Iranian Drones Are Changing the Battlefields of Eurasia

By: Sine Ozkarasahin November 4, 2022 

Iranian Shahed-136 (Source: Italian Institute for International Political Studies)

On October 10, Iranian loitering munitions rained over Ukraine’s urban centers, including Kiev. Two weeks later, Israeli forces struck an Iranian drone factory in SyriaAl Arabiya, October 23). This demonstrated how Iran’s drone program is now beyond Iran, both in terms of production and operational impact. Iran has become a drone-exporting nation and Iranian drones are creating new flashpoints in different geopolitical axes.

Tehran’s drone program is hardly new, however. In fact, it dates back to the 1980s war of attrition with Iraq and rests on a decades-long significant research and development (R&D) effort. Iran’s unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) strategy is aggressive Farsi Al Arabiya, April 23, 2021). It mainly focuses on utilizing UAVs to support the government’s capabilities and strengthen its proxy forces abroad. Led by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and its drone-maker Qods Aviation Industries (QAI), some of Iran’s existing drone technologies are developed from reverse-engineering Western systems that have crashed or landed on or near Iranian territory (including the ones allegedly intercepted or captured near its coast). For example, some of the Iranian government’s most sophisticated systems, including the Shahed-141 and 191, are modeled after the American RQ-171 Sentinel UAV that crashed in Iran back in late 2011....................

Last week, Ukrainian investigators also discovered Western-made parts in the Shahed-136 and Mohajer-6 drones that help to steer, power and guide the drone's weapons, which indicates that some of its parts are being directly purchased from western nations, rather than reverse engineered in China or Iran. Based on these findings, are concluding that customs officials in the U.S., Europe, and Australia, as well as businesses and governments, need to be more vigilant about distributing commercial products with potential military applications. Globalization is changing the way militaries produce their weaponry, and the war in Ukraine is demonstrating this evolution clearer than any conflict in recent memory......To Read More....