This article originally appeared in New York magazine on Wednesday, March 11, 2026.
At the opening of the air war against Iran, the U.S. and Israel won a massively one-sided victory that left Iran’s defenses in tatters and much of its leadership dead. “We achieved air superiority within two days, if that,” says Mark Gunzinger, an analyst at the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies. But just because a war starts well doesn’t mean it will end that way. “The enemy gets a vote,” as former secretary of Defense James Mattis liked to say.
Within hours of the opening salvos, Iran responded with barrages of its own, though of a different nature. Its air force neutralized, Iran turned to waves of ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, and drones. Though these were cheap and lo-fi compared with U.S. weapons, the Iran counterstrike took a surprisinglypainful toll with a single drone killing six American soldiers at a base in Kuwait. Amid the confusion, a Kuwaiti F-18 fighter jet reportedly shot downthree U.S. F-15 fighters, the most ever lost in combat. By the second week of the conflict, Iran had also destroyed some of America’s most sophisticated radar systems, each of which costs $500 million, and taken down 11 hi-tech Reaper drones with a total cost of $330 million.
At the same time, Iran was going after civilian targets in the region, raining down drones and missiles day after day on Israel, Bahrain, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates. In addition to targeting U.S. military bases in those countries, it went after critical oil-production facilities, desalination plants, data centers, and logistics hubs like airports. On Tuesday, the UAE shut down the Ruwais oil refinery, one of the largest in the world, following an Iranian strike. Iran’s most impactful measure has been to shut down the Strait of Hormuz, which sent oil prices soaring around the world.
In short, while Iran has been all but helpless at the game the United States and Israel were playing, it has a playbook of its own: dragging the U.S. into a type of warfare very different from any it has faced directly. This new kind of battle space, which has evolved at hyperspeed during the four years of war in Ukraine, effectively tips the playing field in favor of the underdog. “The Iranians had a plan all along, and now they’re going out and doing the plan,” says retired F-16 fighter pilot John Waters. “They’re striking back.”
The core technology of the new warfare is the drone, or uninhabited aerial vehicle. Though in development for decades, it came to the fore amid Ukraine’s desperate efforts to repel the large-scale Russian invasion that began in February 2022. Ukraine’s first combat drones were off-the-shelf recreational models to which small explosives were attached. In time, this spawned a vast, quickly evolving industry that produces massive amounts of UAVs — currently 1,500 a day on the Ukrainian side. The aim isn’t high performance but sheer quantity: throw so many munitions downrange that you exhaust your enemy’s resources in trying to stop them.
Ukraine has proved drones can function as a kind of poor man’s air force. Russia’s Mach 2–capable fighters are of no use against a whirring quadcopter that’s only one foot across, and Russia’s 2,700 tanks proved vulnerable to relentless drone swarms. Over the winter, Ukraine’s drone-centric military had brought Russia’s slow-grinding offensive to a halt, and last month it regained more territory than it has lost for the first time since 2023.
Now, the U.S. finds itself in a position that may be similar to Russia’s. Although our military has watched developments in Ukraine with great interest, it has never fought in a protracted attritional drone war — until now. Here’s what the Pentagon needs to learn, and fast, about this new kind of battle space:
The U.S.’s best weapons may not be the answer. The country has long focused on building a small number of very expensive, very technologically advanced, very capable pieces of equipment that could hit anyone anywhere in the world without risk of human life. It spent a decade and $44 billionbuilding just 21 B-2 bombers. The new order of battle involves vast numbers of cheap, just good enough drones and missiles that can overwhelm through sheer numbers. There’s simply no one place you can drop that mother of all bombs to make it stop.
Drone warfare is accessible to everyone, even stateless Houthi rebels and narco cartels. In the case of Iran, a teetering regime with a decimated air-defense system facing total diplomatic and economic isolation can still pump out an estimated 10,000 drones per month.
It turns into a manufacturing contest. At the end of day, drone warfare is about quantity: whose factories (or allies) can build the most, fastest. “It’s an industrial battle,” says Thomas Withington, an associate fellow at the U.K.’s Royal United Services Institute.
Strategically, it’s generally easier, and cheaper, to play offense than defense in this kind of warfare. Each Iranian Shahed drone, for instance, costs somewhere between $20,000 and $50,000 to produce, whereas one American Raytheon Coyote interceptor used to shoot them down costs $126,500.
The U.S. recently launched mass drone production for a weapon called LUCAS, or Low-Cost Unmanned Combat Attack System, which is based on the Shahed and costs $35,000 each. LUCAS was reportedly used for the first time in the current campaign.
Experience is a huge advantage. During their four years of war, the Urkainians have become so adept at the incredibly tight decision loop required to survive in the drone battle space that when they recently faced off against NATO counterparts in a war-game exercise, one NATO commander was heard to quip, “We’re fucked.” Iran has been at this game for a long time as a major supplier of Shahed drones to Russia, so it also has considerable operational experience.
Drone wars are hard to shut down. Ukraine started using small drones to strike back at the front lines but then began developing long-range versions that could hit Russia deep in its heartland. Iran has a huge array of targets within range in the Persian Gulf and neighboring regions, including oil tankers in the Strait of Hormuz, a waterway that carries 20 percent of the world’s oil.
Facing an existential threat, Iran seems intent on bringing as much pain to its adversaries as it can with whatever tools it can lay its hands on. “I don’t think a lot of people expected that they would start going after civilian targets, including in the Gulf. But almost anything is possible when you put a regime’s survival at stake,” says Seth Jones, president of the Defense and Security Department at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
Ukraine has proved it’s possible to fight back like this against a larger military for a long time — and even to have some success.
The war is unwinnable in the conventional sense. Once Russia’s invasion of Ukraine got bogged down in a war of attrition, the mass deployment of drones became a way for each side to bleed out the other with a huge number of small strikes. The toll of destruction has mounted without either side being able to land a knockout punch.
Similarly, U.S. air strikes can try to take out Iran’s stores of drones and missiles as well as its missile launchers and drone-production facilities, but that’s like trying to take on a mouse infestation with a hammer. There will always be more hiding out of sight. Witness Israel’s attempt to take out Hamas’s rocket arsenal after the October 7 attack. Hamas kept shooting for months, and that was in an area directly adjacent to Israel, rather than 1,000 miles away, and one four-thousandth as large.
Iran has a larger stockpile than Hamas ever did and is in a better position to add to it. Sources in the region say it may still have more than half of the drones and missiles it started with. As it continues to strangle the Strait of Hormuz, the pain of the ensuing energy crisis will only mount. One prominent analyst says the price of oil could climb above $200 a barrel, which translates into roughly $6 to $7 a gallon for gasoline in the U.S.
“This is a quagmire,” Waters says.
But there may be worse to come. From an Iranian perspective, this attack demonstrates that the country’s long-term security can be achieved only if it obtains the ability to wage a different type of warfare: the atomic kind.
“You’re leaving in power a regime that is more convinced than ever that they need a nuclear weapon as a deterrent,” says Fred Wehrey, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “That’s the great tragedy of this.”