Growing impact of Iran's Shahed-136 on modern warfare

Iran's Shahed-136 loitering munition—often referred to as a "suicide" or "kamikaze" drone—is reshaping 21st-century warfare by challenging advanced air defence systems from the Persian Gulf to Eastern Europe.

The UAV is the product of a decades-long effort by the Islamic Republic, with an article by Newsweek highlighting the unconventional path the developers took, resulting in the creation of a weapon capable of compensating for shortcomings in conventional air power against technologically superior adversaries equipped with far more sophisticated—and expensive—military platforms.

Its relatively low production cost has enabled operators of the Shahed series—whose name translates as "witness" in both Persian and Arabic—to reverse the traditional economics of warfare. Russia has replaced many costly missile strikes with domestically produced Geran drones based on the Shahed design in Ukraine, while the United States has also accelerated efforts to develop low-cost alternatives following its recent confrontation with Iran.

"The Shahed's effectiveness isn't technological sophistication; it's the opposite," Akram Kharief, author of In the Shadow of the Shahed, told Newsweek.

"Analysts consistently frame this as a cost-exchange weapon: Its value lies in numbers, since the drones are cheap and easy to mass-produce compared to the systems built to shoot them down, making them ideal for saturating and exhausting air defences while each intercept burns a far more expensive defensive asset."

Kharief added: "The Shahed has given states like Russia and Iran a cheap way to impose disproportionate costs on adversaries, forcing them to waste expensive interceptors on low-cost drones while also inflicting a steady psychological toll on civilian populations."

Killer drone's origins rooted in Cold War

The Shahed's development can be traced back to several foreign predecessors dating to the final years of the Cold War.

In the 1980s, as NATO searched for an affordable means of suppressing Soviet air defences, West German aerospace company Dornier, with US support, developed the Drohne Anti-Radar (DAR) project. The prototype bore a striking resemblance to today's Shahed and was designed as a one-way attack drone capable of loitering over enemy territory, detecting radar systems and striking them.

Although the DAR never entered service, a similar concept was later developed by Israel Aerospace Industries in the form of the Harpy loitering munition, variants of which remain in use today. As the article points out, it remains unclear how the technology eventually reached Iran. 

According to Fabian Hinz, an independent expert on missile and drone systems, Iran's first comparable design was the Shahed-131.

"That drone was the Shahed-131 and they made one major change to it," Hinz told Newsweek. "Instead of a radiation seeker, they put in satellite navigation guidance—so basically GPS, GLONASS, BeiDou, these systems—so that the system would work like a low-cost cruise missile. You just type in the target's coordinates and then strike the target."

Working through the IRGC-linked Shahed Aviation Industries, Iranian engineers subsequently enlarged the platform and fitted it with a more powerful engine to extend its range, resulting in the Shahed-136.

Ali Bagheri Dolatabadi, a professor at Yasouj University in Tehran, said the program also benefited from Israeli-made Harpy drones obtained after Israeli military operations in Syria.

"Iran worked on and upgraded the Israeli samples," Dolatabadi told Newsweek. "The first unveiling of these drones took place in 2021."

The Shahed-136 is produced by the state-owned Iran Aircraft Manufacturing Industries Corporation (HESA), whose original production facility was built by the U.S. company Textron before the 1979 Islamic Revolution.

Hinz argued that one of the drone's greatest strengths lies in its simplicity. Built largely from commercially available components, it requires relatively little advanced technology and can be manufactured despite international sanctions.

He described it as "the democratization of deep precision strike"—a "poor man's cruise missile" capable of striking targets up to 2,000 kilometers away.

Born out of necessity

Analysts say Iran's drone program emerged largely out of necessity during the Iran-Iraq War.

Steven Feldstein, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and former US State Department official, said Tehran was forced to abandon its reliance on sophisticated US-made military equipment following the 1979 revolution and subsequent sanctions.

"There was no way to preserve the existing military infrastructure modelled on expensive U.S. platforms due to sanctions and loss of human capital," Feldstein told Newsweek.

At the same time, Iran needed affordable solutions to counter Iraq's military capabilities.

"These incentives pushed Iran to develop an indigenous drone and ballistic missiles program that relied on experimentation, cost-effective alternatives, and iterative/adaptive designs," Feldstein said.

Iran introduced its first Mohajer drone in the mid-1980s, followed shortly afterward by the Ababil series, laying the groundwork for the country's modern drone industry.

From regional conflicts to global notoriority

While the Shahed-136's first combat use is difficult to establish, variants of the drone are believed to have been supplied to Iranian allies, including the Houthi movement in Yemen, during the late 2010s.

The weapon has been linked to several major attacks, including the 2021 strike on the MT Mercer Street oil tanker and the 2019 attacks on Saudi oil facilities, although Tehran has consistently denied involvement.

By 2022, Shahed drones had also been supplied to Iran-backed militias operating in Syria.

The system gained global prominence later that year after Russia began deploying Shahed-136 drones in Ukraine before launching licensed domestic production of the Geran variant.

"It is this conflict that helped make these drones famous," Dolatabadi said, adding that Iran initially supplied Russia with around 2,400 Shahed-136 drones before Moscow established local production in cooperation with Tehran.

Since then, Iran has continued to develop new Shahed variants, employing them during recent conflicts with Israel and the United States, further reinforcing the platform's role as one of the most influential low-cost strike weapons in modern warfare.

By Nazrin Sadigova