By Aaron Brynildson
It may sound hard to believe, but the almost trillion-dollar U.S. military is struggling to fight cheap drones in its war with Iran.
Iran has built a simple drone, the Shahed, with a motorcycle-type engine, loaded it with explosives and successfully targeted its neighbors’ cities and power plants.
Iran has also hit U.S. military bases with these drones, including an early April 2026 attack on the U.S. Victory Base Complex in Baghdad.
The drones cost between US$20,000 and $50,000 to build. In response, the U.S. military sometimes fires missiles worth more than $1 million to shoot one down.
As a former U.S. Air Force officer and now national security scholar, I believe that math is a problem: The U.S. military for now has a $1 million answer to a $20,000 question. This math tells you almost everything you need to know about one of America’s biggest national security headaches.
And the frustrating part is that the U.S. military watched this happen in Ukraine for years. It knew the threat was coming.
The weapon that changed modern war
The Shahed isn’t impressive because it’s high-tech. It’s impressive because it isn’t.
Inspection of captured Shahed drones has found that many of their parts are made by ordinary commercial companies. That includes processors from a U.S. manufacturer, fuel pumps from a U.K. company and converters from China.
These military components aren’t hard to get. You could find similar parts in factories or farm machinery. That’s exactly what makes the Shahed so tough to deal with.
Russia, which also produces the drone, tolerates losing more than 75% of its Shahed stock because even at those loss rates, it’s winning the math battle against Ukraine. Russia or Iran don’t need every drone to hit its target. They just need to keep sending waves of them until their opponent runs out of expensive missiles to shoot back.
Ukraine, which had no choice but to learn fast, eventually figured out a better answer. Ukraine developed cheap interceptor drones that could slam into Shahed drones before they reached their targets. Each interceptor costs about $1,000 to $2,000, and Ukrainian manufacturers are producing thousands of them per month. That’s better math: a $2,000 interceptor against a $20,000 attacker.
Ukrainian military’s Strategic Communications Directorate via AP
Ukraine’s battlefield experience, as a result, has become one of the most valuable resources in the world, with American and allied forces asking Ukrainian drone experts to share their knowledge.
Why can’t the U.S. churn out a solution of its own? Because the U.S. military doesn’t have a technology problem but a bureaucracy problem.
The Pentagon’s three-legged slowdown
The U.S. Department of Defense typically can’t just buy things. It follows a long, complicated process that can take a decade or more to go from “we need something” to “here it is.” That process runs through three separate bureaucratic systems, each of which can cause years of delay.
First, someone must write a formal document, known as a requirement, that explains exactly what they need and why. A military service, such as the Air Force, for example, drafts up a requirement and routes it through an internal service review within only their branch.
Until recently, this service-vetted requirement went through a Pentagon review process, the Joint Capabilities Integration and Development System, where all joint services took a look. This process, which the Department of Defense ended in 2025, required approval from military officials.
Even though the joint requirements process was ended, implementation of a new system is far from complete, and the existing culture potentially remains. Under the old requirements process, it took over 800 days to get a requirement approved.
Second, any new program then needs money. This is handled through the planning, programming, budgeting and execution process, a budget cycle designed in 1961. Getting a new program into the budget typically takes more than two years after the requirement is approved, because the military must submit its budget request years in advance. By then, the threat has potentially already moved on.
Third, once a requirement is approved and money allocated, the program then must be developed and built. The average major defense acquisition program now takes almost 12 years from program start just to deliver an initial capability to troops in the field, according to a 2025 Government Accountability Office report.
Add it up and you get a system where the military sees a threat, begs for a solution, argues for money and waits a decade.
Why the system is built this way
The Shahed drone exposed a gap that defense experts have been warning about for years: The U.S. military is very good at building the most advanced, most expensive weapons in the world, but it struggles to build cheap, simple things fast. That is the opposite of what this new kind of warfare demands.
It would be easy, but inaccurate, to blame the military for the decade-long contract process. The real answer is more complicated.
Tom Brenner for The Washington Post via Getty Images
The Pentagon’s lengthy process was designed by the Department of Defense and Congress for a reason. Policymakers created the current system during the Cold War to combat excessive and redundant spending by the separate service branches. The system is built with checkpoints, reviews and approvals to make sure taxpayer money isn’t wasted.
Legacy military contractors also benefit from this dysfunctional process and resist change. They have the capital and know-how to wait out the predictable and stable existing contracts, while vying for new ones. These military contractors rarely need to worry about upstart contractors because they know small companies cannot survive waiting for a decade to secure funding for their prototypes.
The problem is that those rules were built for a world where the biggest threat was another superpower’s expensive jets and missiles. It wasn’t built to fight a flying bomb made from tractor parts. This type of threat requires fast innovation from lean companies, the exact companies that struggle in the current budget process.
What’s changing
There are signs of movement. In August 2025, the Pentagon killed its old requirements process entirely and replaced it with a faster, more flexible system.
However, killing the requirements process dealt with only one leg of the three-legged monster. The 1960s-era budget process that determines how money flows remains largely intact.
The most important reforms still need Congress to act, and Congress moves slowly, too. Congress has launched studies into reforming this system numerous times, with the answers being too politically difficult to implement.
Officials are expanding the use of flexible contracting tools, such as Other Transaction Authority, that let the military skip some traditional rules to get anti-drone technology faster. Yet these flexible contracting tools still represent a small slice of the Defense budget, and their effectiveness is unclear.
Ultimately, instead of using flexible contracting tools to quickly buy new prototypes, the bureaucratically easier solution could be to buy more of the expensive, already approved missiles.
This quick fix would reload the military’s stock of interceptors with existing weapons systems, which is the source of the bad math. The math would get worse and at the same time the operational imperative to find cheaper and better solutions might disappear.
So, as the Shahed keeps flying, the most powerful military in the world is still figuring out the paperwork and looking to other countries for help.
Aaron Brynildson is Law Instructor at the University of Mississippi.
Deirdre says
I guess you can’t bring a missile to a drone fight.
I’m surprised bureaucracy gets in the way of whatever Trump demands, because he usually figures out how to get anything he wants immediately by cheating the system.
Hard to believe the Republican Congress would stand in his way of anything, I figure they’ll push it through, they do with everything else.
Turns out we weren’t prepared for a massive war after all, but we’ll figure out what he’s going to do on Monday after he and his friends make billions more, at least someone is happy.
Well, it’s only our money! With the midterms coming up, we still have nukes, and I wouldn’t be surprised if Trump used them if he thought it would stop elections.
Let’s ask Netanyahu what he thinks, they’ve got nukes too which is dangerous with a country continuing multiple genocides.
Iran is the only thing stopping Israel from murdering the rest of the Palestinians and Lebanese, you would think getting bombed would at least slow them down, but I guess not. Turns out we’re not the big protectors as we thought we were.
Not too many people around the world support either one of us, turns out slaughtering innocent people and destroying their countries is not popular anymore because our excuses have run out. People are starting to notice antisemitism and terrorism is not the problem, the truth has been revealed.
I’m really happy many in our military are having a problem with going, I understand conscientious objector requests have gone way up.
The Empire’s dead, and Trump killed it, maybe this will keep us from going into more wars in the Middle East because we can’t afford them.
That would be a good thing, too bad it took bankrupting America. There will probably be a humiliating Lego video about that too, Trump has got to be enraged about those!
Sherry says
Thank you Deirdre!
While admittedly I choose to know nothing about weapons of war. . . I still do have my common sense. For how many decades since WWII we have spent billions, if not trillions, of hard earned tax payer dollars on very expensive rather “conventional” weapons. Obviously not every “WAR” scenario can be won with the bullying, macho “my bomb is bigger than your bomb” strategy.
Did we learn “nothing” from Vietnam? When going up against experts in guerrilla/ terrorist tactics, we are simply fools in a completely different game!
But ole “out of his depth” hegseth, and “bone spurs” trump will fix it, rightMaga?
Better bring that “new” credit card to the gas pump and grocery store. . . it’s going to get worse !
Deirdre says
I know, and historically we wouldn’t have started bombing schools and killing little kids right off the bat (over 800 bombed so far) and threatening to eliminate their civilization.
This isn’t war in any normal sense of the word, I guess we learned these tactics from Israel and then put psychopaths in charge.
Trump is literally putting the world into an economic depression, I can’t believe he gets away with it.
Sherry says
@ Deirdre,
IMO, trump will continue to “get away with it” because his most passionate supporters are “non-thinking”,fear and hate filled, corrupt, self serving sycophants. . . especially those in Congress!
Pogo says
Aaron Brynildson, thank you for a very able statement of the matter.
Perhaps it is time:
As stated
https://www.google.com/search?q=zero+based+us+military+budget
Ibid
https://www.google.com/search?q=us+defense+procurment+process+overview
Ibid
https://www.google.com/search?q=us+defense+procurment+process+reform
I doubt any of the forgoing will be of benefit without scrupulous enforcement against conflict of interest, ordinary bribery, and all the other ways the human race pursues avarice. One must, I suppose, live in hope.
And so it goes
https://www.google.com/search?q=history+corruption+us+defense+industry
EC: File
DaleL says
I’m surprised that Iran or other countries haven’t produced variants of the German WWII Buzz Bomb (V-1). It was a cheap, simple flying bomb. With a modern guidance system and altitude control, a V-1 style, pulse jet powered, drone would seem to be a deadly weapon. The WWII version flew at nearly 4 times the speed of the Iranian Shahed drone (400 mph vs 115 mph). A pulse jet engine is cheap to build and only requires mild steel, nothing special. It will run on any grade of gasoline. One drawback of the V-1 was range. The inefficient pulse jet engine and higher speed results a much shorter range than the Shahed drone.
Ukraine has developed a cruise missile (drone) based on the V-1 design. It is called Trembita. They cost about $10,000 each. It is much smaller than the German V-1 and has a speed of about 250 mph. Because of the hot exhaust that the jet engine produces, it is an easy target for small AA missiles such as the US Stinger. However, a single Stinger costs about $120,000.
Skibum says
Necessity is the mother of invention.
Iran’s economy has been in the dumps and even getting worse in recent years, but they have been able to maintain a huge amount of ballistic missiles. Who knows where they acquired the means and know how to build their hoards of attack drones, but they did build them by the tens, or perhaps hundreds of thousands due to their inexpensive cost compared to traditional weapons.
The same goes for Ukraine, who, out of necessity because of the idiot in the WH who is still not providing the military support to one of our European allies ravaged by the continued invasion and war with Russia. Ukraine is now seen as a leader in the construction and operation of their own, internal-built swarm of attack drones which have scored multiple, astonishing successes in destroying Russian aircraft, military ships and even other targets deep into Russian territory, including Moscow.
The U.S. should be paying attention! There will still be a need for traditional, very expensive American-made missiles and other state of the art weapons. However, the military experts in the Pentagon (and I don’t mean dipshit Hegseth) should be taking note of, and planning to operationalize much less expensive attack drones ourselves, which could significantly bring the cost of future weapons down to a more reasonable level, saving U.S. taxpayers potentially BILLIONS of dollars that won’t need to be spent on the ever increasing defense budget.
PaulT says
C’mon now who could have known that Iran might deploy swarms of cheap attack drones? Sure they supplied them to Russia three years ago and those Shaheds have proved to be effective against Ukraineian infrastructure but that’s not our war so why would the Pentagon bother to pay attention?
And you can’t blame Trump or Hesgeth for not considerding the possible threat of similar Iranian drone storms when deciding to start an unannounced war against …….. Iran?
Anyway this is a holy war so the US military has divine guidance which has to be way better than actual planning, right?
And I’m sure those videos of the Chinese military training with co-ordinated swarms of autonomous AI guided attack drones are just a deep-fake….. maybe.
Deborah Coffey says
Cut the military budget in half rather than doubling it as Trump is pushing for.
Atwp says
I suppose Trump and the republicans party didn’t read St. Luke 14: 28 through 33. I don’t think they took the time to count up the cost of anything. I believe Trump got himself and the country into a wasp nest that he can’t get out of. Expensive dosent necessarily better. Good job Iran good job. Please defeat Trump.
Pogo says
Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided missiles and misguided men.
— Martin Luther King, Jr.
Skibum says
Excellent analysis!
Sherry says
Thank You Pogo!