Michael C. Horowitz is a senior fellow for technology and innovation at the Council of Foreign Relations and director of Perry World House at the University of Pennsylvania. Lauren Kahn is a senior research analyst at Georgetown\u2019s Center for Security and Emerging Technology.<\/p>\n
Operation Epic Fury and Iran\u2019s response to ongoing U.S. and Israeli attacks represent clear evidence that we are now in the era of precise mass in war, the high-volume use of low-cost, increasingly autonomous systems with high-accuracy guidance. In other words, there are a lot more drones on battlefields today, but not the ones you remember from the global war on terrorism. This shows that the lessons learned from the war in Ukraine, which has now dragged on for more than four years, are shaping the behavior of the United States, Iran, and Israel. The world is seeing the spread of a new form of warfare.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The United States is not the passenger it once was in this new format. The first wave of U.S. attacks as part of Operation Epic Fury marked the initial operational deployment of the LUCAS (low-cost unmanned combat attack system). Reverse-engineered from the Iranian Shahed-136 drone, the long-range, one-way attack loitering munition was sped through the Pentagon\u2019s acquisition pipeline in just eighteen months, and it was only recently embedded in U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) in December 2025.<\/p>\n
The United States\u2019 deployment of LUCAS illustrates that the Pentagon has internalized some of the lessons learned from the war in Ukraine. In the four years since Russia\u2019s invasion in February 2022, the world has watched as the first modern conflict in Europe since World War II has reshaped the way we think about military capabilities. In the same way that the Gulf War came to be known as the first \u201cspace war\u201d\u2014given the sudden proliferation and prevalence of space-based capabilities, including satellite communications and GPS\u2014so too are the Russia-Ukraine war and the conflict in Iran shaking out to be the first artificial intelligence wars,<\/a> full-scale cyberwars, commercial space<\/a> wars, and of course, drone<\/a> wars.<\/p>\n Precise mass hits the Middle East<\/p>\n The primary lesson of the Ukraine war has been that the world has entered an age of precise mass: an era in which states and nonstate actors, great power competitors, and minor powers alike will be able to field low-cost precision weapons and sensors at scale, at both short and long ranges. Ukraine also shows how drones are filling the roles of both complements and substitutes for many different systems on the battlefield. Some drones serve as artillery systems, cruise missiles, or torpedoes, while others act as surveillance aircraft or bombers. Even if each system is not as capable as the exquisite equivalent that the United States employs now\u2014think fighter jets or submarines\u2014they offer enormous striking power at a much lower cost. More importantly, when timelines are compressed and threats are more imminent than far-off, they can be scaled today, unlike exquisite systems.<\/p>\n Iran, for its part, has leaned heavily on its arsenal of inexpensive ballistic missiles<\/a> and especially the Shahed-136 drone, which inspired the LUCAS. The Shahed-136 costs a fraction of a cruise missile or ballistic missile, at between $20,000 and $50,000 per unit, has a range of up to 2,000 kilometers, and has precision guidance such that it will hit what it is aimed at unless it is shot down. Some believe that Iran has likely benefited from Russia\u2019s extensive use of the Shahed in Ukraine, and it could have adopted modifications like anti-jamming antennas and electronic warfare-resistant navigation to harden these systems further. Thus far, Iran has fired<\/a> thousands of one-way attack drones and a declining number of ballistic missiles at Israel, U.S. bases in the Mideast, and countries throughout the region.\u00a0<\/p>\n These strikes by Iran have caused chaos and destruction, but the drone barrages pose a particular challenge. One drone attack has even led to the death<\/a> of six U.S. service members. CENTCOM confirmed the death of a seventh U.S. soldier in an unrelated strike. Even though most of Iran\u2019s drones have been shot down, their steady use has successfully strained the resources of the United States and other countries in the region, and has destroyed critical defensive capabilities, including U.S. radar systems<\/a>.<\/p>\n Though the Ukraine war demonstrates that defenders can often shoot down up to 80 percent of these drone barrages, defending against salvos of Shaheds requires dedicated time and resources\u2014and even 20 percent getting through can mean a large number of damaging strikes as one-way attack drones\u2019 use goes up. Part of Iran\u2019s strategy in the war is to leverage its inexpensive ballistic missiles and Shaheds to put consistent pressure on the United States, Israel, and U.S. partners in the region, allowing it to outlast the limited quantities of air defense systems that each country possesses.<\/p>\n The challenge for the United States and its partners in defending against these attacks is twofold. First, defenders are on the wrong side of the cost curve when facing precise mass offensive weapons such as the Shahed-136. Using air defense systems often costs between five and one hundred times more than firing a precise mass weapon like the Shahed-136. Advanced Patriot missile defense interceptors cost about $4 million dollars per missile compared to the $35,000 drone the Patriot missile is shooting down. Even an inexpensive system<\/a> such as a Coyote<\/a> still costs $125,000 per shot. That cost-exchange ratio illustrates why targeting Iran\u2019s launch capacity is such a high priority.<\/p>\n Second, there are limited numbers of air defense interceptors available to defend against the kinds of salvos countries can generate with precise mass systems, and producing them takes time. Less than two days into the war, U.S. media was already reporting on potential shortages of air defense interceptors, and Gulf states may run short on air defenses within the week if Iran retains the ability to continue launching missiles and drones. The United Arab Emirates (UAE) reported on March 2, shortly after the war broke out, that it had already been targeted by<\/a> 174 Iranian ballistic missiles, 8 cruise missiles, and 689 drones. Lockheed produced<\/a> only about six hundred Patriot missile interceptors in 2025 and wants to scale production to two thousand by 2027, but that is a ways away. With Gulf states already running out of air defense interceptors, they may need to turn to the United States and Israel for help. Both have sufficient quantities in the very short term, but Washington could seek to draw on Indo-Pacific stockpiles\u2014ones that are necessary to deter China\u2014if the conflict drags on.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n The air defense issue is serious enough that the United States has requested assistance<\/a> from Ukraine, which has gained extensive experience shooting down tens of thousands of Shaheds over the last several years. Ironically, the extensive use of air defenses to protect against Iran\u2019s strikes are eliminating stockpiles that Ukraine needs to defend itself against Russia. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said on March 5 that his country was ready to provide drone interceptors, but he also noted that more Patriot missiles were used in the Middle East in three days than Ukraine has used since Russia invaded in 2022.\u00a0<\/p>\n Rethinking drones in warfare<\/p>\n It is important to recognize the inefficiency of calling all of these new systems \u201cdrones.\u201d The term \u201cdrones\u201d now encompasses systems with diverse military applications. There are tactical surveillance drones; high- and medium-altitude long-endurance drones (HALE and MALE), like Turkey\u2019s TB2 Bayraktar; one-way attack drones (OWA), like Iran and Russia\u2019s Shahed-136\/Geran-2 at long ranges; first-person-view (FPV) drones like Ukraine\u2019s Vampire at shorter ranges; and higher-end systems for conventional war such as collaborative combat aircraft. Conflating these systems makes it harder to evaluate their battlefield impact individually and in coordination with one another.\u00a0<\/p>\n A MALE\/HALE drone for asymmetric operations, a tactical surveillance quadcopter, and an OWA system\u2014despite all being recognized as variations of \u201cdrones\u201d today\u2014all serve very different military functions.<\/p>\n Rather than calling all these systems \u201cdrones,\u201d a better way to characterize them<\/a> is based on the capabilities they complement or substitute, and how attritable they are. When you factor in unit cost, replaceability, and mission centrality\u2014how many you need to generate an effect or deliver a payload\u2014drones fall along a sliding scale from attritable (low cost, easy to replace, and narrow functions) to exquisite (expensive and painful to replace in terms of cost, production, and training).<\/p>\n MALE\/HALE drones often substitute for surveillance aircraft, helicopters, or close-air-support aircraft like the A-10 in the United States. This is because they are used for operations such as strikes against militant groups or those without sophisticated air defenses. MALE\/HALE drones can cost millions of dollars even before operational and sustainment costs. While losing a next-generation drone or MALE\/HALE drone is less costly than losing a fighter jet or attack helicopter, they are not disposable.<\/p>\n OWA, or one-way attack drones, are more comparable to cruise missiles or artillery. Russian and Ukrainian OWA drones lack the countermeasures of sophisticated cruise missiles, making them vulnerable unless flown at low altitudes or in large numbers to overwhelm defenses. Longer-range OWA systems have also been used to exhaust adversary defenses and clear the way for the use of more sophisticated weapons. Russia has used this approach to make way for its hypersonic missiles.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n Tactical surveillance drones are built for ease of use, not survivability. They provide short-range sensing and reconnaissance capabilities that militaries in previous generations might have gotten from cavalry or, more recently, from airborne surveillance aircraft.<\/p>\n At the highest end, collaborative combat aircraft are not designed for any of these tasks. Instead, they are built to work alongside advanced fighter aircraft to serve as \u201cloyal wingmen\u201d in conventional military conflicts, providing intelligence, early warning, electronic warfare, flexible strike options, and more..<\/p>\n Precise mass capabilities have utility in part because they can be scaled quickly from readily available inputs: commercial manufacturing, advances in artificial intelligence and autonomy, and easy access to precision guidance. Iran, Russia, and Ukraine all prove it is possible, given the way each nation has produced tens of thousands to millions of drones per year since 2022.\u00a0<\/p>\n In 2026, Russia advertised that it is aiming to produce up to one thousand Geran-2, its equivalent of Iran\u2019s Shahed-136, every day<\/a>. In contrast, Lockheed hopes to increase its annual production capacity to <\/a>about five hundred Long-Range Anti-Ship Missiles<\/a>\u2014the most exquisite anti-ship missile in the United States\u2019 arsenal\u2014but only if the U.S. military can wait a few years and investments to create new production lines go well. Systems like LUCAS, the U.S. comparable drone to the Shahed-136, could be scaled in a matter of months (as proven by the jump in production capacities by Russia in such a short time) if given the proper investment. But, as of now, it is unclear what U.S. production capacity is for this new system.<\/p>\n It is clear as Operation Epic Fury enters its second week, however, that as the United States and Israel continue targeting Iran\u2019s infrastructure, they will begin facing munitions constraints just as they already are facing defensive capacity constraints. And as Iran\u2019s ballistic missile launchers are systematically destroyed, the Islamic Republic will likely rely more heavily on long-range, one-way attack drones such as the Shahed-136 to continue putting pressure on regional air defenses.\u00a0<\/p>\n Precise mass therefore continues to provide new and expanding options to less powerful states such as Iran\u2014just as it has to Ukraine\u2014but it could do the same for the most powerful countries in the world if they make the needed investments. The intersection of technological change and unit economics means that precise mass will likely become a regular feature of warfare moving forward, just like machine guns or tanks in previous eras. Every military needs to take this seriously, especially the United States, given that it spends less than 0.05 percent of its defense budget on fielding precise mass capabilities.<\/p>\n This work represents the views and opinions solely of the authors. The Council on Foreign Relations is an independent, nonpartisan membership organization, think tank, and publisher, and takes no institutional positions on matters of policy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Michael C. 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