The Trump administration, which has expressed frequent exasperation with all that has been asked of it by Ukraine, had an urgent request of its own this week.
With swarms of Iranian drones breaching U.S. air defense systems and striking targets across the Middle East, Ukraine — which has spent years confronting nearly identical attacks — was asked to come to the aid of the United States and its partners.
“We received a request from the United States for specific support in protection,” against Iran’s drone systems, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said Thursday on X. Ukrainian advisers and systems would shortly be on their way to the Persian Gulf region, Zelensky said, because “Ukraine helps partners who help ensure our security.”
It was a rare moment for Zelensky to be in position of lending assistance — however small in scale — a year after he was pilloried in an Oval Office visit with President Donald Trump for pleading for U.S. support with “no cards” to play of his own and for not showing sufficient gratitude.
More broadly, however, the U.S. request has focused attention on why the United States and its gulf allies have seemed poorly prepared for retaliatory drone strikes by an adversary that has spent much of the past four years stockpiling lethal “Shahed” drones by the thousands, as well as whether U.S. and other military leaders had absorbed the lessons of Russia’s war in Ukraine, including incursions into NATO airspace.
“If you are planning a war against Iran — the original purveyor of Shahed drones — and you are surprised that Shaheds are numerous and difficult to intercept you haven’t been paying attention,” said Dara Massicot, a defense and security analyst at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
“There is a multiyear disconnect between the Ukrainian combat experience and institutionalizing its lessons in the U.S. military,” Massicot said. As a result, she said, the United States and its allies are “reaching out to Ukraine in a time of crisis.”
A U.S. official acknowledged a U.S. request but said it was unclear whether it was before or during the current operation.
“Contact was made on how to work together and benefit from their experience,” the official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive communications. The White House declined to provide further details and referred to Trump’s comments to Reuters on Thursday. The president said the U.S. would accept assistance from any country when asked about Zelensky’s comments.
U.S. and allied air defense systems have blunted the vast majority of Iran’s drones attacks, and U.S. and Israeli strikes inside Iran have destroyed key launch sites, according to U.S. military officials and independent analysts.
U.S. Central Command has posted videos touting its hits on Shahed launch sites.
But the relatively small number of Iranian drones that slipped past allied defenses have killed U.S. soldiers and caused high-profile damage.
The only deadly attack on U.S. forces so far was a drone strike that hit a military tactical operations center in Kuwait and killed six U.S. soldiers, according to U.S. officials. In a separate incident, a pair of drones penetrated Saudi Arabia’s defenses and hit the U.S. Embassy complex in Riyadh on Monday, destroying CIA facilities on the top floor of the building with no known casualties.
Other targets damaged by drones include an attack on communications equipment for the U.S. Navy’s Fifth Fleet in Bahrain, a luxury hotel in Dubai’s Palm Jumeirah archipelago and a British military base in Cyprus. One of Saudi Arabia’s largest oil refineries and a major terminal for liquefied natural gas in Qatar were both closed temporarily after drone attacks.
The success of these strikes has been a source of irritation to Trump administration officials.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth lashed out at coverage of Iran’s drone attacks this week during a news conference at the Pentagon. “We’ve taken control of Iran’s airspace and waterways without boots on the ground,” Hegseth said. “But when a few drones get through or tragic things happen, it’s front-page news.”
The U.S. appeal to Ukraine for help is part of a broader scramble by countries in range of Iran’s drone fleet for ways to address one of the more vexing challenges of modern warfare.
The gulf region is strewn with sophisticated air defense systems — including Patriot missile batteries — but has proved vulnerable to a relatively low-tech weapon: drones that are manufactured on a mass scale by Iran and Russia, evade radar by flying at slow speeds low to the ground and can be launched by the hundreds without need for conspicuous staging platforms.
The turn to drones has also upended the economics of warfare. Shaheds cost an estimated $30,000 to $50,000 apiece to produce. They are propellor-driven aircraft with eight-foot wingspans that carry 110-pound explosives in the nose of the fuselage.
The war in Iran has exposed the extent to which shooting down Shaheds can come at a disproportionate cost to the United States and its allies — involving Patriot missiles that cost an estimated $4 million apiece or fighter jets armed with munitions that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Iran appears to be relying on its drone fleet to achieve its strategic aims in the conflict, including spreading fear and inflicting economic costs on U.S. partners in the region, as well as forcing these militaries to burn through critical air defense stockpiles.
Iran’s Fars News Agency, which is affiliated with the country’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, posted a video earlier this week that purportedly showed underground bunkers lined with rows of Shaheds, though it is not clear when the images were recorded.
The pace of Iran’s attacks has tapered off by as much as 83 percent since the start of the conflict, according to U.S. military officials, as U.S. and Israeli strikes pounded Iran’s launch sites.
Even so, Iran has fired more than 2,000 drones since the war began and is projected to launch as many as 5,000 within the first month of the conflict, according to military analysts at the Hudson Institute. That would rival the rate achieved by Russia in its campaign to subjugate Ukraine.
“The big picture so far is that you’ve got gulf states overloaded with Patriots and F-16 and Typhoon [fighter jets]” facing waves of incoming drones aimed at overwhelming their defenses, said a Western security official with knowledge of the efforts to enlist help from Ukraine. The official spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive military issues.
The Pentagon’s doctrine for decades has focused on ballistic missiles and modern aircraft deployed by peers like Russia and China, requiring expensive and sophisticated systems like Patriot and THAAD batteries. The systems are built for those threats in mind and watch the sky and atmosphere for certain trajectories and speeds.
Out of necessity, Ukraine’s military and the country’s defense industry have become laboratories of counter-drone innovation.
Across the front lines the Ukrainian military has deployed networks of sensors and microphones that recognize the acoustic signature of the Shahed’s lawnmower-like sound and alert teams to track them in real time. Ukrainian air defense operators also exploit the Shaheds’ slow speed and flat profile to bring them down with dirt-cheap options like truck-mounted machine guns.
Another key to Ukraine’s success is its fleet of cheaply made, mass-produced interceptors including the Sting system made by the Ukrainian group Wild Hornets. The interceptor drones are operated by pilots with first-person view goggles who send them crashing into drones like Shaheds. They are portable and easy to launch compared with more cumbersome air defenses.
The United States has increased its counter-drone capability in the Middle East in recent years, particularly after attacks on U.S. forces from Iranian proxies surged following Israel’s ground invasion into Gaza in 2023. It has deployed systems that can fire cheaper and smaller munitions rather than relying on scarce systems like the Patriot.
But the speed of change in some areas has been insufficient to keep up with fast-changing threats, officials and troops have said. “I don’t think drones or counter drones will be a priority until a full generation has had to deal with fighting them,” said an Army officer who was not authorized to speak to the press and spoke on the condition of anonymity.
In addition to the request from Washington, Ukraine has also fielded inquiries from the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Jordan, Kuwait, Bahrain and Saudi Arabia, according to Western officials. In return, Ukraine may be hoping to bolster its ties to the United States and attract investment from gulf states in its burgeoning defense sector.
The belated appeals for assistance reflect what analysts described as a puzzling failure by the United States and others to prepare for large-scale drone conflict despite the United States’ deep involvement in the war in Ukraine and abundant signs to Iran’s neighbors that Tehran had spent the past several years stockpiling Shaheds.
There were also previous warnings in the Middle East of the danger posed by Shaheds.
Because they fly at low altitudes as they near their targets, Shaheds operate below the level that many radars are calibrated to look toward, and they can get lost in the clutter of objects at or below the horizon.
Those factors may have contributed to a deadly 2024 attack by Iranian proxies on an American base in Jordan using a Shahed-type drone. The weapon was detected by U.S. troops at the base but may have been mistakenly dismissed as birds in flight on the horizon or another nonthreatening object, investigators found.
The drone slipped through defenses, killing three soldiers in their sleeping quarters. A request by commanders for both a radar that could better detect drones and an air defense system was denied before the attack, in part because such defense resources were limited and needed elsewhere, a report found.
Despite the apparent shortage of drone-focused defensive systems in the gulf, the Pentagon has touted the success of its own one-way attack drone, deployed this week in Iran for the first time in combat. The drone is called LUCAS, for Low-cost Uncrewed Combat Attack System, and costs about $35,000 per unit. It is modeled on Iran’s Shahed.
David L. Stern in Kyiv contributed to this report.
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