Three weeks into Operation Epic Fury, it’s clear that the defining weapon of the war is one the enemy is wielding. Iran’s inexpensive, deadly Shahed drone, which already has shown its devastating effectiveness when used by Russia to swarm Ukrainian defenses, has paid dividends for Iran as well. The Shaheds won’t win the war for Tehran. Firepower is so lopsided in favor of the United States (and Israel) that Iran’s successes are pinpricks delivered against a boxer landing a flurry of devastating body blows: more than 1,500 Iranian military dead versus 13 American soldiers killed, with Iran’s navy destroyed and its missile infrastructure badly degraded.
Still, as in Ukraine, what the humble Shahed lacks in punch, it makes up for in sheer numbers and cheapness to produce. Putting together a fiberglass body, a two-stroke gasoline engine copied from a 1980s German motor meant for ultralight aircraft, navigation by commercial GPS and a warhead is estimated to cost between $20,000 and $50,000 in parts and labor. Mass production is easy. And the volume of the drones has depleted costly Western defense systems, sometimes overwhelming them.
Analysis by ABC News reported that as many as 10 U.S. and allied radar installations across at least five Middle Eastern countries have thus far been damaged, either by Iranian drones themselves or by ballistic missiles evading interception amid incoming drone swarms.
Critics are pillorying President Donald Trump for launching a war without enough weapons on the shelf, especially the costly interceptors that are clearly struggling to keep the Shaheds at bay. Despite Pentagon assurances that it has more than enough firepower to finish the job, there are troubling signs that the U.S. military is already cannibalizing resources from other theaters. The exact numbers are hard to pin down — these are tightly held secrets for obvious reasons — but the squeeze appears real.
Real, but not fatal. And possibly even salutary. In reading “Mobilize,” a new book by Palantir Chief Technology Officer Shyam Sankar and his colleague Madeline Hart, you start to wonder whether Trump’s Iran gambit might accidentally be the thing that gets America’s defense sector in order. The observation often attributed to Otto von Bismarck — about God having special providence for fools, drunks and the United States of America — might yet again apply.
“Mobilize” is both rousing and alarming, an impassioned call to rebuild America’s defense industrial base. “Mass production is like a muscle,” Sankar and Hart write. “If you don’t use it, it atrophies.” The country that built the arsenal of democracy in World War II has for all sorts of historical contingencies — all crisply laid out in this readable tome — developed a kind of sclerosis when it comes to building weapons. The Defense Department dictates what gets built and how, and has a maddening array of rules and regulations in place that give preference to insiders and keep upstarts away.
The book is meant as a goad — to Pentagon bureaucrats strangling procurement in red tape, and to the restless Silicon Valley types who might be lured from building the next social media app into building the next generation of weapons. Sankar and Hart praise Trump’s April 2025 executive orders on defense acquisition reform, which the author compares to the most serious Pentagon overhaul since the Clinton era. The Trump directive mandates a preference for commercial off-the-shelf solutions, threatens to cancel any major program more than 15 percent over budget and tries to make it easier for start-ups to compete with defense-industry giants.
Many of the ingredients for a turnaround, in other words, are falling into place. And perversely, in launching the poorly justified Epic Fury and burning through billions of dollars’ worth of exquisite, expensive hardware that was sitting on shelves, Trump may have accidentally done the one thing frustrated Pentagon reformers could not: He has made the problem impossible to ignore.
Stockpiles of expensive weapons are a poor deterrent, Sankar argued at a recent Hudson Institute event. It’s our ability to credibly keep regenerating those stockpiles in what are likely to be long wars of attrition. “It’s production,” he said, adding, “You don’t have to make them the same old way. The thing that used to cost $2 million — I’m not even talking about new classes of munition — how do you make the same munition at a substantially lower cost basis? How do you reimagine some of that design?”
Can the U.S. really make a cheaper and better Tomahawk missile whose production we can scale to such a degree that it gives China pause? Of course. Sankar’s vision keeps the big, expensive stuff — nuclear submarines, stealth bombers — but dramatically expands the cheap end of the arsenal. That cheap end wouldn’t be one system but a whole ecosystem of different weapons at different price points: autonomous cruise missiles, unmanned surface vessels, directed-energy systems that can fry swarms of incoming drones. Companies such as Anduril, Saronic and Epirus are already building these.
The Shaheds detonating around the Persian Gulf underline the point that the era of relying purely on exquisite, expensive weapons is over. Watching cheap drones tear apart Ukraine’s Western-provided air defenses should have been a wake-up call, but the problem remained theoretical. Washington carefully rationed what was sent to the Ukrainians without asking difficult questions about U.S. arsenals. Now, by depleting existing stocks, Trump is forcing the reckoning: Just how will the U.S. rebuild? Hopefully, voices like Sankar’s will prevail as the scramble begins.
The post Iran’s cheap, deadly drones have done the U.S. a favor appeared first on Washington Post.
