During the Russia-Ukraine conflict, asymmetric warfare was proven to be effective by Operation Spiderweb. Ukraine's sub-$1000 smuggled FPV drones caused roughly $7 billion in damage to Russian strategic bombers. Iran's primary weapon during the Iran-US conflict has been the Shahed-136 drone and its newer jet powered variant, the Shahed-238. The domestic production cost estimates of the Shahed runs around $10,000-50,000 per unit. These drones have caused the loss of F-15Es and a Chinook for Kuwait. The Pentagon's response was to reverse-engineer the same airframe into its own cheap drone (LUCAS) rather than rely purely on expensive interceptors - even the side with trillion dollar defense budget ended up building the $10k drone. A state of the art drone that cost a million dollars to make seems impressive but, when it's facing a 100 dumb drones that cost 10 thousand dollars each to make, it stands no chance. This was the key takeaway from the lecture our professor gave in a PDC class last semester.
During the Russia-Ukraine conflict, asymmetric warfare was proven to be effective by Operation Spiderweb. Ukraine's sub-$1000 smuggled FPV drones caused roughly $7 billion in damage to Russian strategic bombers. Iran's primary weapon during the Iran-US conflict has been the Shahed-136 drone and its newer jet powered variant, the Shahed-238. The domestic production cost estimates of the Shahed runs around $10,000-50,000 per unit. These drones have caused the loss of F-15Es and a Chinook for Kuwait. The Pentagon's response was to reverse-engineer the same airframe into its own cheap drone (LUCAS) rather than rely purely on expensive interceptors - even the side with trillion dollar defense budget ended up building the $10k drone. A state of the art drone that cost a million dollars to make seems impressive but, when it's facing a 100 dumb drones that cost 10 thousand dollars each to make, it stands no chance. This was the key takeaway from the lecture our professor gave in a PDC class last semester.
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