The U.S. military has begun using much cheaper weapons systems to defend against Iranian drones, forcing them to use more exquisite unmanned systems, according to U.S. Central Command Commander Adm. Brad Cooper.
U.S. troops had relied on expensive air defense systems, each missile with a cost upwards of multiple millions of dollars a piece, to stop incoming drones that have cost as little as tens of thousands of dollars. The math wasn’t in the U.S.’s favor, but Cooper said on Thursday that the calculations have begun to change.
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“The days of $35,000 drones that we saw in the last couple years, particularly in the fight against the Houthis in Yemen, those days are behind us,” he said in front of the Senate Armed Services Committee. “Today, we face an increased threat from drones that are highly sophisticated. They’re jet-powered. They have high-end sensors. They have electronic warfare signals intelligence.”
“So those days of using high-value defenses to shoot down cheap targets are behind us,” he said. “What we have been doing lately is using our own low-cost, one-way attack drones, attacking Iran, making them use higher and more expensive weapons. So I can confidently tell you we have flipped the cost curve in many ways.”
Since the United States and Israel launched their opening strikes against Iran on Feb. 28, Iran has responded by launching thousands of drones across the region, including targeting infrastructure in Gulf States.
One specific drone attack on a Kuwaiti operational center in Port of Shuaiba on March 1 resulted in the deaths of six American service members, while several others were injured.
President Donald Trump announced a ceasefire with Iran on April 7, but the two sides have begun dueling blockades of the Strait of Hormuz. For the Iranians, they have threatened to target any commercial vessel that does not meet their demands of coordinating with and paying them, while the U.S. subsequently decided they would blockade any ship going to or coming from an Iranian port so that Iran, too, would feel the economic burden its hold has placed on the global economy.
U.S. Navy vessels in the Strait of Hormuz or nearby have come under Iranian fire multiple times despite the ceasefire, and the U.S. troops have defended themselves kinetically.
The director of the Pentagon’s multi-agency task force to improve the U.S.’s counter-drone technology, Brig. Gen. Matt Ross, recently visited a “battle lab” in the Middle East that the task force established “to assist in the surge of c-UAS capability to our warfighters,” LTC Adam Scher, a spokesperson for the task force, told the Washington Examiner.
Scher added: “Brig. Gen. Ross saw firsthand that there is no ‘silver bullet’ that can defeat every drone threat. What continues to be required in all theaters is a layered defense, including good intelligence to provide early warning, sensing in depth, passive protection, multiple defeat options, and proactive, entrepreneurial base commanders that are empowered to employ the full breadth of tools at their disposal to keep their forces and critical infrastructure safe.”
Cooper, the CENTCOM chief, told lawmakers that the U.S. has also taken lessons from the Ukrainians, who have been on the forefront of drone proliferation and development.
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Far from the front lines in the Middle East or in Europe, U.S. Army soldiers recently participated in Project Flytrap 5.0 as part of the SWORD Exercise in Lithuania. This part of the exercise focused on developing and integrating low-cost, effective counter-drone system solutions that can keep troops safe on the modern battlefield.
Maj. Galen King, a regimental executive officer involved in the training, told reporters, “I think one of the key lessons that we’ve taken from ongoing conflicts is really related. We call the triad, and the three parts of the triad are UAS counter, UAS, and electronic warfare, and they’re all bound together by a network that’s able to synthesize that data and information for all three.”
