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Chapter 1: How have drones changed the way wars are fought?
How drones are changing the way wars are fought. From American Public Media, this is Marketplace Tech. I'm Stephanie Hughes. According to the Smithsonian, there have been attempts to make destructive drones going back to the First World War.
The technology has advanced significantly since then, and drones range in size from tiny, as in fitting in the palm of your hand, to ones that are so big they look like little planes. Stacey Pettyjohn directs the defense program at the Center for a New American Security.
She talked about how drones are being used in the war between Iran, Israel, and the U.S., including a drone used by Iran called a Shahed. On the Iranian side, you know, drones are their primary weapon right now, and they are targeting different types of locations.
And it's proven to be something that's really difficult for the United States and its Gulf partners and Israel to manage because they can't eliminate it and because the means of intercepting it are pretty expensive locations. One other thing worth noting about drones is the U.S. has made a lot of big announcements about the combat debut of the Lucas drone.
It's a low cost uncrewed system, I think is what it is. And essentially, it's a reverse engineered Iranian Shahed 136, which is the main drone the Iranians have been firing. But it doesn't actually fly as far as the Shahed or carry as large of a payload. I understand that Iran is using some off-the-shelf consumer technology to create some of these drones. Is that correct? Tell me how this works.
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Chapter 2: What advancements have been made in drone technology since World War I?
Yeah, absolutely. So the first Shahads that Iran created, they were made of like this honeycomb core that was plastic or paper. And the Russians have moved to fiberglass. And sometimes they're even using carbon fiber, which is a little bit more, quite a bit more expensive and exotic. But fiberglass is pretty readily available today.
They use a piston engine that was reverse engineered from a German engine that you can buy. And they've been buying most of the components for it through commercial intermediaries. And then the big thing is that they use a bunch of different Western commercial off-the-shelf electronics. So there's this global supply chain that they can tap into, which is really hard to cut off.
Because these aren't regulated technologies. These are things you can go out and procure. So there are all kinds of intermediaries and ways that you can work around any of sort of the attempts to limit the proliferation. Like Texas Instruments, there's navigation systems that come from Swedish companies, Norwegian companies that help with the flight controls, which is what makes them so cheap.
And is also one of the key factors that I think will enable them to rapidly reconstitute this weapons capability, even if the U.S. were to destroy every drone they have today. How could the use of low-cost drones in large numbers change how wars are fought moving forward? I mean, they definitely are.
What we're seeing with Iran, and I think the other side of it that you also see in Russia and Ukraine, is sort of this deep warfare where there are these strategic strikes and there's longer range power projections. You're talking hundreds. up to like a thousand miles that they are allowing countries to reach out. And this used to be unheard of for the most part.
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Chapter 3: What role do Iranian drones play in modern military conflicts?
And what's changed is now using these commercial technologies, you have weapons that are actually pretty good. They're not nearly as good as the sophisticated U.S. or Israeli weapons.
but they're good enough for a lot of purposes and they are a threat that has to be honored which is why you see countries having to defend against them and worrying about how to eliminate them and it's providing nations that didn't used to have this means to have sort of course of leverage and to pursue these strategies of exhaustion and attrition we'll be right back
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Chapter 4: How are low-cost drones used as primary weapons?
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We're back with Stacey Pettyjohn, Director of the Defense Program at the Center for a New American Security. What worries you about this technology? I mean, a lot of things. I really do think the fact that, you know, anybody from a terrorist to a criminal to, you know, my kid can go out and buy a drone and play with it and you can hack into it and you can weaponize it if you want to.
It's very it's a really difficult threat to eliminate. And it's like the IED, you know, the improvised explosive devices that the U.S. military faced in Iraq and Afghanistan, where these are very easy to adapt. They adapt their tactics. You know, if you try to counter them one way, let's say you want to jam them. So a cheap commercial drone, it's pretty easy to jam it. You can...
jam the control link that allows the person, the operator controlling it, they'll lose control of the drone and it just like falls down. Well, if you do that, then they put a slightly better antenna on it or they use the fiber optic wire. There are all these different adaptations that are occurring and it's hard to stay ahead of them.
There isn't like a stable point where you can say you've defeated all of these. And this is why Countering drones and drone defenses require layered systems of defenses, and they're often pretty short range. So unlike, you don't want to be using your Patriots or your SM-3 long-range surface-to-air missiles against cheap drones.
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Chapter 5: What challenges do countries face in countering drone technology?
Instead, you need defenses sort of local to whatever you're trying to defend. Is it also the case that we'll see drones just sort of getting run into infrastructure and the drone itself is the weapon? Yeah, absolutely. That is exactly the one-way attack drone. And you're seeing this even with some of the drones they're using now.
Like Russia has its version of the Shahed-136, which is big and carries explosives. But they've made all these smaller decoys that are even cheaper. So they're a couple thousand dollars each. And a lot of them aren't even armed, but you can just fly them into something. So if you're a defender and you actually do have weapons where you could...
shoot down or otherwise stop the drone from reaching its target the decoys have technologies on them to make them look like the bigger drones so you think it's the armed one and you have to kind of you have like a window of time to defeat this that's often a couple of minutes at most and
So you're making decisions under a lot of time pressure with imperfect information and want to take the most conservative action. And then you're spending all of your interceptors and a lot of money because the defensive weapons tend to be much more expensive than the offensive ones that the U.S. has right now, though there are more affordable options that they could field.
That's Stacey Pettyjohn at the Center for a New American Security. Jesus Alvarado produced this episode. I'm Stephanie Hughes, and that's Marketplace Tech. This is APM. Technology shapes the economy, our jobs and our daily lives. Marketplace Tech brings you the information and context you need to keep up.
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