The U.S. military’s cost problem in countering cheap Iranian drones

Tue, 21 Apr 2026 23:55:00 +0200

The article explains why the U.S. military is struggling to respond efficiently to Iran’s low-cost Shahed drones. These drones are inexpensive to build, widely assembled from commercial parts, and effective enough to force U.S. forces into spending far more expensive interceptors to destroy them. The result is a growing cost imbalance: a drone that may cost tens of thousands of dollars can trigger the use of missiles worth more than $1 million.

The piece argues that this is not mainly a technology gap but a bureaucracy and procurement problem. The Pentagon’s requirements, budgeting, and acquisition systems were built for a Cold War-era threat environment and often take years to move from identifying a need to fielding a solution. That slow process makes it difficult to rapidly scale cheaper anti-drone systems, even though Ukraine has already demonstrated that low-cost interceptor drones can be a practical alternative.

The article also notes that the Pentagon ended its old requirement