Attack of the drones

0:00Noel King:Early this morning, President Trump wrote on Truth Social that the war in Iran has taken a turn. Truth Social. I am pleased to report that the United States of America and the country of Iran have had, over the last two days, very good and productive conversations regarding a complete and total resolution of our hostilities in the Middle East. Later, a senior official in Iran's foreign ministry says that never happened. Mr. President, Iran's foreign ministry says you're not telling the truth when it comes to productive conversations to end the war. They're going to have to get themselves better public relations, people.

0:38Noel King:Oh, OK. Coming up on today's Plane from Vox, how the war in Iran might end. What if the will to fight is there, but the weapons aren't?

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2:01You're listening to Today Explained.

2:04Noel King:Vox's Josh Keating, you wrote that this war isn't just a question of will, it's a question of means. Well, yeah, I mean, this is really kind of turning into a sort of war of attrition. This is a missile war. This is a war fought not by ground troops, but by missiles and drones being fired through the air. No, I'm not putting troops anywhere. If I were, I certainly wouldn't tell you. To date, we've struck over 7 ,000 targets across Iran and its military infrastructure. And in just the last few hours, we hit an Iranian drone carrier ship. And as we speak, it's on fire. It's very dangerous outside.

2:42Bombs will be dropping everywhere. And so what we have is a kind of math problem on both sides. Iran has a certain number of projectiles that can fire at its enemies throughout the region. and it's burning through them fast, and a lot of them have been destroyed by U.S. and Israeli airstrikes. Ballistic missile attacks against our forces, down 90 percent since the start of the conflict. Same with one-way attack UAVs. But where there is an acute shortage are on the interceptors. So these are basically sort of smaller projectiles that shoot down the missiles and drones that are fired by Iran. And so those are pretty expensive, pretty advanced systems, and we don't make a lot of them.

3:26President Trump said there's an unlimited supply of missiles and interceptors and munitions, and that's simply not the case. The U.S. is using anti-missile interceptors that cost millions. Each interceptor can reportedly cost anywhere between$500 ,000 to$4 million. And so just because of the quantity of stuff that Iran is basically hurling all across the Middle East, we're burning through the global stockpiles pretty fast. And that's a problem in this war. And it may be a problem for, you know, the U.S. in other theaters as well.

4:01Noel King:I assume the interceptors are being used for missiles on their way into Israel. Where else are they being used? Well, they're being used going into Israel, yeah. People may have heard of the Iron Dome system, which is the sort of famous system that Israel uses previously to shoot down mostly like rockets from Hamas and Gaza, but they have pretty advanced systems shooting down these missiles from Iran as well. But Iran is also shooting a lot of missiles across the Persian Gulf at countries like the United Arab Emirates. Iran firing 10 ballistic missiles and 45 drones at the Emirati air defenses.

4:40And Qatar. Just a few hours ago, the world's biggest liquefied natural gas facility, Qatar's Raslefan, was damaged by an Iranian missile strike. And Saudi Arabia. The targeting of Riyadh, while a number of diplomats are meeting, I cannot see as coincidental. And I think that's the clearest signal of how Iran feels about diplomacy. Actually, one of the surprises of this war has been that they're actually firing more missiles at those countries than they are at Israel. And they're firing at U.S. bases throughout the region as well. So, you know, this is really a kind of all-out regional retaliation strategy that Iran is using both against the U.S.

5:22and Israel and at countries in the Gulf that are not actually part of this war, but are allied with the U.S. and Israel.

5:29Noel King:How is it possible that the United States does not make enough interceptors if the United States is aware of how important interceptors are. Yeah, well, I mean, part of it is just these things are expensive. And, you know, a Patriot interceptor, which is kind of the top end, those missiles, they cost about$4 million each. It's not something you want to fire at, you know, a jury-rigged drone that you bought off of Costco and, like, attached a grenade to, which is something we've seen in the war in Ukraine. If you think about what these are, It's basically shooting down a bullet with another bullet.

6:07And so the fact that we have the technology to do that is pretty amazing. But these are pricey items. The U.S. reportedly burned through an estimated$2.4 billion worth of Patriot interceptors in just the first five days of this war. There's another system called THAAD, which are these advanced mobile missile batteries. And during the war in June, the U.S. burned through about a quarter of its stock of them. You know, so this is an even more intense missile war now. So this is sort of a tough story to cover because every actor in it has incentive not to give you the latest and most accurate numbers.

6:42But, you know, we can assume that they're feeling the strain.

6:48Noel King:OK, so if I'm Iran, I'm thinking, let's just wait for the U.S. to run out of interceptors. That's a good way to win this war. How long can Iran keep going? This is kind of the million-dollar question, or maybe I should say the$4 billion question. You know, so early in this conflict, it looked like there was a real risk of that. I mean, there was reporting Qatar, for instance, a U.S. ally that hosts a major military base, was only a few days away from running out of interceptors entirely. The shortage is a little less acute now, and that's mainly because just the number of Iranian launches has dropped.

7:25They're firing, you know, according to the Pentagon's number, you know, 90 percent fewer missiles, something around 80 percent fewer drones. That means the supplies can probably hold up a lot longer because just because they're using fewer of them. And sort of the question becomes, is Iran firing fewer missiles because it's running out of them? But it also is quite possible the Iranians are holding something in reserve, that they know this could be a long conflict and they are kind of, you know, drizzling them out, so to speak, just using a few of the time just so they can continue to fight this war as long as possible and continue to impose costs.

8:09You know, the calculation being that Trump's pain tolerance is just a lot lower than theirs, and that sooner or later, the president will, you know, get sick of this war and move on to other things.

8:19Noel King:Is there evidence that Iran is holding back some of its weapons in order to surprise the U.S. later on? You know, they certainly want to give that impression. If you look at another actor in this conflict, Hezbollah, which is the Lebanese militia, one of Israel's staunchest enemies, they fired like a handful of rockets into Israel, like maybe half a dozen. And I think a lot of analysts, reporters looked at that and were like, oh, you know, Hezbollah's spent, like they've been fighting Israel for two years, they just don't have it. And then a few days ago, they launched 200 into Israel, and that indicates they were holding back.

8:57So the Iranians may be doing the same. So my guess is it's a combination of the two, that there is a deliberate strategy where they're sort of parceling these out and they don't want to run out. You know, this is an asymmetric fight. I don't think Iran, I don't think anyone was ever under any illusions that Iran was going to sort of defeat the US and Israel in a conventional military sense. What they can do is they're willing to absorb a lot more punishment up to and including the death of the Supreme Leader while continuing to impose costs on the US, on Israel, on the wider region that might just be, more than this U.S.

9:36government can tolerate at a time of rising gas prices, lowering poll numbers, impending midterms. Pick your factor at work here.

9:44Noel King:I wonder what your reporting indicates about how America's other enemies are looking at this situation, right? If you and I are aware that the U.S. is running out of interceptors, so is China, right? So is North Korea. So what does that mean? Yeah, I mean, I actually wrote an article last week on how Russia has been a beneficiary of this conflict on a few fronts, one being whenever oil is over$100 a barrel, that's good news for the Kremlin. But another are just these concerns that interceptors or other munitions that were previously bound for Ukraine could get diverted to the Middle East. And there hasn't been reporting that that's happening quite yet, but it's something that, you know, in recent conversations I've had with European officials, something they've been very concerned about.

10:31and then yeah and turning to east asia the same week there was this reported they were moving the system out of south korea north korea was conducting tests of a new uh ship launched uh missile system of their own so you know i've i've written about this this interceptor issue also about aircraft carriers i mean the u.s only has three of those at sea at any one given time you know we've now moved two of them to the Middle East one of which the Ford is like badly in need of maintenance to the point that you know they just had a terrible fire on that ship its deployment's been extended several times and I think what both these stories really underline is that even with the sheer scale of money that the U.S.

11:17spends on its military even with the advanced technology has with our ability to like strike targets all over the world seemingly at will, that there really are still material constraints on the projection of U.S. power and the ability to shift on a dime from fighting one war in Venezuela one month to the Middle East the next month. There are real issues with the number of munitions and interceptors we have. It takes time to move an aircraft carrier all the way across the Atlantic Ocean. We still do live in a real world with real physical constraints. And that we have to remember that if we're going to be getting into a new military conflict every month.

12:06Noel King:That was Vox's Josh Keating. Coming up, attack of the drones.

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16:06Noel King:It's Today Explained. We're back. All right. So President Trump says the U.S. and Israel have destroyed 100 percent of Iran's military capability. That's not true. It's not true. The U.S. has done damage to Iran's missile sites and military bases, but Iran still has cheap, easy to assemble drones that pose a real threat on the battlefield. Michael Horowitz, senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, tell us about them drones. So today, these one-way attack drones, like the Shahid-136, are used essentially as a substitute for a cruise missile. So if you imagine something like the U.S. Tomahawk missile, if you think like way, way back for someone like old like me to the first Gulf War.

16:44A perfect example was the Tomahawk cruise missile. 333 cruise missiles were launched during the war against heavily defended targets such as air defense headquarters, key radar facilities, and major communication centers. When we would see these images of missiles sort of hitting a building and the idea that you could, if you were the United States, target not just a neighborhood, but a building and not just a building, but the third floor and not just the third floor, but the second window from the left. These drones are capable of that almost exact same level of accuracy. And so Iran is using them to do things like target American air defense radars, which are necessary to find other drones and shoot them down.

17:31Iran is using them to target government buildings like embassies. Iran is using them to target critical infrastructure that countries in the Middle East use for oil and gas. You can hit lots of things with them today. The thing that somebody like me worries about is that American aircraft carriers in general are extremely well protected. There's generally a whole set of ships around them, and they have these enormous defense systems designed to ensure sort of nothing happens. And a drone in and of itself would never take out an American aircraft carrier. They're just too small. But a lot of them could.

18:12And the real risk here is that suppose you fired not one, not 100, but 500 at an American aircraft carrier at once, even if the U.S. could shoot down 450 of them. That's still a lot that are getting through. Like, who knows, I mean, whether the aircraft carrier would actually sink or not. But the point being that the scale of these one-way attack drones that you can launch generates the potential ability to not just target the kinds of infrastructure and things that we're seeing Iran doing, but really important military targets as well, including our ships.

18:48Noel King:Iran presumably does not have an infinite number of these drones, Or am I just telling myself that to calm myself down? Like, how many do they actually have on hand? We don't actually know exactly how many Iran has on hand, but we know that they have thousands. We also know, for example, that Russia has the ability to produce a thousand or more every couple of weeks of their knockoff, in some ways, of the Shahid 136. And so Iran likely has the ability to do something in that range as well, Except that the U.S. and Israel are obviously targeting their manufacturing capabilities. But Iran has a lot of manufacturing that's more underground.

19:28And because you can use commercial manufacturing to build these systems, you can do that almost anywhere. I mean, that's one of the reasons why I have been very vocal that the United States needs to invest more in these capabilities. and why I was thrilled, frankly, in the context of this conflict, regardless of what one thinks of the conflict itself, to see the U.S. use its own first precise mass system, the Lucas, against Iran early in the conflict. This is the Lucas drone, low-cost, unmanned combat attack system. An Arizona company developed the drones with a range of about 500 miles and a maximum payload of 40 pounds.

20:10The American military arsenal is based on quality over quantity. It's based on having small numbers of exquisite, expensive, hard to produce systems that are the best in the world, but they were designed to be essentially craft produce or bespoke produce, like you'd buy them on Etsy or something. They were not designed for mass production. The issue is that that's not enough anymore. In a world where it required having those expensive, exquisite kinds of systems to do things like accurately fire weapons at your adversaries, then that was a source of a kind of unique advantage, generational advantage for the United States military.

20:54But because everybody, both smaller states and militant groups, can launch more accurate precision strike at lots of different targets, it means that the just having those kinds of systems is not enough for the United States. Like if Iran is firing a$35 ,000 Shahid 136 at the United States and the United States is shooting it down with a weapon that costs anywhere between$1 million per shot and$4 million per shot, you do not need to be a defense planner to understand that that cost curve is in the wrong direction. Yeah.