These drones are cheap to build. With the money of one of these expensive drones, Iran can make dozens of these cheaper drones.
For fast and expensive attacks, we have ballistic missiles.
Yes, you know what else is cheap to build? Arrows and cannon balls. Last I checked those aren’t used in warfare anymore.
You will [eventually] be wasting resources and wasting money as newer [defensive] technologies come online to combat older tech. This is natural evolution of warfare.
$20K-75K/drone for America is not a lot when it’s budget is 900B or China whose military budget is 300B or even Russia who is at 100B. For a sanctioned Iran that is still substantial at 15-20B.
15,000 drones costing average price of let’s say $50,000 is $750M USD. To put it in perspective, Iran’s
S-300 deal with Russia was $800M
There is nothing wrong with swarm warfare especially if Iran is fighting Azeribajian or Saudi Arabia. But against a higher peer opponent (Israel or US), it becomes a lot less sustainable. If you cannot quickly and sufficiently degrade your opponents defenses then it becomes a war of attrition.
Look at Ukraine, look at the amount of ordnances that Russia has dropped on Ukraine it exceeds the amount of missiles Iran likely has in its inventory. Russia is firing over 10,000 artillery shells
a day. That’s not even taking into the hundreds of thousands of KGs in FAB bombs it’s dropping.
Yet it has failed to gain air superiority due to NATO replenishment. So even a sub-tier military power can stand up to a mighty war machine if it has enough funding and replenishment despite getting pulverized by the air constantly.
And here is another problem. You fire 10,000 drones let’s say 25% get thru 2,500 drones with 20kg warheads aren’t going substantially degrade your opponent.
It’s going to take you months to rebuild that inventory. But unlike Russia where you can safely build a Shahed mega factory without worry about it being bombed, all of Iran’s drone manufacturing will be under constant attack meaning that replenishing supply of suicide drones will be hard against a peer to peer opponent.
My point: It’s important to begin investing in higher tier threat multiplier platforms. That includes high altitude supersonic VLO bomber drones, that includes stealth cruise missiles, that includes SuperSonics and eventually Hypersonics.
You don’t have to completely abandon the low cost swarm approach, but you shouldn’t be putting all your eggs in a basket thinking firing a volley after volley of arrows will eventually break thru a shield. You might run out of arrows by the time it does.
