Asymmetric warfare – relearning hard lessons

(This is the first of a two-part series addressing the state of the current conflict with Iran and the way forward.)

When I was an Army ROTC cadet in 1976, one of my instructors was a Special Forces SFC named Mason. He had served multiple tours in Vietnam. On one occasion, he and his team had been dropped into North Vietnam to conduct sabotage. Most of the team was killed. Mason was shot through the leg. He dressed his own wound, evaded pursuit, and after days of hard marching made it out to an extraction point under his own power.

Mason was about as hard as they come.

When we would go on field training exercises carrying the PRC77 radio, we would periodically have to change the big, brick-like batteries. In training, we humped them out, something you would never bother to do in combat. They would be discarded. But Mason made a point of driving home to us that in the real world, before you discarded a battery, you had to crush it. If you did not, it would be picked up by the Viet Cong, and that “dead” battery that would not run your radio anymore still had enough “juice” to be used to activate a boobytrap and kill American soldiers, what we considered trash the enemy considered a weapon.

Mason had learned that lesson the hard way. He understood asymmetric warfare.

We are locked in combat with the Iranians. We are fighting a high-tech, conventional war. They are not. They are operating on a different level, approaching the conflict asymmetrically in both strategy and the weapons they rely on.

Let’s take the Shahed drone as one example. Estimates of the number of such drones the Iranians possessed at the outset of the war vary widely. There are rumors that the Chinese are building them more. Put simply, none of this means anything.

The Iranians don’t need the Chinese to make these drones for them; they can build new ones almost as fast as they can use them.

General Hossein Salami, who led the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps until he died in an Israeli airstrike last summer, once told an audience that advances in Iran’s defense industry had made manufacturing weapons systems “as easy as producing bicycles.” The Shahed is a perfect example of what he meant.

An Iranian-made Shahed drone is a simple weapon. The wings are made of fiberglass and end in two fixed vertical stabilizers. The rear control fins are operated by simple servos. The drone carries an autopilot system, a global positioning receiver, and a data module. Propulsion is provided by a basic air-cooled four-piston motor, made of cast aluminum, producing 50 horsepower to drive a pusher propeller. It’s essentially a motorcycle engine. The drone can fly about 100 miles an hour and carry an eighty-five-pound warhead. It has a range of 1200 miles

The Iranians have launched thousands of these things already. They have hit not just military sites, but also ships and all sorts of civilian targets, including refineries, airports, and hotels. Largely because of these drones, the Straits of Hormuz are now effectively closed. The majority of the drones fired have been intercepted, but the volume of attacks means some are still getting through.

Popularly broadcast estimates of the cost of a Shahed drone run from $20,000 to $50,000. That cost is a tiny fraction of the cost of the interceptor missiles we use to stop them, whose price tag can reach up to $3 million. The truth is far worse, however. It does not actually cost anything like $20,000 to build a Shahed in Iran.

The United States recently unveiled its version of the Shahed, called the Low-Cost Uncrewed Combat Attack System, or LUCAS. CENTCOM says the LUCAS has a production cost of $35,000. While slightly smaller, the LUCAS is a more advanced drone, produced with composite materials, greater precision, and more features, including an integrated Starlink terminal. It is also made in the United States, where production costs are much higher. If we can build a high-tech version of the Shahed here in the States for $35,000, it does not cost the Iranians anything like that to make the simpler original version in Iran.

The best estimate available, in fact, suggests that the Iranians produce new Shaheds for about $4000 a pop. It also appears that production of the Shahed is now fully indigenized, meaning key components are domestically assembled. That includes the MD-550 motor used in the drone. The components Iran does need to import are widely available commercially and used for a variety of legitimate purposes. Preventing the Iranians from getting those is a losing game.

Also, keep in mind that the Iranians manufacture over 1,000,000 passenger vehicles a year. They have a large steel and aluminum industry and many domestic parts manufacturers. Building simple fiberglass drones is no trick for them, and denying them access to the materials and equipment they need would mean true carpet bombing of large swaths of the country.

Airstrikes have targeted facilities belonging to the maker of the Shahed, the Iran Aircraft Manufacturing Industrial Company. All that means is that Iran will now disperse drone production across numerous facilities, including underground locations. Such production may, in fact, have been dispersed before we ever hit the factory. We are talking about a weapon that can quite literally be built in a garage.

The point here is not just that the Iranians can keep making really cheap drones for a very long time. It is that they are fighting a war of a completely different kind than we want them to fight. They have no intention of trying to take on the U.S. Air Force or the U.S. Navy in direct combat. They aren’t going to sail out to attack a carrier battle group. They never were.

They are going to use simple, cheap weapons employed by a completely decentralized command structure that can operate independent of any central command and they are going to shoot at really big, easy to hit targets that have massive economic impact on the whole world: tankers, desalination plants, refineries, ports, oil tanks and maybe very soon actual oil and gas production facilities as well.

And, they may be able to keep doing this for a very long time. Just like the Viet Cong were able to keep killing Americans with booby traps powered by our trash for a very, very long time.

So, we need to recalibrate our thinking and start aligning our goals and the means we are willing to employ to achieve them. That means either settling for something considerably less than regime change, or it means acknowledging that air power alone will not win this fight.

Next time – Anaconda – An Alternate Approach To Dealing With Iran

Originally published by AND Magazine