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Comment by jonnybgood | Hacker News Reader

It’s just Russia using Iranian drones, but that was already happening.

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.

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The Ukrainian counter-UAV industry is already seeing huge growth. The Gulf oil states attacked by Iran are buying.[1]

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...

Volume is the real threat from drones. Any competent air defense system can shoot down a drone, which is much, much easier to shoot down than a conventional cruise missile, which is in turn much easier to shoot down than a ballistic missile. But you can't task interceptors that cost $200k to shoot down drones that cost $20k for very long. Even if they all hit, and they won't, you'll quickly exhaust your magazines.

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.

>The US didn’t stop its offensive because of Iranian weapons.

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.

There has already been significant infrastructure capacity destruction. Hard to get an inventory on exactly what, but even if there were an actual peace agreement with full strait traversal, it will be years to resume previous production numbers. Qatar lost LNG trains and facilities which are estimated at 3-5 years to replace.

Just restoring shut in oil wells will take months. It is unlikely all wells will ever reach previous output levels.

Yes that's correct, thank you, I see my comment implied otherwise.

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.

Russia hasn't used Iranian drones for some years now. They got their own production running and have even shipped drones to Iran.

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