Why are Iranian drones so deadly? | The Economist为什么伊朗无人机如此致命？|《经济学人》

So what exactly is a shahed drone? So shahed is the name that Iran has given to these strange delta wing shaped drones. And we probably know them best from Ukraine, where they've been thick and fast in Ukraine skies, because Russia basically bought them off Iran. They license produce these inside Russia. They call them the Garonne. They've improved upon them in Russia, then they've churned out absolutely masses of them, every, every single month and fire them at Ukraine in huge quantities. And really, the for me impetuses the way in which the boundary between what you would once have considered a drone, a kind of crazy drone a missile, a cruise missile, an aircraft between all those things has just blurred now, the drones that Iran is using, I'm fairly certain are manufactured in the country. They've got a long history of doing that. They're capable of doing it, but they are seeing assistance in Russia in terms of how to use these to maximum effect. So why are they being used so frequently now? shaheed type drone. It travels more slowly than the ballistic missiles that we talked about last week. They carry smaller warheads that they're far, far more basic in many ways. But They're much, much cheaper. Right. So Russia, in producing them, probably spends about $55,000 for each Shahi drone. maybe that goes up to more than $100,000 per unit. If you add in various, you know, bits and bobs to make it more advanced. But these are these are fundamentally very cheap compared to a ballistic missile. And so that low cost allows Russia or any country like Iran now to churn out huge numbers of these, per day. They're also a bit easier to launch. You can launch them from a variety of different places from the back of a truck. A ballistic missile maybe needs a silo, or it needs a big transporter erector launcher, as we call them. You can spot them from the air more easily and therefore bomb them. These things can be launched from a much more flexible variety of sites. unlike a ballistic missile, they fly low. They can skim the ocean. And of course, for any traditional radar, that's a bit of a bit of a nightmare.