Other countries with rising weapons businesses are Ukraine and Iran.
The best endorsement for a weapons manufacturer is winning a war against a tough opponent.
The best endorsement for a weapons manufacturer is winning a war against a tough opponent.
Ukraine is the odd one out in that it has developed significant technological capabilities, largely with drones and anti-drone defences, and has active buyers for that tech.
Which makes the US refusal to interact with, learn from, or adopt Ukrainian tech all the more frustrating. There are 13 US fighters that would likely still be alive today, if the current US establishment was t so irrational in their hate of Ukraine, and had adopted anti drove tactics common in Ukraine, including the P1-SUN interceptors that could have taken out the shaheds. Losing an AWACS is an embarrassment beyond words, honestly. Best thing would not have been to start a stupid unwinnable war without any clear objectives.
Only one-way attack drones which are the lowest tech type of drones. ISR drones are much higher on the tech tree, and Iran aren't in the FPV drone game due to a lack of need for them.
That having been said, I couldn't agree more with your frustration around refusing to collaborate with and learn from Ukraine when it comes to Shaheds.
Iran's successes in the 2025 and 2026 conflicts would be within that premise.
Prior to 2025, and dating back to the mid-1980s, Iran and Israel have been engaged in a proxy conflict, but that also differs from the premise. In large part that's relied on the ability to inflict some pain on counterparties, but not necessarily by exhibiting technological superiority, and not to decisive effect on the part of either Iran or Israel for that matter. See: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran%E2%80%93Israel_proxy_conf...>.
Rational thought processes and the current US administration aren't even worth mention, though I'll suggest that the failure of what were once thought to be at least partially resistant institutions such as the military establishment against executive idiocy is especially disheartening.
I don't know why anyone would think the US isn't paying attention in Ukraine. This is all classified stuff, and we won't know what the US government is doing behind the curtain for decades. I might add that Ukraine relies heavily on the US-built medium range Hornet drone.
POTUS is widely considered to be in the pocket of, or under leverage of, Putin; other decisions are dictated by his unhinged, flighty, and purely emotional reactions.
The USAF is rife with Evangelist Christian bias, a problem that precedes the Orange Idiot. To restate: the branch of the military that should be benefitting the most from the tide change in aerial warfare is obsessed with public displays of religious conformity instead.
Ideally there are swift, barely detectable undercurrents of change upgrading our military focus by the elite powers atop the power structure, but in practice we have armed soldiers guarding a paint job on a public water pool.
Edit: Interestingly, ITT the Shahed has been claimed to be based on US tech, a basis for US Tech, based on German tech, and completely outdated.
The North Vietnamese were famous for ad libbing, adapting on the spot, but in the end biggest weapon is the willingness to fight.
Russia and the United States never learn it isn’t about the best weapon or how much money you can spend…
This war with Iran is not really an endorsement of Iranian weapons. The US didn’t stop its offensive because of Iranian weapons. We already knew the effectiveness of one way attack drones just from looking at their employment in Ukraine.
The US counter-UAV industry might start seeing some exponential growth. There’s a lot of lessons learned for the US and we’ll probably start seeing a lot more money thrown around by the US military.
Strong counter-UAV defense requires an entire integrated low-altitude air defense systems. The US systems the Gulf states have purchased are high-altitude oriented, useful against incoming aircraft and some missiles. They have long range radars, but not enough of them in the right places for finding low-flying drones. They have expensive missiles like the Patriot, which works against drones if there are not many of them. There are many incoming drones. Ukraine alone is up to 7 million drones a year.
Aerial warfare is changing in a big way. It's starting to look as big as the transition from battleships. Big airfields are big, fat targets.
[1] https://www.thedefensenews.com/UAE-Qatar-and-Kuwait-Seek-Tho...
In Ukraine both sides are choosing very carefully when and where to expend expensive interceptors, and I think as time goes by we're going to see a lot more passive defenses, i.e. sandbags and bunkers.
I would say they did. Gulf countries ran out of missile and drone defenses and a lot of infrastructure was getting hit. Long run loss of capacity here would be worse than temporary strait closure and there were a lot of assets left to hit.
Just restoring shut in oil wells will take months. It is unlikely all wells will ever reach previous output levels.
There had also been Iranian strikes on desalination plants and near the end strikes on Saudi Arabia's red sea assets. I believe these were very convincing.
"The U.S. military reverse-engineered Iran’s Shahed-136 loitering munition to create a low-cost, one-way attack drone squadron in the Middle East called LUCAS (Low-Cost Unmanned Combat Attack System)."
Necessity is the mother of invention. We spent billions in exchange for making our "enemies" stronger. We really are a ridiculous nation.