March 18, 2026 • 32 mins
Iran's Shahed drone costs $30,000 to build. The US missile sent to destroy it? Up to $4 million. Pulitzer Prize-winning conflict journalist Ben C. Solomon wants you to do the math. Oz sits down with Ben to break down the economics driving the conflict with Iran, why the Pentagon may already be making impossible choices about what to defend, and why Ukraine — largely abandoned by the West — has quietly become the world's leading authority on drone warfare.
Additional Reading:
- Ben C. Solomon Instagram: Just follow the money.
- Pentagon acknowledges tough quest to counter Iranian drones | Military Times
- US may not have capacity to take down full barrage of Iranian drones, officials warn | US-Israel war on Iran | The Guardian
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:15):
Welcome to tech Stuff. Our guest today is Ben C. Solomon,
a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and filmmaker who reports on
combat zones and international crises. His work has appeared as
in New York Times, on WECE, and in the Wall
Street Journal, and a recent Instagram video of Ben's really
caught my attention.
Speaker 2 (00:34):
The way that the Irridians have designed current status of
this war. It won't be about who has the biggest guns.
It'll be about who can afford to keep pulling the trigger.
Speaker 1 (00:44):
It had the following caption, just follow the money. In
the first few days of this conflict, the US has
fired over eight hundred Patriot missiles. They cost about four
million dollars per missile. An Iranian shah Head drone costs
about thirty thousand dollars to make. So how is this
going to work?
Speaker 2 (01:02):
How?
Speaker 1 (01:02):
Indeed?
Speaker 2 (01:03):
Ben, welcome, Thanks thanks for having me.
Speaker 1 (01:05):
So you asked the.
Speaker 2 (01:06):
Question, what's the onset? You know, I don't think there's
still a clear guideline for the Americans. I think that
when the fighting started, it was pretty obvious that the
American military thought that this was going to be a
pretty fast process.
Speaker 1 (01:23):
I ever heard that one before.
Speaker 2 (01:26):
It's Yeah, it's kind of played out to a lot
of complicated ways for the way that the military works.
I think that a lot of the advisors in the
Pentagon had been advising against this, and a lot of
the mechanisms that they have for defending against the attacks
that they probably expected are in fact ready. But the
(01:48):
attacks they didn't expect are the ones that are coming now,
and that's really drones. And because of that, it's become
a really financially imbalanced fight and that's where their problems
are now.
Speaker 1 (02:00):
Now, how is it they didn't expect drones because the
Iranians famously have been manufacturing sha head drones, which is
showing up on the battlefield in Ukraine for the Russians
for the last thral four years. So Iran even as
a reader of the newspaper, you know that they have
a big drone manufacturing capability.
Speaker 2 (02:15):
Well, you know, I can't speak to the American military
manufacturing and what maybe they did or didn't expect, but
what we can deduce from the way that it's played
out over the past few weeks is that they really,
even if they had thought about your head drones, they
didn't plan for it to go for more than a
few days, and because of that, what we're seeing is
real imbalance in arms. The ship head drones are about
(02:37):
thirty thousand dollars each twenty thirty thousand dollars. They're really basic,
they're really easy to make, and for someone like me
who's been working and covering Ukraine for many years now,
you see them all the time. I mean they are
if you are a Ukrainian living in the city, you
know it well. You know the sound. It's haunting. It
sounds like a buzzing in the air, and it happens
(02:58):
every few nights that these things are crashing in.
Speaker 1 (03:00):
What do they look like.
Speaker 2 (03:02):
They're kind of, you know, their fiberglass hull. They're about
i don't know, like the size of maybe like half
of like a car. They are pretty basic. In the front,
they have a long tube and then the back is
a engine that is it's basically the Iranian who developed
the Iranian military forces who developed it, like reverse engineered
a what is basically the engine of a VW Beetle.
(03:24):
It's about a two hundred horsepower engine that they apparently
found in a different arms or a different a different
a small aircraft, a German aircraft and then a reverse
engineer this thing to be a small and powerful engine
that can fly hundreds of miles. So it's loud, it's
it's buzzing and annoying, and it's really cheap and basic.
(03:45):
It's not a really complicated piece of tech. It's it's
really low tech. So in fact, it's it's like super simple.
And their ability over the past three years since it's
kind of been most prevalent in Ukraine to perfect it
is really why this conflict is as complicated as it
is right now.
Speaker 1 (04:03):
These drones crossed I think about thirty thousand dollars to make,
and they're known as suicide drones, and what the Iranians
have been doing is flying them basically at the Gulf
and Israel. And the core of your story is that
the price of shooting these out of the air is unsustainable,
both financially and in terms of missile supplies.
Speaker 2 (04:24):
Yeah, so a she shed drone, like you said, it's
about thirty thousand dollars, simple, basic structure, and the American
defenses that are going up against it are a couple
of different air defense systems, all of which are the
most advanced in the world. Unbelievably well put together, but
also stupidly expensive. The Patriot missile system fires a projectile.
(04:47):
It's about four million dollars. The Nasam's air defense system
is about one million dollars. These are the best of
the best air defense technologies. So when you want to
shoot something down, that's what you want. And that's why
the Ukrainians have been pushing the America to get it
for many years. That's why many other nations are hoping
to make them or copy them in some way. But
because they're so expensive, Iran is taking advantage of that.
(05:09):
It is so easy for them to fire as many
drones as they possibly can thirty thousand dollars shots, and
to take it down. The Americans have to at this
point fire four million dollar shots. It doesn't add up.
And to top it all off, we only can make
The American military can only make about six hundred Patriot
missiles a year. Their production line, which is slow and procedural,
(05:32):
means that they have to really like preserve it in ways.
That's why it's been so complicated selling it and giving
it to the Ukrainians, and it's why now after the
first week of this war, it was said that something
like two hundred or three hundred of them had already
been fired. That's about half the stock of a year,
and a lot of the stock that they probably have
even ready. So I think very quickly they realized this
is not going to last as long as they as
(05:54):
they need, and they got to figure out something else.
And now I think they're scrambling.
Speaker 1 (05:58):
I want to ask you about what the ops are
on the figuring out something else before we get there.
Why did the Uranians develop this drone?
Speaker 2 (06:05):
So the shah head drone is so shahad is it
translates to martyrs like a suicide drone. I think originally
it was. I don't know for sure, but the first
early days of it and when it kind of came
to its biggest prevalence was in Ukraine. The Russians started
using it to basically do the exact same technique that
the Iranians are doing now, which is to overwhelm the
(06:27):
system with attacks. In terms of trying to make the
best weapon or the most effective weapon, this was not that.
This is just one that you can make cheap, fast
and easy, and the idea is to just overload anything
you fired at. If you fire fifty of these things,
A couple of them are going to get through and
they're going to do some damage. They are accurate to
a point. They're not the most accurate, but they're not
(06:47):
the worst. And over the past three years, the Russians
have been using them NonStop. The chart that we've seen
that of just how many of these things have gone
up in the past few years just keeps going up
and up and up. Four the Russian usage in Ukraine,
and it's really kind of perfected the system of how
you can totally overwhelm their defenses. The Iranians, it's unclear
(07:10):
as to how and why they put it together, but
they're very proud of this system. It's become folklore, it's
become so widely used, it's become so effective that people
are really out of it in the Iranian military, and
as well they should be. They've really kind of used
a scrappy, small system that subverts and uses asymmetrical warfare,
(07:31):
the idea that we are a weaker system, and we
know we don't have the same amount of arms and
power as you, but if we can find a scrappy
way to make it hurt for you, then we win
and that's really what these drones are doing.
Speaker 1 (07:41):
I remember in two thousand and one, I was a
high school debater and one of the debate topics was
about the war in Afghanistan, and I found this great
quote that I rolled out with enthusiasm, which was some
talent bound spokesperson that said, the Americans have the watch shit,
but the Tallee Band have the time. Fast forward twenty
(08:02):
ish years and the Taleban are backing power in Afghanistan.
And that sense of the watches and the time, you
can't help thinking about it when you think about this story.
Speaker 2 (08:12):
Yeah, I think about that quote a lot too. It's
widely known, it's well documented. It's something that kind of
has kind of become the most prevalent takeaway from that conflict,
and I think the core of it is exactly what
we're seeing today, which is asymmetrical warfare. It's this idea
that one side's big and powerful, and it's got Patriot
missiles millions of dollars to keep making them. What do
(08:33):
you have? What is the thing that you are able
to do that the other side can't, and how can
you make it painful for them? With these drones, they've
really kind of gained the economic system of war. These
drones are able to just keep firing and keep attacking,
and keep just pushing more and more problems into the
hands of the defenses. If you think about it, when
(08:55):
the Iranian military fire is a drone off, they win.
No matter what happens, they win. Either it gets shot
down and costs the Americans billions of dollars, or they're
hidden something and making damage. So anytime one of these fires,
they win. And that's kind of why this is such
an effective tool.
Speaker 1 (09:11):
Right now, now we're recording this a few days before
it will air. It's Thursday, the twelfth of March today.
But I'm curious, are we seeing the Americans and the
Gulf nations having to stop making hard choices about what
to intercept already? Is that something which is going to
make come in the next days, Well.
Speaker 2 (09:27):
It's unclear when and how. Right now, there was a
report from I can't remember, I think it was the
Washington Post that had some sources inside the Pentagon that
were saying that they are going to start very soon
having to make tough choices about what to defend and
what not to. Now this is not to say that
the rate of drones that are being fired is at
(09:47):
the same rate that it was at the beginning of
the war. It's not. The Americans' response to this is
to hit launch sites, and it's been effective. The amount
of drones that are flying out is gotten out about
eighty something percent, Like there's just not as many flying around.
So the eighty percent of launches eight percent of drones
from Iran in the air has gone down significantly. So
(10:09):
it's changed the way that I think Iranians are thinking
about this too. They are also being judicious in the
way that they're firing drones because the Americans do have
a better view of where attacks can happen and how
they can shut them down. I mean, the Americans are
not losing the tactical fight right now by any means.
They are attacking many, many sites, and they're proud that
(10:30):
you can see it on the scent Calm Twitter. They
are filling the feed with all of the attacks they're doing,
and it is many and it's really hurt in the Iranians.
So they're not it's not completely out that the Americans
are having effective strikes on these targets, but still the
way that the Iranians are able to fight. It's going
to get more and more complicated, and you see it
now in the Strait of Horn moves.
Speaker 1 (10:51):
Well, I want to come to that, but let me
ask you first. Key difference here being the Americans have
access to long range missiles and air power, as do
the Israelis, and therefore they can knock out the launch
sites of the shah Head drones in Iran, whereas the
Ukrainians have not been able to successfully attach the launch
(11:11):
sites of the Shahad drones in Russia.
Speaker 2 (11:15):
Sometimes yes, sometimes no, I mean the Ukrainians are the
most interesting part of the Shahead conversation by far. The
Ukrainians have spent the past three years dealing with these
things and spent the past three years creatively coming up
with ways to stop them. That's ranged from taking fifty
cal machine guns and World War Two style shooting up
(11:35):
in the night sky and trying to knock these things
down to really high tech solutions creating interceptor drones, which
are basically smaller, faster drones that have tracking systems on
them that see the Shahad, which is fairly slow the
head is not a fast weapon, and chase it down
the air and knock it out of the sky, and
they are proving to be effective too, and that's a
(11:57):
tech that they're developing more and more so. For the
U Crainians, the shahdrone is something that they've been dealing
with all the time, and not in a way that
the Americans have, which is to say lots of money,
lots of support, and lots of expensive missiles to shoot
them down. They have to come up with scrappy, low
tech ways to destroy these things. And again, they're not
that hard to shoot down. They are slow, they're not
that well made. They are meant to be a haunting
(12:20):
slow device, so it's not that hard to shoot them down.
But if there's hundreds of them, then you have to
worry about it.
Speaker 1 (12:26):
You probabished an extraordinary video from Ukraine, and I think
you had access that I've never seen before to be
able to shoot inside a drone targeting facility in Ukraine
and meet some of the most senior figures in the
Ukraine Drone Warfare Department, one of whom said to you,
with drones, the world will never be the same again.
(12:50):
NATO country's understanding of drones does not match what we
understood in twenty twenty two.
Speaker 2 (12:56):
Yeah, and he's proving to be more and more right.
I think that something that you Ukrainians pride themselves on
is their ability to creatively find fighting solutions in a
terrible situation without much support and kind of just with
grassroots movements to make these things happen. The colonel that
I talked to, he is somebody that has spent so
(13:17):
much time perfecting drones, making it an assembly line process
that this is someone that really knows how and what
the complications of fighting are with them. And he's saying,
he was saying to us when we interviewed him, they
need our help. The NATO needs us to come in
and teach them what they know, because soon they're going
to have this problem too. We shot that in November
(13:38):
of last year, November twenty twenty five, and now, however,
many months later in March twenty twenty six, he's proving
to be right more and more. And there's been reports
that some of the Gulf nations are starting to enlist
the Ukrainian drone expertise and bring them over. We haven't
seen what that looks like yet. That was a tweet
from President Zelenski a couple of days ago. That said
(13:58):
that that's happening, but it's something that I think the
Ukrainians are proud of and want to be a part of.
But it also brings it in more questions about where
this war will go. So much of the fighting in
Ukraine has been localized to just those two nations. With
this new fighting in Iran, how much the Ukrainians will
be involved and the NATO defense in golf country's defense,
(14:20):
and more importantly, how much Russia will be involved in
directing Iranians and how to use these shahads in interesting ways,
which is also some other reports that are coming out
of the word seeing will mean a lot to the
next stages of this fight.
Speaker 1 (14:32):
You mentioned Zelenski, I mean, I think he said that,
if I'm not mistaken, Ukrainian interceptor drones and now defending
US military interest in the Gulf and in Jordan.
Speaker 2 (14:42):
Right, That's yeah. I mean, so far the sources that
I've been talking to who I'm in touch with the Ukrainians,
I haven't heard about what that looks like on the
ground yet. I have no doubt that people are in
motion and that the Ukrainians are a part of these
next processes. But I think It's time will tell how
involved all Ukrainians will get in these processes, and how
(15:03):
the Gulf nations and for that matter, in America will
react to their expertise, and what will mean to them.
Speaker 1 (15:10):
There's a certain irony here. Your eyes widened, right, I mean,
it's kind of extraordinary.
Speaker 2 (15:19):
I've spent the past three plus years covering this war
in Ukraine and watching the American interest in it and
American connection to that fight just really just drop off
a cliff. When I first started reporting there in twenty
twenty two, people were so passionate about this fight and
(15:40):
the defense of Ukraine and what it meant to kind
of stand up against Russia. And then over the years
it kind of dipped, and it dipped politically too, it
dipped most importantly financially. And with that dip, the Ukrainians
have felt abandoned in many ways, and in that abandonment,
they've had to figure out how to do it on
their own. And that's where we're at now in of drones.
(16:00):
So the fact that some of these nations are now
turning to Ukraine and saying, hey, can you help us
with this? What do you know about this? It's it's
a kind of a wild step, and as someone who's
kind of covered closely and covered drones intensely and almost
been killed by them. Uh, it's it's kind of amazing
to me and and kind of flabbergasting to know that
(16:21):
the rest of the world is finally waking up to
what Ukraine has been screaming now for years, which is
drones are here and they're not going anywhere. The future
of war will involve drones in every single way, and
there's no going back from that.
Speaker 1 (16:49):
After the break, Can defense tech companies actually keep up
with the pace of war stay with us? It's also interesting,
(17:15):
I mean, the US has apparently copied the Iranian shah
head drone technology from Iran. You're shaking your hay, Is
that true or not true?
Speaker 2 (17:22):
It's very true. In fact, there was a video online
circulating of one that had crashed in Iraq and some
people were filming themselves picking it up and checking it out.
But it's not even a secret. I mean, the Americans
are proud of it. They were in the early stages
of the war putting out press releases and videos and
photos saying like, here's our version of this tech. I
(17:45):
don't think the problem for any of these governments, in
any of these militaries is that they don't believe that
drones are important. I just don't think anybody has used
it yet. I don't think anybody has applied it in
ways that are useful except the Ukrainians, the Russian and
now the Iranians. I think the Americans are playing ketchup.
I think a lot of NATO countries are also playing ketchup.
(18:06):
But for the most part, like I was saying, like
these things are here to stay, and I don't think
the Americans have any like any qualms about saying how
important it is, saying how much they want to be
a part of that game. I mean to the point
that you know, there was news the other day that
the sons of President Trump were investing in military drone
technology companies. But it's incredible. It's there's no hiding that
(18:29):
these things are happening. And I think anybody that is
running companies they're involved with drones or thinking about drone
defense knows that after this war that everybody's going to
be kind of jumping at this.
Speaker 1 (18:40):
Lauren Kahn, who is a former Pentagon policy advisor, has
said this is the first case in a long time,
really since the early days of the Cold War, whether
the US has seen a capability produced by an adversary
and decided it fills a gap and then decide to
produce it. She's referring specifically to Shih drones, and how
are they actually being used by the You know, it's unclear.
Speaker 2 (19:01):
I think that right now, in the early days of
the war and the early days of the fighting in Iran,
they were used in kind of limited capacities in different
strike sites. I don't think that the US military has
a really clear plan for how they want to use them.
They just know they want them. So there's not been
a lot of reporting, a lot of understanding where they go.
But what we do know is that the reporter you're
(19:24):
talking about is absolutely right. These weapons are not simple
things that are made kind of specific to one fight
or another. There's something that is really going to be
prevalent throughout the next stages of any kind of conflict.
You see Shah drones in Sudan. We heard about a
drone strike in Congo yesterday. When I was in Sudan
(19:48):
reporting a few years ago, it was one of the
weirdest feelings to be worried about drones in a country
that I had just left Ukraine a month before, and
now I'm in another country again worrying about conflict with drones,
And I think that's going to be the common feeling
for so long now. I think anywhere that there is
people trying to kill each other, drones are a effective
(20:09):
tool to do that.
Speaker 1 (20:10):
Have you looked into the kind of very heavily venture
backed drone companies like Anderil in the US or Helsing
in Europe and whether they're drone technology which is exciting
investors from from the Trump kids to Daniel Eck of Spotify,
whether their drone technology, which has been developed ultimately in
(20:31):
a vacuum, is going to be competitive on the battlefield
with the kind of homespun Ukrainian and Iranian technologies.
Speaker 2 (20:40):
Yeah. You know, the most experience that I've had with
the tech that is surrounding drones from the West was
kind of maybe two years ago in Ukraine. We were
covering the fighting around Chasavar for the Wall Street Journal,
and it was at a time when drones were becoming
more and more prevalent. It wasn't what it is now,
(21:00):
which is everything. It's like eighty percent of all strikes
in Ukraine. But back then it was it was really
revving up and you were just starting to worry about it.
And at the Wall Street Journal we said, okay, well,
how are we going to deal with this? What are
the mechanisms to defend ourselves? And as a company, our
security advisors the best in the business. We're going out
to different companies and saying what do you got, And
(21:21):
these companies will come back to us and we're like, oh,
we got the jammer. This is the one. This is
the perfect one. All you need to do is pay
us two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. This jammer protects
your journalists all the way through. And that went to
the bosses and dow Jones was you know how to
this is great? Now we have we can do this,
blah blah blah. And I would turn to the soldiers
on the ground, these guys who've been living at it,
and be like, oh, we're going to get this tech.
(21:42):
It's expensive, it's nice, we got the good stuff. And
they're like, oh, it's we just used that like last month.
That doesn't work anymore. Yeah, that's so good. Now used
to work on this channel. Now they figured out how
to use it on this channel. So yeah, it's not
good anymore. Really, the people on the ground are moving
at light speed the way thrones are changing. And anybody
who says different, anybody says that they have the answer,
(22:04):
is trying to sell you something. Because when you're in
Ukraine and you see these drones and you see that
the ways that they adapt, and you hang out with
drone makers, people that produce these things, and kind of
think about the best ways to use them, you find
out really quickly that it's just a game of chess.
They figure out how to stop this thing. How do
we get around that? Okay, they figure out how to
(22:25):
stop that thing? How do we get around that? The
Russians and the Ukrainians are pushing each other in the
most deadly way to get better and better at this tech.
So I think a lot of these companies, because they
are so well funded, are going to figure stuff out.
They're going to use different ways to progress the effectiveness
and the deadliness of drones in ways that Ukrainians can't.
(22:45):
But the real word world experience that the Ukrainians right
have right now is second to none.
Speaker 1 (22:51):
One of the chilling but also fascinating things about modern
warfare is social media videos of weapons caches. I remember
the Pilisco New Generation Cartel a couple of years ago
did these videos of like their you know, surface to
our missiles and rocket launchers, and like they were basically
(23:13):
all but saying we are better equipped than the Mexican
military in terms of our warfighting ability. The Iranians released
a video of just this bunker full of naval drones,
and there's like a kind of dolly shot where you
just got drone after drone after drone after drone, and
they look kind of like mini speedboats or mini jet skis,
except I assume they're underwater drones. And their function you
(23:34):
mentioned the straight up horn moves earlier, which I want
to come back to now, it is to attack ships.
Speaker 2 (23:39):
So naval drones are the next step in the most
kind of interesting cat and mouse game of attack drones.
There is US fees on manned surface vessels, which you
know you can think about just basically is like RC
remote controlled boats with lots and lots of explosives on them.
I mean, that's basically odd. Is these are small, dynamic,
(24:00):
really agile boats that just ram into ships. And they're
hard to shoot down and they're hard to kind of
defend against. And now I think they're seeing a lot
of talk about swarm tactics, which is the same as
with shahads, just sending as many as you can so
that how do you stop all of them. They're designed
to hit oil tankers because secondary explosions and you can
(24:22):
light the gas on fire, but also naval ships, coastal infrastructures,
anything that it can kind of get its hands on.
And then there's also talk about the UUVs, which is
the sorry, the unmanned underwater drums. These are the ones
that are submersive like submarines. They can dive, they can
go to really deep deaths and kind of go under.
They can drop mines. Some of the reporting is saying
(24:44):
that a lot of them are being used to mine
the Strait of Horror moves right now, and they can
also be used to attack ships in the middle of
the night. We've yet to see just how effective these
things are. I mean, we're hearing about the first strikes
of these things, but what we do know is how
they've already been used again in Ukraine. Again, the Ukrainian
were some of the people that first started innovating with
these kinds of drones the Black Sea, where the Ukrainians
(25:06):
had some of the most effective hits with naval drones,
with some of their prime examples of how useful it
was for them against the Russian fleets. These are just
any way that you can decide to send big things
with explosives on them that are fast but simple enough
that they can get around big defenses and big big
things trying to stop it. If you swarm them and
(25:28):
you send a bunch of them, eventually one or two
of them are going to get through. And that's what
I think all of these militaries are now finding out,
for better or for worse, I means extraordinary.
Speaker 1 (25:35):
People talked all through last year about how the Ukraine
Russia conflict is a testing ground or a Petrie dish,
or a foreshadowing of what the future of warfare will be.
And you know, the Trump decision to strike Iran has
seemed to have proven that everything people said about how
the confliction in Ukraine would shape the future of warfare
(25:57):
has come true, and a hummeled adversary but with access
to this unmanned and relatedly cheap and mass producible drones
under sea, surface, sea, and air. I mean, could drag
the United States into an unending conflict.
Speaker 2 (26:15):
Yeah, I think the whatever the plan was, and whatever
the plan is in this fight, I think it's probably
changing very rapidly. It's hard to know what it was.
It's hard to know what it's going to look like
in the future. But I think that what it looked
like at the beginning, I saw a lot of similarities
to the beginning of the invasion of Ukraine in twenty
(26:37):
twenty two. A big, powerful military rushing in with all
of its might. Now, the biggest and most important comparison
is that this American strikes on a run or all
precision strikes with no boots on the ground and that
we know of, whereas Ukraine was massive amounts of armies
invading the nations. But at the same time, the similarities
(26:59):
that are striking are just the amount of kind of
the what they had not considered going into it, how
much they are learning on the fly, and how much
they are having things fail. The Americans thought that this
was going to be easy. It's clear that they thought
this was going to be fast. They thought they were
going to do something that was really effective and then
move on. That's something that we see from a lot
(27:20):
of the way that Trump has approached a lot of
these military actions over the past year. But now it
hasn't been and hasn't it hasn't been easy to kind
of set the goals. We still don't. We haven't really
got a lot of clear answers from the American government
as to what the goals are. And more importantly, it's
unclear how it ends, unclear how the US can stop this,
and from everything that's happening, it's very clear that Iran
(27:43):
is kind of holding a lot of the keys to
what happens next. Today the new Iatolda announced he's going
to continue blocking off the Strait of horror moves. This
is incredibly important for the Americans to get back open.
The entire global economy rests on the ability to get
gas moving again through the through this, through this canal.
So if it doesn't happen, what happens with the America?
(28:05):
What do they do to respond? So at this point,
and in the same way the Russians forcing them thought
they were gonna take KIV, what did they say they're
gonna take it? In a couple of days. They didn't.
It took it took now four years to make you know,
tiny advances at the cost of millions of soldiers dead
to be able to get bits and pieces of the country.
(28:26):
And even for them, it's still not clear where that
war ends. These wars of attrition, they are terrible for
everybody involved. And whatever happens next this war and war
in Iran, if it is anything like Russia, if it's
anything like that, the way that that's turned out, it's
going to be costly and painful for everybody on every side.
Speaker 1 (28:47):
And coming back to Ukraine, I mean, there was obviously
partisans hiding in the forests in the Second World War,
and the Partisans would ambush Soviet troops and Nazi troops
and have victories and and you know, kept the conflict
going and degraded both of those forces. Now you essentially
can have partisans, But who have range?
Speaker 2 (29:09):
Is that right?
Speaker 1 (29:09):
And what is the ability under pressure, under air power
and the fire do continue to manufacture these drones for Iran?
Like is it conceivable that the US could knock out
the manufacturing capability just with air power?
Speaker 2 (29:22):
That's kind of the big question. We eight nine months
ago we struck Iran, and we hit the American military,
hit military sites to try to knock out their nuclear capabilities,
and then immediately claimed victory, saying we totally knocked it
all out. We did everything. It's great, We're done that.
It's unclear of that that happened. We don't know what
(29:45):
the Iranian military capabilities are, we don't know what their
response can be, and we don't know what they will
do next. But a lot of the control rests in
their ability to kind of withstand. As long as they
with stand, they are winning. As long as they can
keep the straight clothes, they are winning. As long as
they can keep firing drones and keep causing the Americans
(30:08):
to spend money, they are winning. This is a war
of holding out, and the Russians, if we're making the comparison,
are famous for holding out. This is the nation of Stalingrad.
This is the nation of World War Two. That said,
you know how many millions of people say their deaths
to fight off the Nazis and defeat the Nazis by
numbers alone? The Americans, I don't think. I'm not sure
(30:31):
how much of the we're able to withstand the pain
in that sense. On the you know the midterms are coming,
gas prices are going to start increasing, and it's unclear
what Trump can do to kind of ease the pain
of this next process. So the Iranian response and the
Iranian military capabilities, it's a black box. We just don't
know what they can and can't do, but I think
(30:53):
we'll learn as we go.
Speaker 1 (30:55):
Just to close, Ben and thank you. I know this
is not directly your beat, but this is the Tech
Stuff podcast, so I had to ask you tech questions.
What do you make of these Iranian strikes on the
data centers in the Gulf.
Speaker 2 (31:05):
I think the Iranian attack plan right now is to
touch on as many painful points they can. You see
it most importantly in Saudi Arabia. They're attacking oil refiners
with Shia drones. You see it at the different bases
that they're attacking all around the Gulf region. And more importantly,
if they can hit data centers, they know that this
will cause disruptions to the global trade and the important
(31:28):
parts that the American and Western governments are investing so
deeply in. So again, I think this all goes back
to attrition. How much pain can the Iranian cause and
where can they cause? It, and how are they going
to do that in a way that's cheap and can
last a lot longer than the West can.
Speaker 1 (31:50):
Ben Solomon, thank you, thanks for tech stuff. I'm as Varshian.
(32:15):
This episode was produced by Eliza Dennis and Melissa Slaughter.
It was executive produced by me Julian Nata and Kate
Osborne for Kaleidoscope and Katrina Norvel for iHeart Podcast. The
engineer is Charles de Montebello from c DM Studios, Jack
Instey miss this episode, and Kyle Murdoch Rodard theme song.
Please do rate and review the show wherever you listen
(32:36):
to your podcasts.
Welcome to tech Stuff. Our guest today is Ben C. Solomon,
a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and filmmaker who reports on
combat zones and international crises. His work has appeared as
in New York Times, on WECE, and in the Wall
Street Journal, and a recent Instagram video of Ben's really
caught my attention.
Speaker 2 (00:34):
The way that the Irridians have designed current status of
this war. It won't be about who has the biggest guns.
It'll be about who can afford to keep pulling the trigger.
Speaker 1 (00:44):
It had the following caption, just follow the money. In
the first few days of this conflict, the US has
fired over eight hundred Patriot missiles. They cost about four
million dollars per missile. An Iranian shah Head drone costs
about thirty thousand dollars to make. So how is this
going to work?
Speaker 2 (01:02):
How?
Speaker 1 (01:02):
Indeed?
Speaker 2 (01:03):
Ben, welcome, Thanks thanks for having me.
Speaker 1 (01:05):
So you asked the.
Speaker 2 (01:06):
Question, what's the onset? You know, I don't think there's
still a clear guideline for the Americans. I think that
when the fighting started, it was pretty obvious that the
American military thought that this was going to be a
pretty fast process.
Speaker 1 (01:23):
I ever heard that one before.
Speaker 2 (01:26):
It's Yeah, it's kind of played out to a lot
of complicated ways for the way that the military works.
I think that a lot of the advisors in the
Pentagon had been advising against this, and a lot of
the mechanisms that they have for defending against the attacks
that they probably expected are in fact ready. But the
(01:48):
attacks they didn't expect are the ones that are coming now,
and that's really drones. And because of that, it's become
a really financially imbalanced fight and that's where their problems
are now.
Speaker 1 (02:00):
Now, how is it they didn't expect drones because the
Iranians famously have been manufacturing sha head drones, which is
showing up on the battlefield in Ukraine for the Russians
for the last thral four years. So Iran even as
a reader of the newspaper, you know that they have
a big drone manufacturing capability.
Speaker 2 (02:15):
Well, you know, I can't speak to the American military
manufacturing and what maybe they did or didn't expect, but
what we can deduce from the way that it's played
out over the past few weeks is that they really,
even if they had thought about your head drones, they
didn't plan for it to go for more than a
few days, and because of that, what we're seeing is
real imbalance in arms. The ship head drones are about
(02:37):
thirty thousand dollars each twenty thirty thousand dollars. They're really basic,
they're really easy to make, and for someone like me
who's been working and covering Ukraine for many years now,
you see them all the time. I mean they are
if you are a Ukrainian living in the city, you
know it well. You know the sound. It's haunting. It
sounds like a buzzing in the air, and it happens
(02:58):
every few nights that these things are crashing in.
Speaker 1 (03:00):
What do they look like.
Speaker 2 (03:02):
They're kind of, you know, their fiberglass hull. They're about
i don't know, like the size of maybe like half
of like a car. They are pretty basic. In the front,
they have a long tube and then the back is
a engine that is it's basically the Iranian who developed
the Iranian military forces who developed it, like reverse engineered
a what is basically the engine of a VW Beetle.
(03:24):
It's about a two hundred horsepower engine that they apparently
found in a different arms or a different a different
a small aircraft, a German aircraft and then a reverse
engineer this thing to be a small and powerful engine
that can fly hundreds of miles. So it's loud, it's
it's buzzing and annoying, and it's really cheap and basic.
(03:45):
It's not a really complicated piece of tech. It's it's
really low tech. So in fact, it's it's like super simple.
And their ability over the past three years since it's
kind of been most prevalent in Ukraine to perfect it
is really why this conflict is as complicated as it
is right now.
Speaker 1 (04:03):
These drones crossed I think about thirty thousand dollars to make,
and they're known as suicide drones, and what the Iranians
have been doing is flying them basically at the Gulf
and Israel. And the core of your story is that
the price of shooting these out of the air is unsustainable,
both financially and in terms of missile supplies.
Speaker 2 (04:24):
Yeah, so a she shed drone, like you said, it's
about thirty thousand dollars, simple, basic structure, and the American
defenses that are going up against it are a couple
of different air defense systems, all of which are the
most advanced in the world. Unbelievably well put together, but
also stupidly expensive. The Patriot missile system fires a projectile.
(04:47):
It's about four million dollars. The Nasam's air defense system
is about one million dollars. These are the best of
the best air defense technologies. So when you want to
shoot something down, that's what you want. And that's why
the Ukrainians have been pushing the America to get it
for many years. That's why many other nations are hoping
to make them or copy them in some way. But
because they're so expensive, Iran is taking advantage of that.
(05:09):
It is so easy for them to fire as many
drones as they possibly can thirty thousand dollars shots, and
to take it down. The Americans have to at this
point fire four million dollar shots. It doesn't add up.
And to top it all off, we only can make
The American military can only make about six hundred Patriot
missiles a year. Their production line, which is slow and procedural,
(05:32):
means that they have to really like preserve it in ways.
That's why it's been so complicated selling it and giving
it to the Ukrainians, and it's why now after the
first week of this war, it was said that something
like two hundred or three hundred of them had already
been fired. That's about half the stock of a year,
and a lot of the stock that they probably have
even ready. So I think very quickly they realized this
is not going to last as long as they as
(05:54):
they need, and they got to figure out something else.
And now I think they're scrambling.
Speaker 1 (05:58):
I want to ask you about what the ops are
on the figuring out something else before we get there.
Why did the Uranians develop this drone?
Speaker 2 (06:05):
So the shah head drone is so shahad is it
translates to martyrs like a suicide drone. I think originally
it was. I don't know for sure, but the first
early days of it and when it kind of came
to its biggest prevalence was in Ukraine. The Russians started
using it to basically do the exact same technique that
the Iranians are doing now, which is to overwhelm the
(06:27):
system with attacks. In terms of trying to make the
best weapon or the most effective weapon, this was not that.
This is just one that you can make cheap, fast
and easy, and the idea is to just overload anything
you fired at. If you fire fifty of these things,
A couple of them are going to get through and
they're going to do some damage. They are accurate to
a point. They're not the most accurate, but they're not
(06:47):
the worst. And over the past three years, the Russians
have been using them NonStop. The chart that we've seen
that of just how many of these things have gone
up in the past few years just keeps going up
and up and up. Four the Russian usage in Ukraine,
and it's really kind of perfected the system of how
you can totally overwhelm their defenses. The Iranians, it's unclear
(07:10):
as to how and why they put it together, but
they're very proud of this system. It's become folklore, it's
become so widely used, it's become so effective that people
are really out of it in the Iranian military, and
as well they should be. They've really kind of used
a scrappy, small system that subverts and uses asymmetrical warfare,
(07:31):
the idea that we are a weaker system, and we
know we don't have the same amount of arms and
power as you, but if we can find a scrappy
way to make it hurt for you, then we win
and that's really what these drones are doing.
Speaker 1 (07:41):
I remember in two thousand and one, I was a
high school debater and one of the debate topics was
about the war in Afghanistan, and I found this great
quote that I rolled out with enthusiasm, which was some
talent bound spokesperson that said, the Americans have the watch shit,
but the Tallee Band have the time. Fast forward twenty
(08:02):
ish years and the Taleban are backing power in Afghanistan.
And that sense of the watches and the time, you
can't help thinking about it when you think about this story.
Speaker 2 (08:12):
Yeah, I think about that quote a lot too. It's
widely known, it's well documented. It's something that kind of
has kind of become the most prevalent takeaway from that conflict,
and I think the core of it is exactly what
we're seeing today, which is asymmetrical warfare. It's this idea
that one side's big and powerful, and it's got Patriot
missiles millions of dollars to keep making them. What do
(08:33):
you have? What is the thing that you are able
to do that the other side can't, and how can
you make it painful for them? With these drones, they've
really kind of gained the economic system of war. These
drones are able to just keep firing and keep attacking,
and keep just pushing more and more problems into the
hands of the defenses. If you think about it, when
(08:55):
the Iranian military fire is a drone off, they win.
No matter what happens, they win. Either it gets shot
down and costs the Americans billions of dollars, or they're
hidden something and making damage. So anytime one of these fires,
they win. And that's kind of why this is such
an effective tool.
Speaker 1 (09:11):
Right now, now we're recording this a few days before
it will air. It's Thursday, the twelfth of March today.
But I'm curious, are we seeing the Americans and the
Gulf nations having to stop making hard choices about what
to intercept already? Is that something which is going to
make come in the next days, Well.
Speaker 2 (09:27):
It's unclear when and how. Right now, there was a
report from I can't remember, I think it was the
Washington Post that had some sources inside the Pentagon that
were saying that they are going to start very soon
having to make tough choices about what to defend and
what not to. Now this is not to say that
the rate of drones that are being fired is at
(09:47):
the same rate that it was at the beginning of
the war. It's not. The Americans' response to this is
to hit launch sites, and it's been effective. The amount
of drones that are flying out is gotten out about
eighty something percent, Like there's just not as many flying around.
So the eighty percent of launches eight percent of drones
from Iran in the air has gone down significantly. So
(10:09):
it's changed the way that I think Iranians are thinking
about this too. They are also being judicious in the
way that they're firing drones because the Americans do have
a better view of where attacks can happen and how
they can shut them down. I mean, the Americans are
not losing the tactical fight right now by any means.
They are attacking many, many sites, and they're proud that
(10:30):
you can see it on the scent Calm Twitter. They
are filling the feed with all of the attacks they're doing,
and it is many and it's really hurt in the Iranians.
So they're not it's not completely out that the Americans
are having effective strikes on these targets, but still the
way that the Iranians are able to fight. It's going
to get more and more complicated, and you see it
now in the Strait of Horn moves.
Speaker 1 (10:51):
Well, I want to come to that, but let me
ask you first. Key difference here being the Americans have
access to long range missiles and air power, as do
the Israelis, and therefore they can knock out the launch
sites of the shah Head drones in Iran, whereas the
Ukrainians have not been able to successfully attach the launch
(11:11):
sites of the Shahad drones in Russia.
Speaker 2 (11:15):
Sometimes yes, sometimes no, I mean the Ukrainians are the
most interesting part of the Shahead conversation by far. The
Ukrainians have spent the past three years dealing with these
things and spent the past three years creatively coming up
with ways to stop them. That's ranged from taking fifty
cal machine guns and World War Two style shooting up
(11:35):
in the night sky and trying to knock these things
down to really high tech solutions creating interceptor drones, which
are basically smaller, faster drones that have tracking systems on
them that see the Shahad, which is fairly slow the
head is not a fast weapon, and chase it down
the air and knock it out of the sky, and
they are proving to be effective too, and that's a
(11:57):
tech that they're developing more and more so. For the
U Crainians, the shahdrone is something that they've been dealing
with all the time, and not in a way that
the Americans have, which is to say lots of money,
lots of support, and lots of expensive missiles to shoot
them down. They have to come up with scrappy, low
tech ways to destroy these things. And again, they're not
that hard to shoot down. They are slow, they're not
that well made. They are meant to be a haunting
(12:20):
slow device, so it's not that hard to shoot them down.
But if there's hundreds of them, then you have to
worry about it.
Speaker 1 (12:26):
You probabished an extraordinary video from Ukraine, and I think
you had access that I've never seen before to be
able to shoot inside a drone targeting facility in Ukraine
and meet some of the most senior figures in the
Ukraine Drone Warfare Department, one of whom said to you,
with drones, the world will never be the same again.
(12:50):
NATO country's understanding of drones does not match what we
understood in twenty twenty two.
Speaker 2 (12:56):
Yeah, and he's proving to be more and more right.
I think that something that you Ukrainians pride themselves on
is their ability to creatively find fighting solutions in a
terrible situation without much support and kind of just with
grassroots movements to make these things happen. The colonel that
I talked to, he is somebody that has spent so
(13:17):
much time perfecting drones, making it an assembly line process
that this is someone that really knows how and what
the complications of fighting are with them. And he's saying,
he was saying to us when we interviewed him, they
need our help. The NATO needs us to come in
and teach them what they know, because soon they're going
to have this problem too. We shot that in November
(13:38):
of last year, November twenty twenty five, and now, however,
many months later in March twenty twenty six, he's proving
to be right more and more. And there's been reports
that some of the Gulf nations are starting to enlist
the Ukrainian drone expertise and bring them over. We haven't
seen what that looks like yet. That was a tweet
from President Zelenski a couple of days ago. That said
(13:58):
that that's happening, but it's something that I think the
Ukrainians are proud of and want to be a part of.
But it also brings it in more questions about where
this war will go. So much of the fighting in
Ukraine has been localized to just those two nations. With
this new fighting in Iran, how much the Ukrainians will
be involved and the NATO defense in golf country's defense,
(14:20):
and more importantly, how much Russia will be involved in
directing Iranians and how to use these shahads in interesting ways,
which is also some other reports that are coming out
of the word seeing will mean a lot to the
next stages of this fight.
Speaker 1 (14:32):
You mentioned Zelenski, I mean, I think he said that,
if I'm not mistaken, Ukrainian interceptor drones and now defending
US military interest in the Gulf and in Jordan.
Speaker 2 (14:42):
Right, That's yeah. I mean, so far the sources that
I've been talking to who I'm in touch with the Ukrainians,
I haven't heard about what that looks like on the
ground yet. I have no doubt that people are in
motion and that the Ukrainians are a part of these
next processes. But I think It's time will tell how
involved all Ukrainians will get in these processes, and how
(15:03):
the Gulf nations and for that matter, in America will
react to their expertise, and what will mean to them.
Speaker 1 (15:10):
There's a certain irony here. Your eyes widened, right, I mean,
it's kind of extraordinary.
Speaker 2 (15:19):
I've spent the past three plus years covering this war
in Ukraine and watching the American interest in it and
American connection to that fight just really just drop off
a cliff. When I first started reporting there in twenty
twenty two, people were so passionate about this fight and
(15:40):
the defense of Ukraine and what it meant to kind
of stand up against Russia. And then over the years
it kind of dipped, and it dipped politically too, it
dipped most importantly financially. And with that dip, the Ukrainians
have felt abandoned in many ways, and in that abandonment,
they've had to figure out how to do it on
their own. And that's where we're at now in of drones.
(16:00):
So the fact that some of these nations are now
turning to Ukraine and saying, hey, can you help us
with this? What do you know about this? It's it's
a kind of a wild step, and as someone who's
kind of covered closely and covered drones intensely and almost
been killed by them. Uh, it's it's kind of amazing
to me and and kind of flabbergasting to know that
(16:21):
the rest of the world is finally waking up to
what Ukraine has been screaming now for years, which is
drones are here and they're not going anywhere. The future
of war will involve drones in every single way, and
there's no going back from that.
Speaker 1 (16:49):
After the break, Can defense tech companies actually keep up
with the pace of war stay with us? It's also interesting,
(17:15):
I mean, the US has apparently copied the Iranian shah
head drone technology from Iran. You're shaking your hay, Is
that true or not true?
Speaker 2 (17:22):
It's very true. In fact, there was a video online
circulating of one that had crashed in Iraq and some
people were filming themselves picking it up and checking it out.
But it's not even a secret. I mean, the Americans
are proud of it. They were in the early stages
of the war putting out press releases and videos and
photos saying like, here's our version of this tech. I
(17:45):
don't think the problem for any of these governments, in
any of these militaries is that they don't believe that
drones are important. I just don't think anybody has used
it yet. I don't think anybody has applied it in
ways that are useful except the Ukrainians, the Russian and
now the Iranians. I think the Americans are playing ketchup.
I think a lot of NATO countries are also playing ketchup.
(18:06):
But for the most part, like I was saying, like
these things are here to stay, and I don't think
the Americans have any like any qualms about saying how
important it is, saying how much they want to be
a part of that game. I mean to the point
that you know, there was news the other day that
the sons of President Trump were investing in military drone
technology companies. But it's incredible. It's there's no hiding that
(18:29):
these things are happening. And I think anybody that is
running companies they're involved with drones or thinking about drone
defense knows that after this war that everybody's going to
be kind of jumping at this.
Speaker 1 (18:40):
Lauren Kahn, who is a former Pentagon policy advisor, has
said this is the first case in a long time,
really since the early days of the Cold War, whether
the US has seen a capability produced by an adversary
and decided it fills a gap and then decide to
produce it. She's referring specifically to Shih drones, and how
are they actually being used by the You know, it's unclear.
Speaker 2 (19:01):
I think that right now, in the early days of
the war and the early days of the fighting in Iran,
they were used in kind of limited capacities in different
strike sites. I don't think that the US military has
a really clear plan for how they want to use them.
They just know they want them. So there's not been
a lot of reporting, a lot of understanding where they go.
But what we do know is that the reporter you're
(19:24):
talking about is absolutely right. These weapons are not simple
things that are made kind of specific to one fight
or another. There's something that is really going to be
prevalent throughout the next stages of any kind of conflict.
You see Shah drones in Sudan. We heard about a
drone strike in Congo yesterday. When I was in Sudan
(19:48):
reporting a few years ago, it was one of the
weirdest feelings to be worried about drones in a country
that I had just left Ukraine a month before, and
now I'm in another country again worrying about conflict with drones,
And I think that's going to be the common feeling
for so long now. I think anywhere that there is
people trying to kill each other, drones are a effective
(20:09):
tool to do that.
Speaker 1 (20:10):
Have you looked into the kind of very heavily venture
backed drone companies like Anderil in the US or Helsing
in Europe and whether they're drone technology which is exciting
investors from from the Trump kids to Daniel Eck of Spotify,
whether their drone technology, which has been developed ultimately in
(20:31):
a vacuum, is going to be competitive on the battlefield
with the kind of homespun Ukrainian and Iranian technologies.
Speaker 2 (20:40):
Yeah. You know, the most experience that I've had with
the tech that is surrounding drones from the West was
kind of maybe two years ago in Ukraine. We were
covering the fighting around Chasavar for the Wall Street Journal,
and it was at a time when drones were becoming
more and more prevalent. It wasn't what it is now,
(21:00):
which is everything. It's like eighty percent of all strikes
in Ukraine. But back then it was it was really
revving up and you were just starting to worry about it.
And at the Wall Street Journal we said, okay, well,
how are we going to deal with this? What are
the mechanisms to defend ourselves? And as a company, our
security advisors the best in the business. We're going out
to different companies and saying what do you got, And
(21:21):
these companies will come back to us and we're like, oh,
we got the jammer. This is the one. This is
the perfect one. All you need to do is pay
us two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. This jammer protects
your journalists all the way through. And that went to
the bosses and dow Jones was you know how to
this is great? Now we have we can do this,
blah blah blah. And I would turn to the soldiers
on the ground, these guys who've been living at it,
and be like, oh, we're going to get this tech.
(21:42):
It's expensive, it's nice, we got the good stuff. And
they're like, oh, it's we just used that like last month.
That doesn't work anymore. Yeah, that's so good. Now used
to work on this channel. Now they figured out how
to use it on this channel. So yeah, it's not
good anymore. Really, the people on the ground are moving
at light speed the way thrones are changing. And anybody
who says different, anybody says that they have the answer,
(22:04):
is trying to sell you something. Because when you're in
Ukraine and you see these drones and you see that
the ways that they adapt, and you hang out with
drone makers, people that produce these things, and kind of
think about the best ways to use them, you find
out really quickly that it's just a game of chess.
They figure out how to stop this thing. How do
we get around that? Okay, they figure out how to
(22:25):
stop that thing? How do we get around that? The
Russians and the Ukrainians are pushing each other in the
most deadly way to get better and better at this tech.
So I think a lot of these companies, because they
are so well funded, are going to figure stuff out.
They're going to use different ways to progress the effectiveness
and the deadliness of drones in ways that Ukrainians can't.
(22:45):
But the real word world experience that the Ukrainians right
have right now is second to none.
Speaker 1 (22:51):
One of the chilling but also fascinating things about modern
warfare is social media videos of weapons caches. I remember
the Pilisco New Generation Cartel a couple of years ago
did these videos of like their you know, surface to
our missiles and rocket launchers, and like they were basically
(23:13):
all but saying we are better equipped than the Mexican
military in terms of our warfighting ability. The Iranians released
a video of just this bunker full of naval drones,
and there's like a kind of dolly shot where you
just got drone after drone after drone after drone, and
they look kind of like mini speedboats or mini jet skis,
except I assume they're underwater drones. And their function you
(23:34):
mentioned the straight up horn moves earlier, which I want
to come back to now, it is to attack ships.
Speaker 2 (23:39):
So naval drones are the next step in the most
kind of interesting cat and mouse game of attack drones.
There is US fees on manned surface vessels, which you
know you can think about just basically is like RC
remote controlled boats with lots and lots of explosives on them.
I mean, that's basically odd. Is these are small, dynamic,
(24:00):
really agile boats that just ram into ships. And they're
hard to shoot down and they're hard to kind of
defend against. And now I think they're seeing a lot
of talk about swarm tactics, which is the same as
with shahads, just sending as many as you can so
that how do you stop all of them. They're designed
to hit oil tankers because secondary explosions and you can
(24:22):
light the gas on fire, but also naval ships, coastal infrastructures,
anything that it can kind of get its hands on.
And then there's also talk about the UUVs, which is
the sorry, the unmanned underwater drums. These are the ones
that are submersive like submarines. They can dive, they can
go to really deep deaths and kind of go under.
They can drop mines. Some of the reporting is saying
(24:44):
that a lot of them are being used to mine
the Strait of Horror moves right now, and they can
also be used to attack ships in the middle of
the night. We've yet to see just how effective these
things are. I mean, we're hearing about the first strikes
of these things, but what we do know is how
they've already been used again in Ukraine. Again, the Ukrainian
were some of the people that first started innovating with
these kinds of drones the Black Sea, where the Ukrainians
(25:06):
had some of the most effective hits with naval drones,
with some of their prime examples of how useful it
was for them against the Russian fleets. These are just
any way that you can decide to send big things
with explosives on them that are fast but simple enough
that they can get around big defenses and big big
things trying to stop it. If you swarm them and
(25:28):
you send a bunch of them, eventually one or two
of them are going to get through. And that's what
I think all of these militaries are now finding out,
for better or for worse, I means extraordinary.
Speaker 1 (25:35):
People talked all through last year about how the Ukraine
Russia conflict is a testing ground or a Petrie dish,
or a foreshadowing of what the future of warfare will be.
And you know, the Trump decision to strike Iran has
seemed to have proven that everything people said about how
the confliction in Ukraine would shape the future of warfare
(25:57):
has come true, and a hummeled adversary but with access
to this unmanned and relatedly cheap and mass producible drones
under sea, surface, sea, and air. I mean, could drag
the United States into an unending conflict.
Speaker 2 (26:15):
Yeah, I think the whatever the plan was, and whatever
the plan is in this fight, I think it's probably
changing very rapidly. It's hard to know what it was.
It's hard to know what it's going to look like
in the future. But I think that what it looked
like at the beginning, I saw a lot of similarities
to the beginning of the invasion of Ukraine in twenty
(26:37):
twenty two. A big, powerful military rushing in with all
of its might. Now, the biggest and most important comparison
is that this American strikes on a run or all
precision strikes with no boots on the ground and that
we know of, whereas Ukraine was massive amounts of armies
invading the nations. But at the same time, the similarities
(26:59):
that are striking are just the amount of kind of
the what they had not considered going into it, how
much they are learning on the fly, and how much
they are having things fail. The Americans thought that this
was going to be easy. It's clear that they thought
this was going to be fast. They thought they were
going to do something that was really effective and then
move on. That's something that we see from a lot
(27:20):
of the way that Trump has approached a lot of
these military actions over the past year. But now it
hasn't been and hasn't it hasn't been easy to kind
of set the goals. We still don't. We haven't really
got a lot of clear answers from the American government
as to what the goals are. And more importantly, it's
unclear how it ends, unclear how the US can stop this,
and from everything that's happening, it's very clear that Iran
(27:43):
is kind of holding a lot of the keys to
what happens next. Today the new Iatolda announced he's going
to continue blocking off the Strait of horror moves. This
is incredibly important for the Americans to get back open.
The entire global economy rests on the ability to get
gas moving again through the through this, through this canal.
So if it doesn't happen, what happens with the America?
(28:05):
What do they do to respond? So at this point,
and in the same way the Russians forcing them thought
they were gonna take KIV, what did they say they're
gonna take it? In a couple of days. They didn't.
It took it took now four years to make you know,
tiny advances at the cost of millions of soldiers dead
to be able to get bits and pieces of the country.
(28:26):
And even for them, it's still not clear where that
war ends. These wars of attrition, they are terrible for
everybody involved. And whatever happens next this war and war
in Iran, if it is anything like Russia, if it's
anything like that, the way that that's turned out, it's
going to be costly and painful for everybody on every side.
Speaker 1 (28:47):
And coming back to Ukraine, I mean, there was obviously
partisans hiding in the forests in the Second World War,
and the Partisans would ambush Soviet troops and Nazi troops
and have victories and and you know, kept the conflict
going and degraded both of those forces. Now you essentially
can have partisans, But who have range?
Speaker 2 (29:09):
Is that right?
Speaker 1 (29:09):
And what is the ability under pressure, under air power
and the fire do continue to manufacture these drones for Iran?
Like is it conceivable that the US could knock out
the manufacturing capability just with air power?
Speaker 2 (29:22):
That's kind of the big question. We eight nine months
ago we struck Iran, and we hit the American military,
hit military sites to try to knock out their nuclear capabilities,
and then immediately claimed victory, saying we totally knocked it
all out. We did everything. It's great, We're done that.
It's unclear of that that happened. We don't know what
(29:45):
the Iranian military capabilities are, we don't know what their
response can be, and we don't know what they will
do next. But a lot of the control rests in
their ability to kind of withstand. As long as they
with stand, they are winning. As long as they can
keep the straight clothes, they are winning. As long as
they can keep firing drones and keep causing the Americans
(30:08):
to spend money, they are winning. This is a war
of holding out, and the Russians, if we're making the comparison,
are famous for holding out. This is the nation of Stalingrad.
This is the nation of World War Two. That said,
you know how many millions of people say their deaths
to fight off the Nazis and defeat the Nazis by
numbers alone? The Americans, I don't think. I'm not sure
(30:31):
how much of the we're able to withstand the pain
in that sense. On the you know the midterms are coming,
gas prices are going to start increasing, and it's unclear
what Trump can do to kind of ease the pain
of this next process. So the Iranian response and the
Iranian military capabilities, it's a black box. We just don't
know what they can and can't do, but I think
(30:53):
we'll learn as we go.
Speaker 1 (30:55):
Just to close, Ben and thank you. I know this
is not directly your beat, but this is the Tech
Stuff podcast, so I had to ask you tech questions.
What do you make of these Iranian strikes on the
data centers in the Gulf.
Speaker 2 (31:05):
I think the Iranian attack plan right now is to
touch on as many painful points they can. You see
it most importantly in Saudi Arabia. They're attacking oil refiners
with Shia drones. You see it at the different bases
that they're attacking all around the Gulf region. And more importantly,
if they can hit data centers, they know that this
will cause disruptions to the global trade and the important
(31:28):
parts that the American and Western governments are investing so
deeply in. So again, I think this all goes back
to attrition. How much pain can the Iranian cause and
where can they cause? It, and how are they going
to do that in a way that's cheap and can
last a lot longer than the West can.
Speaker 1 (31:50):
Ben Solomon, thank you, thanks for tech stuff. I'm as Varshian.
(32:15):
This episode was produced by Eliza Dennis and Melissa Slaughter.
It was executive produced by me Julian Nata and Kate
Osborne for Kaleidoscope and Katrina Norvel for iHeart Podcast. The
engineer is Charles de Montebello from c DM Studios, Jack
Instey miss this episode, and Kyle Murdoch Rodard theme song.
Please do rate and review the show wherever you listen
(32:36):
to your podcasts.
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