America’s Not Ready for the Drone Warfare Era.

Added: 2026-05-07

[00:00:00]The Israel Defense Forces are by just about any measure one of the most sophisticated militaries on Earth technologically, operationally, and in terms of sheer ability to punch above their weight. And yet, you wouldn't know it from what's happening in southern Lebanon right now. On the 5th of May alone, Hezbal are claimed 20 separate attacks on Israeli positions, many of which were carried out with drones. The IDF's response to this new technology has been underwhelming, to put it charitably. They've resorted to handing out hunting shotguns to troops in case a drone strays too close. The Iron Beam, the country's much hyped laser defense system, is running into the limits of what lasers can actually do in imperfect conditions, like when it's raining. And that's if the IDF can get enough batteries to the iron beam in the first place. Israel might be the most visible case right now, but they're certainly not alone. Across the Gulf, American supplied Patriot batteries are burning through interceptors faster than the factories can replace them. And the Pentagon, despite years of trying, doesn't have an answer of its own, ready to deploy at scale. The most advanced militaries on the planet are apparently stumbling in real time with their own soldiers lives on the line.

[00:01:08]Drone warfare. So, let's go back to those attacks by Hezbollah. Because although Hezbollah fighters have plenty of tactics at their disposal, it's the drones that have really been catching the IDF and the wider world by storm.

[00:01:20]Hezbollah claimed six separate drone strikes yesterday alone, which are not the first and are almost certainly not the last. When a fiber optic drone hit an armored unit near Tabar, killing at least one soldier, troops on the ground had to resort to firing their rifles at the next wave that were coming in. The army's broader counter measures haven't exactly inspired confidence. Instead, they rely on those hunting shotguns we just mentioned, distributed to IDF soldiers. While this is a tactic that's been used on both the Ukrainian and Russian sides of their war with some success in downing incoming drones, it's really a last resort measure rather than the sophisticated high-tech response that Jerusalem's become known for. Now, look, to be fair, they do have more than just shotguns to counter the drone situation. It's just a question of how effective those alternatives actually are. First and foremost, among them is the so-called iron beam, the country's laser defense system. The problem is that the iron beam has a very short range and is only at peak effectiveness in clear weather. Fog, rain, or any other particles in the air can degrade the beam. Even when it's running at optimal conditions, the system can be overwhelmed relatively easily. To actually bring a drone down, the system needs to focus its laser for a few seconds, which might not sound like a long time at first, but when you add in the complexity of sustaining this incredibly narrow beam on a moving target, the maths really starts to move decisively against you. According to the IDF's own estimates, they would need around 14 batteries to withstand a larger Hezbollah attack, and they only have a fraction of that, hence the need for shotguns to do the rest. In the last day or so, the IDF has also deployed a homegrown drone on drone intercept system into Lebanon, where a radar system picks up an incoming threat and launches a drone of its own to take down the enemy's drone with a net. It's very much still in its trial phase, and we'll be keeping a close eye on its performance. that drone industry sources told Israeli media that it could not reliably detect incoming drones in testing as recently as just a year ago.

[00:03:14]How much of that problem has actually been fixed remains an open question. For the last few years, as drone warfare really began to take off, countries looked to jamming the drone signal as a cheap alternative to using expensive and hard to manufacture traditional interceptors. It wasn't bulletproof by any means, but it had some successes.

[00:03:31]Ukrainian electronic warfare units were knocking close to 2,000 Russian drones out of the sky at their peak and a national spoofing network that feeds false GPS data to incoming shaheds managed to divert over 150 of them into Bellarus in a single month. What makes Hezbollah's recent drone attack so concerning though is that they seem to have increasingly pivoted to fiber optic FPV units. Drones with an ultra thin cable running back to the controller. It might sound like a pain, but it makes them completely impervious to the IDF's jamming techniques because there simply isn't any wireless signal being broadcast that they can jam. Now, to be fair, Israeli population centers are far from defenseless against drones.

[00:04:10]Jerusalem features a multi-layered defense system that has repeatedly proven resilient against most of what the region can throw at it. And the IDF has recently been flexing some muscle through its own use of drones on the offensive. But on the whole, Israel has the same issue that's plaguing just about every other sophisticated military. Standard tactics, using big, expensive interceptors to shoot down cheap drones just isn't sustainable.

[00:04:33]Across the Gulf, the world's premier military superpower is learning the same lesson, but at a significantly greater cost. But before we get into just how expensive that issue is for Washington, a quick pause to tell you about a project we've been working on that won't break the bank. Front.co is our subscriber site for people who want to dig even deeper into stories like this one. Every week we publish two exclusive videos and two expert written articles that let us go much deeper than we do here on the main channel. A subscription is just $5 a month or $50 a year and it truly goes a long way towards letting us keep producing independent coverage.

[00:05:06]That's from Stockco. And now let's get back to the trillion dollar headache that is drone defense bleeding out. Now, in the early days of Operation Epic Fury, Iran responded with exactly the kind of attritional barrage that military planners had been warning about for years. Roughly 1,200 ballistic missiles and 4,000 drones were sent across the Gulf in the opening weeks alone, and this number was constrained only by American strikes on Iranian launch sites. Panic began to set in across the Gulf within a day. After all, American leaders hadn't expected Iran to attack this widely, despite the urging of Gulf states that insisted such an outcome was definitely possible. Strikes on Israel and American bases were not surprising. But Dubai, Riyad, Doha, Gulf States fired more than 900 Patriot interceptors in the first four days alone. More than Ukraine has used in 4 years of war against Russia. This was completely unsustainable, and reports began to circulate that they were close to running dry on ammo if Iran's attacks kept up. The UAE and Kuwait had together burned through nearly 3/4 of their combined pre-war Patriot infantry. Doha, according to Bloomberg, got us close to 4 days away from running out entirely.

[00:06:15]The two biggest issues with this are the cost of producing interceptors and the time that it takes to do so. The Pentagon, to his credit, hasn't been entirely blind to this. It's been pretty clear for some time that drone warfare is the future, and the Pentagon's first dedicated counter drone office was created back in 2020. Since then, American defense contractors have been racing to come up with the best solutions. The $5 billion contract that RTX locked up last year, should give you some sense of where the biggest bets are going. Their Coyote Interceptor, a small turbine powered missile that flies into a drone blows up, has racked up 170 confirmed hits across three active combat zones and is deployed to no fewer than 36 sites overseas. At about $100,000 per round, it ain't cheap, but compared to a $4 million Patriot, it is a different category of money altogether. The catch is that Coyote is still one interceptor per drone, which is part of what makes Anderil's Roadrunner M interesting. It's a recoverable interceptor that takes off vertically, hunts for a target, and if it doesn't find one, it flies back and lands for reuse. The Marines awarded Anderil a $642 million contract to deploy a counter drone family of systems at every Marine Corps base worldwide, and the Navy has started putting the Monali Burke class destroyers alongside Coyote. Blue Halo, meanwhile, has over a dozen of its Locust laser systems deployed with the Army right now at locations the Pentagon won't publicly name. Basically, Locust is the American version of the Iron Beam. One of these systems costs roughly what a handful of Patriot interceptors do, but can then be used on repeat without having to reload.

[00:07:47]The system uses an AI powered tracker that can lock onto incoming drones from over 2 mi out, then burn a hole through them with a focus beam. It does, however, suffer from the same downsides as the Iron Beam. limited range, especially compared to traditional interceptors, and it can take 15 seconds to burn through an incoming target. If it fails, the drone is by that point way too close to launch any backup interceptor, is game over. The Leonida system from Eperus, which we dedicated an entire episode to here on Warren back in late 2024, is arguably more versatile because it can do some things that lasers can't. It's a microwave weapon that switches between sniping individual drones with a focused beam and projecting a wide electromagnetic blast that fries just about everything in its path at once. Eperus has built variants for every branch that wants one. An expeditionary version for the Marines that mounts on top of armored jeep carriers, a mobile version that integrates onto the army striker, and a lightweight pod configuration that could theoretically go on just about everything. And all of this sounds fantastic, right? But if it's so good, then why isn't any of this actually being used? And we really wish we had a better answer for you. Leonodidus is probably the most frustrating example.

[00:09:00]The US Army sent four prototypes to central command back in 2024 and got feedback that the system worked but needed better range and got to work on upgrades. It was supposed to become a formal program in 2025, which would have put it on path to being brought in bulk and deployed across the force in case, I don't know, 2026 turned out to be eventful or something. This still hasn't happened for reasons that reek of a lack of proper prioritization. The original counter drone office created in 2020 didn't have the authority to actually purchase any hardware. In fact, a Senate review later found that the Army had inadvertently self-imposed restrictions on its own procurement authority, which is a polite way of saying the office responsible for solving the drone problem had accidentally made it illegal for itself to buy the solutions. The joint inter agency task force 401, its replacement, only got real spending authority last August. Hexath told Congress that the defense industrial base is quote currently postured to produce only a limited number of prototypes end quote of directed energy systems rather than actually being at the stage of ramping up production. The defense contractors building the stuff Eperus, Blue Halo, you name it have been expanding factories and hiring engineers, but they are essentially acting on faith that that military financing is going to come in. And while there are many things you can say about Washington, a failure to spend on defense when it's truly deemed to be critical is not one of them. Israel, for its part, seems to have a similar issue.

[00:10:24]The Jerusalem Post reported the other day just how little usage the iron beam actually saw during the war with Iran because of a simple lack of batteries.

[00:10:32]It would of course be more sustainable and cost-effective to just build more batteries, but the sophisticated design of these units means it could be years before Jerusalem is rolling out enough of them to replace their conventional Iron Dome system. This lack of prioritization is often times the result of nations that feel relatively secure in their current systems. For them, there's no urgent need to get new systems up and running since the old school ones were still functioning just fine, or at least they were before this year. One country though hasn't had that luxury. And the time crunch that this nation faced put it front and center in any conversation we have about drone warfare.

[00:11:12]And that country is Ukraine. And the path Ukraine followed to achieve its drone expertise is certainly not the conventional one. Back when the Russians rolled across the border in February 2022, the entire Ukrainian drone arsenal consisted of just a few thousand commercial Chinese quadcopters that operators had jerry-rigged with grenades. They had no industrial capability to produce more and only a small number of Ukrainian troops have been trained on how to use them. Fast forward to today though and it is a new country entirely. Ukraine now produces more than 3 million drones a year and has set up the world's first dedicated drone branch of any modern military. Not only did Ukraine adapt to drone warfare and live to tell the tale, then how exporting their survival stories and methodologies to whoever's interested in buying. Lately, that's been a steadily growing number of countries, and the Gulf States have been lining up to get their hands on Kiev's expertise at just about any expense. This transformation started with the same fiber optic cable that Hezbollah has been put into work in Lebanon. Ukrainian engineers figured out pretty early in the war that if you run control commands down a thin wire that trails the drone, no amount of jamming equipment can touch it. Given how heavily Moscow had invested in electronic warfare by that point, neutralizing the enemy's jamming lair for the cost of a spool of cable was a hell of a trade. Look online today and you'll easily find photos of entire Ukrainian fields covered in a glimmering fiber optic spiderweb. By 2023, FPV kamicazi drones that cost a few hundred a piece were destroying Russian tanks and artillery positions across the front lines. Critically, the people designing the country's counter drone programs were oftent times the same ones designing the offensive drone systems, meaning that advances in one could inherently give the other a leg up. And they started to get really good at both.

[00:12:55]The following year, cheap interceptors purpose-built with the explicit job of killing other drones started rolling out and were boosted in their efficiency through coordination with Sky Map, a national command platform that combined thousands of previously separate acoustic and radar sensors into a single real-time picture across the whole country. In June of 2025, Kiev demonstrated just how far that ecosystem had come. Ukrainian intelligence was able to smuggle 117 quadcopters deep into Russia in civilian trucks and basically unleashed havoc from there.

[00:13:24]They hit four separate strategic air bases stretched across four separate time zones in a single night and took out somewhere between 10 and 41 aircraft depending on whose intelligence you trust. It was so effective that the Pentagon later ran a rehearsal of the same technique at a Florida air base late last year just to see what would happen if someone tried it on them.

[00:13:44]Washington wouldn't admit it, but Kiev at this point had basically been crowned as champion of drone and counter drone tech. By the time 2026 rolled around, drones like Sting, which cost just a few thousand, accounted for more than 70% of drone shootowns over Kiev in February.

[00:13:59]Other similarly inexpensive counter drone systems brought Ukraine's total success rate to somewhere around 90%.

[00:14:05]It's that defensive record that's really turned Ukraine into something of an international rockstar. In the midst of that interceptor shortage that we were discussing as the war in Iran got more and more intense. It was Kiev that the Gulf started reaching out to and Kiev showed up. By the end of March, over 200 counter drone advisers were operating across Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar, Kuwait, Jordan, and elsewhere.

[00:14:26]Critically, Russia's long-standing relationship with the Islamic Republic meant that the drones it had been using against Ukraine were essentially Iranian. Moscow had been mass-producing clones of Iran's Shaw Head 136 under a billion dollar franchise deal since 2023, meaning that the weapons now raining down on Riad and Abu Dhabi were more or less identical to the ones Kiev had spent years learning how to kill.

[00:14:48]Ukrainian interceptors had been designed around the Shahed's specific flight profile and speed. And the entire counter drone stack had been stress tested against nightly barges of hundreds at a time, something no western testing range could possibly simulate.

[00:15:02]When those same shaw heads started hitting the Gulf, the systems were essentially plug-andplay. Ukraine moved fast to formalize that edge. During a diplomatic sprint in late March, the nation's president signed 10-year defense export agreements with Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the Emirates, covering interceptors, joint production lines, electronic warfare, and full technological exchange. Analysts are projecting north of $2 billion in drone and interceptor sales this year alone, with the framework designed to scale well beyond that. Danish Prime Minister Meta Friedrien put it bluntly last fall.

[00:15:34]The only expert in the world right now when it comes to anti- drone capacities is Ukraine because they are fighting the Russian drones almost every day. End quote. Kit actually pitched the concept to Trump first, but Washington passed.

[00:15:47]We're not going to wager against the American military catching up to its rivals based on that alone, but it really needs to up its game on drone warfare. And so does Israel. Whether that can happen fast enough, that's the trillion dollar question. And for America and its long-term customers across the world, that clock is ticking.

[00:16:07]Thank you for watching.