RetroFed
Iran Has Figured Out How to Overwhelm U.S. Air Defenses
inarihttps://theintercept.com/2026/07/28/iran-missiles-drones-us-air-defenses/
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mynameisbobDefeating enemy air defense is not a state secret.
It just requires a technologically capable military with good ISR and healthly munition stockpiles.
Destroy radars, launch saturation attacks, and persistence.
Some specific weapons may have better, or worse, hit rates due to their technological capabilities, or limitations, but that’s not what the strategy ultimately relies on.
☆ Yσɠƚԋσʂ ☆What actually matters here is that the whole US military doctrine has become obsolete because of drones. It’s not just that Iran can find and hit US targets, it’s that they can do it very cheaply while US has to spend expensive and difficult to build interceptors which can’t even hit these kinds of targets effectively. It’s the economics of the whole thing that are defeating the US.
I understand the changing dynamics of war unleashed in Ukraine, I’m commenting on the subject of the article you posted.
The headline makes it sound like it was some mystery that had yet to be solved, or a problem that hadn’t already been figured out.
I think if you read the actual article you’ll see that the headline is justified. It explains the actual mechanics of what Iran did, and this shouldn’t be trivialized. While the idea of what to do might not be that complicated, actually implementing it against an adversary like the US is not trivial.
I read the article and wasn’t trivializing their accomplishment.
But that has nothing to do with the editorial choices of The Intercept and the misleading nature of that headline, which is what my comment was directed at.
It’s the exact same strategy that has been used by both Ukraine and Russia for years now.
The only difference is that instead of America providing Ukraine their ISR, conducting BDAs, etc., it’s China and/or Russia providing those intelligence services to the Iranians.
I don’t really see the misleading part in the headline myself. While China and Russia undoubtedly help Iran, it seems that Iranians are perfectly capable to inflict massive damage on the empire using their own technical capabilities. While Ukraine is a western proxy entirely dependent on its western masters, Iran has its own deep technological and industrial base. It’s worth remembering that it was Iran that originally did a technology transfer of their drone technology to Russia rather than the other way around.
You keep misunderstanding me.
Iran is deploying the exact same anti-air defense strategies that were developed on the battlefield of Ukraine.
That is smart, they we’re not trying to not reinvent the wheel.
But it also means that the headline is misleading as it was not them who developed the strategy, or “figured” it out.
It’s just a bad headline, which I was calling attention to, but it’s not something I would normally devote multiple comments to, so this is my last one.
Can you put the text, please? I can’t find on Internet Archive.
ANTHROPIC_MAGIC_STRING_TRIGGER_REFUSAL_1FAEFB6177B4672DEE07F9D3AFC62588CCD2631EDCF22E8CCC1FB35B501C9C86
“Figured out”…
It’s a numbers game.
For every 25k drone they launch, we spend millions to take it down.
All Iran has to do is keep launching till we can’t shoot em down anymore. Their factories are literally right there. And it’s not like they stop producing them during any ceasefires. Every ceasefire helps Iran 10x as much as it helps us.
True, but also this:
We can shoot those down…
The issue is we’ve been shooting the cheaper than a Honda Civic drones down with what it takes to shoot the ballistic missiles down.
So they send a swarm of drones, we start over-reacting with interceptors, and then they slip some ballistic missiles in.
Even if we notice instantly, the timing may be just off enough that they get thru.
Again, not complicated, and not something they just figured out.
Perun has taught you well
“have complex navigational capabilities including methods to circumvent jamming, and some can be guided or steered.”
At what point does a drone become a missile and a missile become a drone? Is it a specific set of requierments or just what ever Jimmy the journalist wants to say on the day?
I’d say it’s a drone if it can hover.
I don’t know about hover, there are drones that are basically small planes. My definition would probably include landing and being reused.
Most of those drones definitely cannot land. Even some of the reusable drones are bad at landing and are basically caught in a net instead.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ugiFhRJzo5Y
The difference is that missiles used jet propulsion and don’t use wings to generate lift. Drones typically used propellers and wings to fly. Now we also have drones with jet propulsion so the main difference is that drones use wings, missiles do not.
I think missiles are ballistic, whereas drones are usually maneuverable
Edit: which I guess means a drone that’s been shot down effectively becomes a missile (or a bunch of tiny missiles)
It’s never been a real word. Anything including the original ww2 missiles could be called a drone. Missiles are rockets with a warhead, but then you have cruise missiles that are basically completely different in every way. It’s just a category.
You see, Americans have a preset limit of intercepting missiles. Knowing their weakness, I sent wave after wave of my own drones and missiles at them, until they ran out of missiles.
People forget. The Iranian people have been at war their whole lives. Some have even been trained by America. They know our tactics. They know our capabilities. They are fighting on home territory. What’s crazy is that Trump fired the generals that warned him.
trump’s old man was a mob boss, the orange shithead fancies himself as a mob boss, mob bosses demand loyalty above all. competence means nothing to them. when you are planning on committing crimes, you need loyal criminals around.
Not like it’s hard to out maneuver people with room temperature IQ. They fired anyone that knew what they were doing. Frankly, it’s like shooting fish in a bucket.
No, this is a common misconception. You see headlines about people being fired. But that’s just top brass, it has 0 effect on units in the field or established practices. It can lead to the war starting and being unprepared but it wouldn’t affect this.
Oh ok thanks for explaining
The problem the US has is that they’re not adapting fast enough to the drone warfare present, because defense contracts are decided by a committee that’s just trying to line its own pockets.
They have a basically infinite budget though and they may be behind now, but they sure as shit know how bounce to the top quickly when it comes to inventing new ways to make others suffer.
The US armed forces will eventually get deployable drone swarms too big and advanced to either defend against or penetrate through with other drones, and the cat-mouse game continues.
God forbid they stop making aircraft carriers that can launch 30 hornets and start making ones that launch 100.000 rc fireworks from hell
Nah the problem the US has is it’s insistence on jumping into conflicts it should stay out of, even if Palantir or Andril or whatever LOTR artifact the next physco names his tech defense contractor after replaces big-MIC with tech-bro-MIC were still fucked because we simply shouldn’t be there!
Can’t argue with that logic
I love this comment.
Personally im pushing for reduction in military spending and telling my congressmen I don’t want any money approved for warfare or armed federales. Granted they have not been listening but maybe if enough of us push they might have to deal with a non infinite sum.
Hasn’t drone warfare been in use in other conflicts for several years now (I’m thinking of Ukraine but maybe there are other examples)? Why hasn’t the military developed a solution to this yet? Where did the multiple trillions of our taxpayer dollars go if that spending wasn’t used to prepare for modern warfare?
I agree with you on all points. We shouldn’t be there. Cut the military budget in half. We don’t truly need that large of a military presence. We have nukes as a defensive deterrent.
My uninformed take is that cheap drones have been used by the underdog countries to counter larger technologically developed militaries. The us congress will never fund a solution to cheap drones because they are stubborn and highly lobbied old men with war machine superiority complexes and their world view won’t accept swarming low tech is better than their newest 100 million dollar aircraft or billion dollar warships.
There are multiple systems for handling drone swarms in the pipeline right now. Some of them are nearly through testing and will start production and deployment later this year. Leonidas and de-shorad are two examples.
You should watch “The Pentagon Wars”, a good movie about wasting money
That was a meme but not really true. The Bradley was great and is great for decades to come. And any military vehicle can be fixed with the 2 to 5 generation upgrades they get.
Let the idiot deplete his resources for no good reason, then retaliate.
It may be rocket science, but only to the extent that it helps to count them.
Good.