Watch the new documentary film from Meidas Defense and VALOR Media Network, Drone Hunters of Kherson
The first major loss of American life in the war against Iran came at the end of a cheap suicide drone. Six soldiers died when a Shahed slipped through and struck a base inside Kuwait. Ukraine figured out years ago how to counter this threat. The Americans did not learn in time.
That failure was not inevitable. It was a choice.
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Shaheds are not sophisticated weapons. The most common variant is slow, propeller-driven, and sounds like a lawn mower. It costs between twenty and fifty thousand dollars to build. A Patriot interceptor costs over four million. That ratio—a hundred-to-one on a bad day—is the entire strategic logic of the Shahed campaign: manufacture asymmetry, drain treasuries, exhaust defenses. Iran does not need every drone to hit its target. It needs every drone to cost the defender more than it cost to build.
Iran has been at this for years—Shaheds against Saudi oil facilities in 2019, against Israeli targets in April 2024, and now against American bases and embassies across the region. The newest models have moved beyond GPS navigation toward AI targeting and infrared cameras that lock onto heat signatures without any satellite uplink at all. The lawn mower has learned to think.
The Shahed, though, is the easy problem. It is slow, loud, and detectable. The harder problem is the small first-person-view (FPV) drone—built from commercial components for a few hundred dollars, capable of destroying a tank, collapsing a trench, or targeting a single soldier in the open. In Ukraine, these FPVs now account for the majority of front-line casualties on both sides. Some fly into their targets with no radio uplink to jam and no electromagnetic signature to detect. Reports indicate that drones of this type, flown by Iranian-backed militias, are now striking American bases in Iraq.
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The advent of drone warfare represents a sea change in military conflict. For over a century, artillery was the dominant killer on the battlefield—responsible for roughly 60 percent of casualties in World War I and serving as a central organizing principle of how armies have fought ever since. The drone has displaced it. Faster to field, cheaper to produce, harder to detect, and increasingly autonomous, drones have rewritten the economics of the battlefield in less than a decade.
I have been on the receiving end of an FPV swarm. In June of 2025, I was embedded with a Ukrainian suicide drone unit when Russia retaliated for Operation Spiderweb, Ukraine’s masterful strike on strategic air assets deep inside Russian territory. That night, Russia launched successive waves of attacks on Ukrainian cities, while at the front Russian FPVs hunted everything that moved. Our unit was pinned down for more than twenty hours as the drones probed the terrain around us, hoping to flush us out. I lost count of the nearby hits. They were close enough that we could feel the concussions in our chests.
I have also watched the drone war from the other side — with the crews who kill them. I have crouched on a rooftop on the outskirts of Kyiv with a mobile gun crew serving as that city’s last line of defense, and stood on the shores of the Black Sea outside Odessa at three in the morning as the Shaheds came in low, engines buzzing. You hear them before you see them. Then you see the tracers. Then, if the crew is good, the fireball. I have ridden in gun trucks crewed by men from every corner of Ukrainian society, bound by a common determination to defend their country. One unit I embedded with was commanded by a sitting member of Ukraine’s Supreme Court — judicial robes during the day, body armor at night. He was very good at killing drones.
What the Ukrainians have done is solve an economic equation with life and death stakes. Russia sends cheap weapons to kill them, and they have found even cheaper ways to defeat the threat. The Sting — a 3D-printed, bullet-shaped quadcopter that costs about two thousand dollars and flies at 213 miles per hour — has destroyed nearly four thousand Russian drones since May 2025. SkyFall’s P1-SUN is even cheaper at a thousand dollars, with over 1,500 Shahed kills in four months. These are not experimental prototypes – domestic manufacturers are producing thousands of interceptors per month. And Ukraine needs every one of them. On any given night, hundreds of attacking drones enter its airspace, but with ingenuity and rapid iteration, Ukraine’s defenders have ensured that the vast majority never reach their targets.
Ukraine is trying to export this knowledge. Most of the West is listening. France has partnered on the DWS-1 Drone Wall—two hundred autonomous interceptors controlled by a single operator, the first system of its kind to be fielded in a combat zone. Britain launched Project Octopus to mass-produce Ukrainian-designed interceptors. Romania signed on for joint drone production. Denmark is running counter-drone exercises with Ukrainian instructors. The Danish prime minister put it simply: the only real expert in the world right now on drone defense is Ukraine.
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America, however, has not learned from Ukraine’s experience. Not for lack of courage. I spent years in the Navy, and flew reconnaissance missions off Russia and Iran and other places I am not permitted to name. I saw American bravery up close. What we lack now is expertise—and the humility to seek it. The Ukrainians have operational knowledge of how to defeat drones at scale, at low cost, and with the kind of creativity that only comes from defending your cities night after night for three years.
The burning skyscrapers across the Gulf and the body bags in Kuwait show the cost of America’s arrogance. Ukraine intercepts massive waves of Shaheds with ingenuity and precision, using interceptors that cost a few thousand dollars apiece. America continues to fire million-dollar missiles, ignoring the layered defense that Ukraine has perfected and offered to share. For those in the line of fire, the difference is not a budget line. It is a body count.
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Ken Harbaugh is a former Navy reconnaissance pilot, president of MeidasTouch Studios, and founder of VALOR Media Network.
