given to Iran's ballistic missiles, the country has spent more than a decade diversifying its strike capabilities. While ballistic missiles offer unmatchable speed, the bulk of Iran's ballistic-missile force, particularly its long-range systems, has long been of limited accuracy.
Over the past decade, this situation has changed, and Iran now fields a growing and diversifying array of increasingly accurate ballistic missiles.
John Davison/Reuters
These improvements in accuracy have made Iran's ballistic force more effective, as exhibited in the January 2020 strikes against an Iraqi airbase housing US soldiers in retaliation for the US assassination of Iranian military commander Gen. Qasem Soleimani.
Nevertheless, these gains have been largely offset by improvements in the ballistic-missile defense capabilities of the United States, Israel and Iran's Gulf Arab neighbors. At the same time, Iran's achievements in improving the accuracy of its missiles have come at the cost of affordability, just as Tehran needs an ever-larger force of missiles to overcome the improving ballistic-missile defenses of its adversaries.
In this context, longstanding efforts toward developing jet-powered land-attack cruise missiles and analogous propeller-driven kamikaze drones dating back to the 1990s have taken on new importance, as these types of munitions offer a more cost-effective — and in certain respects a more militarily effective — means of striking many of the same types of targets with superior levels of accuracy.
Since its development and use of unmanned aircraft in the context of the Iran-Iraq War in the 1980s, Iran has consistently experimented with the use of drone technology in various roles.
As early as the 1990s, Iran began developing expendable attack drones, typically propeller-driven unmanned aircraft carrying explosives that crash into a target and detonate their payload much like a jet-powered cruise missile such as the United States' well-known Tomahawk missile.
While overshadowed by Iran's ballistic-missile force, the first notable employment of Iran's drones dates back to 2006, when Hezbollah — the Lebanese group that is Iran's primary nonstate regional ally — employed small numbers of them against Israel in a war largely shaped by Hezbollah's massive use of unguided rocket artillery.
More recently, the Houthis — Iran's nonstate ally in Yemen — have repeatedly employed more advanced Iranian drones against Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates since 2015. Iranian drones were notably employed alongside cruise missiles in the attacks on Saudi oil facilities in September 2019.
The Shahed-131 and Shahed-136 drones furnished to Russia — apparently designated by the Russian military as the Geran-1 and Geran-2, respectively — are therefore but the latest examples of a long-running trend.
REUTERS/Roman Petushkov
Weighing around 440 pounds and with a wingspan of 8 feet, the Shahed-136 and other attack drones of its class are typically deployed on launcher trucks; the Shahed-131 is a smaller and lighter design of the same configuration.
Unlike much smaller and lighter drones that can be launched by hand and tend to be powered by batteries, the Shahed-131 and Shahed-136 are equipped with a small piston engine that can sustain cruise speeds of around 95 mph.
In contrast, the propeller-driven Shahed-129, one of Iran's larger drones, and its American analog, the MQ-1 Predator, have a loaded weight of around 2,200 pounds, while jet-powered cruise missiles like the American Tomahawk and Russian Kalibr weigh over 2,650 pounds.
By virtue of the smaller payload and slower speed, attack drones in the class of the Shahed-131 and Shahed-136 are much more affordable and simpler to manufacture, and they can therefore be fielded and expended in much greater numbers.
It is difficult to discern exactly how Iran intends to employ its strike capabilities in a full-fledged conflict with the United States, Israel or its Gulf Arab neighbors. But the country's continued investment in ballistic and cruise missiles alongside attack drones indicates that it is pursuing an increasingly composite, or hybrid, set of strike capabilities, in which lower-end and higher-end systems are complementarily employed in pursuit of combined arms synergies.
Unlike the Houthis in Yemen, who have largely employed strike capabilities provided by Iran at a small scale and in a rather sporadic fashion, the limited available evidence of Iran's real-world employment of attack drones suggests that it appreciates the role that combined arms integration can play in striking complex targets, as well as the role of mass in both overcoming defenses and inflicting high levels of damage.
The examples of Iranian strikes against Saudi oil facilities in 2019 and US forces in Iraq in 2020 suggest that Iran's military recognizes the strengths and weaknesses of its diverse array of strike systems and is capable of skillfully integrating these systems in complex operations.
Reuters
Given the dearth of examples in which a state, rather than a nonstate actor, has employed Iranian drones in combat operations, it is tempting to view Russia's use of them against Ukraine with an eye on military dynamics in the Middle East and surmise that Iran will employ these systems in similar ways to attain similar effects.
Although Russia's use of Iranian drones may provide some evidence of the reliability of Iranian designs and their relative effectiveness, particularly as Ukraine's air defenses improve and adapt, Russia nevertheless appears to be employing these systems in very different ways than what Iran's military planning and objectives may dictate.
With Russia seemingly having depleted much of its inventory of conventionally armed land-attack missiles, it is significant that Russia is employing its newly supplied attack drones on a stand-alone basis, without combined arms integration alongside crewed combat aircraft and missiles of various types. This is consequential for several reasons.
First, kamikaze drones, including the Iranian designs operated by Russia, tend to carry small payloads that limit the types of targets that they can significantly damage, let alone destroy.
While the roughly 45-90 pounds of high explosives that drones of this type typically carry can devastate a vehicle or a small building, larger structures vital to the Ukrainian war effort, whether bridges or steel mills, would be able to sustain the damage from such strikes and remain operable at some level.
Given that it appears to lack adequate numbers of suitable combat aircraft or ballistic and cruise missiles, Russia is incapable of significantly damaging such targets in Ukraine. As a result, much of Ukraine's transport system, for example, remains operable eight months into the war.
National Guard of Ukraine/Reuters
In contrast, Iran's strike capabilities appear designed to complement one another, with low-end kamikaze drones used to degrade defenses so that ballistic and cruise missiles with larger payloads can be used to severely damage if not destroy more resilient targets.
In so doing, Iran is better-positioned to damage — if not destroy — critical infrastructure in a conflict, and the rather sacrificial expenditure of relatively low-cost kamikaze drones serves a more appreciable purpose than the damage inflicted by Russian drone attacks in Ukraine thus far. While these have incurred severe humanitarian costs against the civilian population, they remain primarily a nuisance in terms of military effectiveness.
Second, the propeller-driven Iranian drones that Russia is now using are slow and, if detected while in transit, provide ample warning for defenders to activate defenses. While this can paralyze defenders by forcing them to wait for a slow-maneuvering object to strike one of any number of potential targets in a wide area, it nevertheless means that these drones are unsuitable against certain types of targets, particularly mobile military targets as opposed to stationary structures.
The only practical way to overcome these limitations without making the attack drones as expensive as conventional cruise missile designs is to employ them in a combined arms fashion — that is, alongside combat aircraft as well as ballistic and cruise missiles and even artillery in a battlefield context.
So far, Russia has not employed its Iranian-sourced drones in this manner, and Iran's large stockpile of fast conventionally armed ballistic missiles with various ranges suggests that an Iranian strike campaign may look very different from what Russia is presently undertaking against Ukraine.
Taken together, this means that Ukraine may not be the proving ground for Iran's drone technology that many observers are anticipating. Russia appears to be employing Iranian drones in a manner more akin to the Houthis in Yemen, albeit on a wider scale and at a higher tempo, rather than as Iran itself appears to intend.
Nevertheless, the employment of Iran's latest military technologies in a new context constitutes an unexpected turn of events not just for the Russia-Ukraine War, but also for military dynamics in the Middle East.
Shahryar Pasandideh is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Political Science at the George Washington University and an International Security Program Fellow at the Belfer Center of Harvard University.
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