If Iran is not defeated, the drone doctrine needs to be revolutionized

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: David Zaikin is the founder and CEO of Key Elements Group Inc., a London-based strategic consultancy specializing in defense, international affairs, and crisis diplomacy. He has contributed to the Jerusalem Post, Barron’s, CNBC, BBC and Bloomberg.

The Gulf war did not reveal a procurement problem. It revealed a doctrinal one. Patriot interceptors at $3 million apiece were fired at Shaheds costing $35,000, according to CSIS. At scale, that is not a battle the West can sustain.

Moscow already knew this. What the Gulf proved was something it suspected but could not confirm on American soil: the same arithmetic failure applies to U.S. forces. That is the lesson that matters, and it has nothing to do with Iran.

Russia has been using the same Iranian drone designs against Ukrainian cities since 2022. It has four years of data on what they do to air defenses, how defenders adapt, and where the gaps are. The Gulf did not teach Moscow anything new about drone warfare. It taught Moscow that American air defenses have the same structural vulnerability as everyone else’s. That changes the calculus for Europe.

Russia does not need to match NATO in conventional firepower to terrorize European capitals. It needs only two things it already has: a mass-production drone capability and a nuclear arsenal that deters any proportionate Western response. Every Patriot round fired at a Shahed in the Gulf is a proof of concept.

If American bases defended by Patriots cannot stop every Shahed, what happens when the target is Warsaw, Copenhagen or Ramstein? Ukraine already has the answer: purpose-built interceptor drones, countering the same weapons at a fraction of the cost. The coercion model only works if the West has no affordable counter. Ukraine already has one.

This is already happening. In September 2025, approximately 20 Russian drones penetrated Polish airspace, forcing airport closures across multiple cities. Poland invoked NATO Article 4 consultations. Denmark’s prime minister warned that Russia’s hybrid war is “only the beginning — to threaten us, to divide us, to destabilize us.”

NATO’s response confirmed the logic. Operation Eastern Sentry sent advanced combat aircraft and precision-guided missiles to intercept plywood-and-Styrofoam drones costing $10,000 each. The cost asymmetry bleeding American stockpiles in the Gulf is already being tested against NATO in Europe. Russian President Vladimir Putin joked he would “stop sending drones to France, Denmark and Copenhagen.”

Ukraine is the only country that has solved this problem under fire. It built a counter-drone architecture costing a fraction of what the Gulf just spent: purpose-built interceptors against the same Shaheds forcing $3 million Patriot launches. Its interceptor program now accounts for over 70% of Shahed downings over Kyiv.

The Pentagon’s own counter-drone task force visited Kyiv the week before the Iran strikes. Brig. Gen. Matt Ross said his mission was to understand what Ukraine employs: “Nobody has more experience in this particular type of warfare.” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has since confirmed a formal U.S. request for counter-drone support.

But buying drones is not doctrine. Ukraine survived four years of aerial bombardment by building a system, not a stockpile: detection, jamming, operators, and production are inseparable. That integrated knowledge, how to counter a mass drone attack while sustaining your own offensive capability, how to adapt as the adversary shifts frequencies in real time, is something no NATO military currently has and no procurement contract can deliver.

Iran’s drone campaign in the Gulf is a crisis. Russia’s potential campaign against Europe is an existential one, backed by the world’s largest nuclear arsenal. The scenario: sustained drone bombardment of European cities, calibrated below the threshold of a NATO response, while nuclear threats deter conventional retaliation. Not an invasion. A campaign designed to fracture NATO’s political cohesion and demonstrate that the American security guarantee cannot protect European citizens from drones any more than it protected Bahrain or Kuwait.

Beijing is watching. If American interceptor stockpiles are depleted against Iran, what remains for a Taiwan contingency? China’s drone programs are larger, more sophisticated, and backed by the world’s dominant manufacturing base. If the arithmetic does not work against Iran, it will not work against China.

The current approach does not just burn through interceptors. It burns through deterrence. The West’s air defense model is strategically bankrupt against a $35,000 weapon, and Moscow and Beijing both know it.

Three things need to happen.

First, adopt Ukraine’s integrated counter-drone system as the model for European theater defense, not just its hardware. Detection, jamming, trained operators, and domestic production are a single architecture, and the U.S. military should embed that architecture into EUCOM planning and force structure now, not after the first strike on a NATO city.

Second, scale production. Ukrainian manufacturers have already opened factories in Britain, Slovakia, Germany, Denmark and Finland. NATO’s proposed drone wall across Europe’s eastern border must move from concept to capability before Moscow decides to test it.

Third, formalize Ukraine as a strategic counter-drone partner. U.S. operators need access to Ukrainian training pipelines, combat-tested doctrine, and the institutional knowledge that comes from four years of nightly drone warfare. No exercise replicates what Ukrainian crews do on a live battlefield every night. That access is worth more to U.S. readiness than any hardware purchase.

Iran does not need to win. It just needs to keep launching. But Iran is not the adversary that keeps American defense planners awake at night. Russia has four years of data on saturating air defenses with cheap drones, a nuclear arsenal that deters retaliation, and it just watched the most sophisticated air defenses on Earth struggle against $35,000 weapons. It is already probing European airspace.

The doctrine has been written in blood over four years in Ukraine. The technology exists. The production capacity is proven. The question is whether the United States and its allies adopt it before Moscow decides the math is good enough, confident its nuclear arsenal will limit NATO’s response to scrambling jets and issuing statements of concern. We have seen what damage that 1,184 drones launched at a single well-prepared country could cause, now imagine tens of thousands of drones being launched in a single day at a country lacking preparation.

That is not a procurement problem. That is a deterrence crisis. And every week without a doctrinal revolution is a week Moscow and Beijing bank.