Blood from a drone: Iran’s deadly arsenal

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1:29Gavin Jackson:The fringes of India's biggest cities are some of its buildings with the biggest footprints. A data center boom is going on and we ask who stands to benefit.

1:40Rosie Blau:And if playing interminable games of Monopoly is also one of your childhood traumas, imagine a life-sized version. Last week, I took a crack team of intelligence producers to try it and discover why adults are embracing live-action games. Spoiler alert, Mayfair eluded us.

2:06But first...

2:14Rosie Blau:Nearly two weeks into the war and the display of American and Israeli firepower has been fast-paced and overwhelming. Iran's response, too, has been fiercer than some expected. Overnight, Iran attacked two foreign tankers in the Persian Gulf. It continued to strike energy infrastructure across the region, and its Revolutionary Guard Corps threatened Western financial institutions after a bank in Tehran was hit. As well as deploying ballistic missiles, Iran's retaliation relies on another weapon too, a vast arsenal of cheap, precise and deadly drones.

2:53Jason Palmer:Iran has fired more than 2 ,000 Shahid-type drones at Israel, at Arab countries, indeed as far afield as Cyprus, throughout this conflict. And they've been incredibly important.

3:07Rosie Blau:Shashank Joshi is the Economist's defense editor.

3:10Jason Palmer:They've struck some important American facilities, American consulates, embassies, military bases. They've killed American troops. They've even destroyed some of America's most valuable military radars in the region. Now, over long distances on their way to Israel, they've typically been shot down. But at short range, they have proved very effective, very dangerous and a really formidable threat in this conflict.

3:38Rosie Blau:So what exactly is a Shahid drone?

3:42Jason Palmer:So Shaheed is the name that Iran has given to these strange delta wing shaped drones. And we probably know them best from Ukraine, where they've been thick and fast in Ukraine skies, because Russia basically bought them off Iran, they licensed produce these inside Russia, they called them the Geran, they've improved upon them in Russia, then they've churned out absolutely masses of them every single month and fire them at Ukraine in huge quantities. and they, for me, epitomise the way in which the boundary between what you would once have considered a drone, a kamikaze drone, a missile, a cruise missile, an aircraft, between all those things has just blurred.

4:21Jason Palmer:Now, the drones that Iran is using, I'm fairly certain, are manufactured in the country. They've got a long history of doing that. They're capable of doing it. But they are seeing assistance from Russia in terms of how to use these to maximum effect.

4:34Rosie Blau:So why are they being used so frequently now?

4:36Jason Palmer:A Shaheed-type drone, it travels more slowly than the ballistic missiles that we talked about last week. They carry smaller warheads. They're far, far more basic in many ways, but they're much, much cheaper. So Russia, in producing them, probably spends about$55 ,000 for each Shaheed drone. Maybe that goes up to more than$100 ,000 per unit if you add in various spits and bobs to make it more advanced. But these are fundamentally very cheap compared to a ballistic missile. And so that low cost allows Russia or any country like Iran now to churn out huge numbers of these per day. They're also a bit easier to launch.

5:11Jason Palmer:You can launch them from a variety of different places from the back of a truck. A ballistic missile maybe needs a silo or it needs a big transporter. You can spot them from the air more easily and therefore bomb them. These things can be launched from a much more flexible variety of sites. And unlike a ballistic missile, they fly low, they can skim the ocean. And for any traditional radar, that's a bit of a nightmare. air.

5:32Rosie Blau:So they're harder to spot and there are far more of them. Is there any way to defend against these?

5:37Jason Palmer:There's loads of ways to defend against them. The problem is how do you defend against them in cost-effective and sustainable fashion? Now, if you take a Patriot or a THAAD system, the big air defence systems, very high end, we've spoken about before, these are taking out your big ballistic missiles, zooming in, arcing up high, sometimes into space, and then zooming back down at massive speeds. Those will very happily take out a Shahid for you. If you point them at the right Shahid and fire an interceptor missile. The problem is you are taking out a$55 ,000 Shahid with an interceptor that costs much, much more.

6:09Jason Palmer:Now, sometimes maybe that's worth it, but what you really want to do is try and use cheaper means. There's a lot of ways to do it. Currently, you can get a plane up in the air. You can fire an air-to-air missile at the Shahid. After all, as I said, it's a bit like an aircraft. So you would expect just like you would take out an aircraft, you might take out a Shahid. You've also got a bit more of an economical method, which involves laser-guided rocket pods mounted on warplanes. And these can shoot down Shahids at closer ranges, so you wouldn't fire it so far away. But that's much more cost-effective.

6:38Jason Palmer:You can also use maybe a burst of your cannon. But at that point, you're getting pretty close to this drone. It's pretty hairy if you're shooting it down with your cannon. Israelis in their wars with Hezbollah in Lebanon have tried other messes. They've tried repurposing old anti-aircraft cannons on the ground and pointing them up. and they actually proved fairly successful depending on the height the drone is flying at. There are also lasers you could use. Israel has something called iron beam, but that's only at a fairly early stage. The technology is quite nascent and lasers, interestingly, need very clear weather to be effective.

7:10Jason Palmer:That is a bit of a problem in the Gulf where you often have sandy, dusty conditions and your laser beam isn't always working perfectly in those circumstances.

7:18Rosie Blau:You say that these drones have been used a lot in Ukraine. What can we learn from the experience there of them.

7:25Jason Palmer:Ukraine has by far the most extensive experience of defending against these things. In fact, interestingly, Russia, having pioneered the use of these at scale, is now sending and sharing some of its tactics with Iran, the originator of these systems. So there's an interesting transfer of knowledge. And in the same way, Ukrainian knowledge is now flowing to the Gulf. Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine's president, has said he is going to help the Gulf states. I think there's already expert advisory teams in countries like Jordan. The technology is active. And the interesting thing about the Ukrainians is they've gone through that learning journey of how the hell do we shoot these down without wasting all of our interceptors and spending huge sums of money.

8:03Jason Palmer:And what they've basically hit on is a really interesting method that uses a drone to kill a drone. They are using FPV interceptor drones. And FPV stands for first-person view. These are small racing drones. There are other sorts. Some of them have fins and a bit bigger. But the concept is basically you send a very fast, very manoeuvrable and hopefully very cheap drone up to go and intercept the Shahid. And it can manoeuvre more quickly than the Shahid can and basically either ram it or blow up near it. And some of the most recent drones Ukraine is using for this purpose have AI guidance. So you get them close to the Shahid and autonomous guidance takes over and does that final stage of intercept.

8:45Jason Palmer:We're also seeing Ukraine do some very clever things that are actually quite relevant to the Gulf, which is that Russia often sends its Shahids on these big long runs over the Black Sea, skimming the sea. And so Ukraine has put some of these intercept drones on uncrewed boats that then pop up and go intercept when they're over the water. This is working really well. If you look at the statistics in January, Ukraine destroyed, I think, over 1 ,700 Shahids. That was half the total that month. That's a record. That was half of the total launched by Russia. Of those, about 70 % were taken out using FPV interceptors.

9:20Jason Palmer:And actually, skill is very important there, because a handful of units were responsible for a bulk of those kills. You need very well-practiced, very skillful people operating these things. Now, that's not the only way to tackle these drones, and tactics change all the time. There's a constant game of cat and mouse. But the point is, the Ukrainians are so far ahead in that game that they have huge amounts of the expertise necessary for this problem today.

9:44Rosie Blau:And are the Ukrainians now going to lend their tech and skill to those fighting Iran?

9:50Jason Palmer:They're doing it already, but it's very clear that Zelensky sees an opportunity here to leverage this expertise for something he wants. I think that's made some people in the Gulf a little bit irritated, actually. But he's in a position where he's watching these Gulf countries use up more patriot interceptors in this war than he's had throughout the entire conflict at his disposal. So he is willing to, yes, give this technology to the Gulf. But I think naturally he'd be looking for Gulf investment in Ukrainian production. Gulf has money. Ukraine has tech. It's an obvious marriage of skill and cash.

10:21Jason Palmer:And I think he also would like to say to Western partners, I'm happy to share this with you guys, but I need weapons. I need aid. And he has struggled in recent months to get America to sell him the big interceptors for missiles that he needs. So I think the Ukrainians are looking at this as a big opportunity for defence industry and for the munitions they need to replenish their war. But as Donald Trump famously said, Ukraine has none of the cards. I think we're clearly seeing Ukraine does in fact have plenty of cards.

10:50Rosie Blau:Shashank, thank you very much.

10:52Jason Palmer:Thank you.

10:55Rosie Blau:And Iran looks set to dominate our thoughts, our lives and our economies for some time to come. Later today on The Insider, our video offering, editor of The Economist Zannie Minton-Beddoes will be asking if the war could trigger a global economic crisis. Do watch. You'll need to be a subscriber.

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12:34Gavin Jackson:As you'll have heard many times on the show, the soundscape of India is ever-present. Not just the traffic, but also the construction.

12:46Gavin Jackson:One kind of building is showing up more and more, though. Data centers. India needs more of these vast sheds full of blinking servers. And investors, both foreign and domestic, are proving happy to pony up for them.

13:03Shashank Joshi:All sorts of people benefit from this big push by any data centers. Probably the chief one is India's legions of data users. Gavin Jackson is our South Asia business and economics correspondent. The people are streaming videos, they have lower latency, all those hundreds of millions of people who want the latest YouTube video and they want it now and they want it quickly. People will have WhatsApp videos on their phone just constantly. They'll just be WhatsAppping with their family all day. WhatsApp is where I do journalism now.

13:38Gavin Jackson:So let's wind back then. Tell me what the data center boom looks like in India.

13:43Shashank Joshi:It looks like huge shiny sheds going up in industrial parks on the outskirts of major cities. They've got all kinds of pipework on the top keeping them cool and not very many people going through their security gates to get in. Their capacity reached about 1.3 gigawatts last year, according to JLL, a property firm. Now that means India is still a minnow compared to the US and China, but this figure is triple what it was in 2020. Big international players are often teaming up with local groups. That includes the likes of Amazon, Meta, Google, or the hyperscalers, as they're called.

14:17Gavin Jackson:So really, this is just the wider world cashing in, in part, on the India data boom, becoming a data center boom?

14:24Shashank Joshi:Partly. So India produces around a fifth of the world's data, but only has about 3 % of its data center capacity. So meeting that demand by the big international players means locating closer to the Indians who use them. But also partly it's a data sovereignty angle. There's mandates for financial institutions to house client data in country, and some speculation that rules can change in the future to keep more data within India.