Today, Explained - Attack of the drones

Episode Date: March 23, 2026

Iran's cutting-edge drones are changing how wars are fought, and the US is running out of munitions to combat them. This episode was produced by Hady Mawajdeh, edited by Jolie Myers, fact-checked by Andrea López-Cruzado, engineered by Patrick Boyd, and hosted by Noel King. Missiles launched from Iran seen over Hebron in West Bank. Photo by Mamoun Wazwaz/Anadolu via Getty Images. Listen to Today, Explained ad-free by becoming a Vox Member: vox.com/members. New Vox members get $20 off their membership right now. Transcript at ⁠vox.com/today-explained-podcast.⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Early this morning, President Trump wrote on Truth Social that the war in Iran has taken a turn. I am pleased to report that the United States of America and the country of Iran have had over the last two days very good and productive conversations regarding a complete and total resolution of our hostilities in the Middle East. Later, a senior official in Iran's foreign ministry says that never happened. Mr. President, Iran's foreign ministry says you're not telling the truth when it comes to productive conversations down the war. Well, they're going to have to get themselves better public relations, people. Oh, okay. Coming up on today, explain from Vox, how the war in Iran might end. What if the will to fight is there, but the weapons aren't?

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It's a question of means. Well, yeah, I mean, this is really kind of turning into a sort of war of attrition. This is a missile war. This is a war fought not by ground troops, but by missiles and drones being fired through the air. No, I'm not putting troops anywhere. If I were, I certainly wouldn't tell you. To date, we've struck over 7,000 targets across Iran and its military infrastructure. And in just the last few hours, we hit an Iranian drone carrier ship.

And as we speak, it's on fire. It's very dangerous outside. Bombs will be dropping everywhere. And so what we have is a kind of math problem on both sides. Iran has a certain number of projectiles that can fire at its enemies throughout the region. and it's burning through them fast, and a lot of them have been destroyed by U.S. and Israeli airstrikes. Ballistic missile attacks against our forces down 90% since the start of the conflict.

Same with one-way attack UAVs. But where there is an acute shortage are on the interceptors. So these are basically sort of smaller projectiles that shoot down the missiles and drones that are fired by Iran. And so those are pretty expensive, pretty advanced. systems, and we don't make a lot of them. President Trump said there's an unlimited supply of missiles and interceptors and munitions, and that's simply not the case.

The U.S. is using anti-missile interceptors that cost millions. Each interceptor can reportedly cost anywhere between $500,000 to $4 million. And so just because of the quantity of stuff that Iran is basically hurling all across the Middle East, we're burning through the global stockpiles pretty fast. And that's a problem in this war, and it may be a problem for, you know, the U.S. in other theaters as well. I assume the interceptors are being used for missiles on their way into Israel. Where else are they being used? Well, they're being used going into Israel.

Yeah, people may have heard of the Iron Dome system, which is the sort of famous system that Israel uses, you know, previously to shoot down mostly like rockets from Hamas. in Gaza, but they have pretty advanced systems shooting down these missiles from Iran as well. But Iran is also shooting a lot of missiles across the Persian Gulf at countries like the United Arab Emirates. Iran firing 10 ballistic missiles and 45 drones at the Emirati air defenses. And Qatar. Just a few hours ago, the world's biggest liquefied natural gas facility, Qatar's Rassafan, was damaged by an Iranian missile strike. and Saudi Arabia. The targeting of Rial, while a number of diplomats, are meeting, I cannot see as coincidental.

And I think that's the clearest signal of how Iran feels about diplomacy. Actually, one of the surprises of this war has been that they're actually firing more missiles at those countries than they are at Israel. And they're firing at U.S. bases throughout the region at well. So, you know, this is really a kind of all-out regional retaliation strategy. that Iran is using both against the U.S. and Israel and at countries in the Gulf that are not actually part of this war, but are allied with the U.S. and Israel. How is it possible that the United States does not make enough interceptors if the United States is aware of how important interceptors are? Yeah, well, I mean, part of it is just these things are expensive.

And, you know, a Patriot Interceptor, which is kind of the top end, those missiles, they cost about $4 million, each. It's not something you want to fire at, you know, a jury-rigged drone that you bought off of Costco and, like, attached a grenade to, which is something we've seen in the war in Ukraine. If you think about what these are, it's basically shooting down a bullet with another bullet. And so the fact that we have the technology to do that is pretty amazing. But these are pricey items. The U.S. reportedly burned through an estimated $2.4 billion worth of Patriot, receptors in just the first five days of this war. There's another system called Thad, which are these advanced mobile missile batteries. And during the war in June, the U.S. burned through about a

quarter of its stock of them. So this is an even more intense missile war now. So this is sort of a tough story to cover because every actor in it has incentive not to give you the latest and most accurate numbers. But, you know, we can assume that they're feeling the strain. Okay, so if I'm Iran, I'm thinking, let's just wait for the U.S. to run out of interceptors. That's a good way to win this war. How long can Iran keep going? This is kind of the million-dollar question, or maybe I should say the $4 billion question. You know, so early in this conflict, it looked like there was a real risk of that. I mean, there was reporting Qatar, for instance, a U.S. ally that hosts a major military base was only a few days away from running out of interceptors.

entirely. The shortage is a little less acute now, and that's mainly because just the number of Iranian launches has dropped. They're firing, you know, according to the Pentagon's number, you know, 90% fewer missiles, something around 80%, fewer drones. That means the supplies can probably hold up a lot longer just because they're using fewer of them. And sort of the question becomes, is Iran firing fewer missiles because it's running at? out of them. But it also is quite possible the Iranians are holding something in reserve, that they know this could be a long conflict, and they are kind of, you know, drizzling them out, so to speak, just using a few of the time, just so they can continue to fight this war as long as

possible and continue to impose costs, you know, the calculation being that Trump's pain intolerance is just a lot lower than theirs, and that sooner or later, the president will, you know, get sick of this war and move on to other things. Is there evidence that Iran is holding back some of its weapons in order to surprise the U.S. later on? You know, it's, they certainly want to give that impression. If you look at another actor in this conflict, Hezbollah, which is the Lebanese militia, one of Israel's staunchest enemies, they fired like a handful of rockets into Israel, like maybe half a dozen. And I think a lot of analysts, reporters look to that and were like, oh, you know, Hezbollah's spent. Like, they've been fighting Israel for two years. They just don't have it.

And then a few days ago, they launched 200 into Israel, and that indicates they were holding back. So Iranians may be doing the same. So my guess is it's a combination of the two, that there is a deliberate strategy where they're sort of parceling these out and they don't want to run out. You know, this is an asymmetric fight. I don't think Iran, I don't think anyone was ever under any illusions that Iran was going to sort of defeat the U.S. and Israel in a conventional military sense. What they can do is they're willing to absorb a lot more punishment up to and including the death of the Supreme Leader, while continuing to impose costs on the U.S., on Israel, on the wider region that might just be, you know, more than this U.S. government can tolerate at a time of, you know, rising gas prices, lower. boring poll numbers, impending midterms, you know, pick your factor at work here.

I wonder what you're reporting indicates about how America's other enemies are looking at this situation, right? If you and I are aware that the U.S. is running out of interceptors, so is China, right? So is North Korea. So what does that mean? Yeah, I mean, I actually wrote an article last week on how Russia has been a beneficiary of this conflict on a few fronts, one being whenever oil is over $100 a barrel, that's good news for the Kremlin. But another, are just these concerns that interceptors or other munitions that were previously bound for Ukraine could get diverted to the Middle East. And there hasn't been reporting that that's happening quite yet,

but it's something that, you know, in recent conversations I've had with European officials, something they've been very concerned about. And then, yeah, and turning to East Asia, the same week there was this reported they were moving the Thad system out of South Korea, North Korea was conducting tests of a new ship-launched missile system of their own. So, you know, I've written about this interceptor issue, also about aircraft carriers. I mean, the U.S. only has three of those at sea at any one given time. You know, we've now moved two of them to the Middle East, one of which the Ford is, like, badly in need of maintenance to the point that, you know, they just had a terrible fire on that ship. its deployment's been extended several times.

And I think what both these stories really underline is that even with the sheer scale of money that the U.S. spends on its military, even with the advanced technology has, with our ability to strike targets all over the world, seemingly it will, that there really are still material constraints on the projection of U.S. power and the ability to, like, shift on a dime from fighting one war in Venezuela one month to the Middle East the next month, that there are real issues with the number of munitions and interceptors we have. It takes time to move an aircraft carrier all the way across the Atlantic Ocean, that we still do live in a real world with real physical constraints,

and that we have to remember that if we're going to be getting into a new military conflict every month. That was Vox's Josh Keating. Coming up, attack of the drones. Support for the show comes from Delete Me. Delete me makes it easy, quick and safe to remove your personal data online at a time when surveillance and data breaches are common enough to make everyone vulnerable. Have you Googled yourself? Have you Googled yourself in creative ways? Some weird stuff can come up.

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Different worlds that pose the same question. What are you made of? Every ground is our proving ground. Ready, set, Ford. It's today explained. We're back. All right. So President Trump says the U.S. and Israel have destroyed 100% of.

of Iran's military capability. That's not true. It's not true. The U.S. has done damage to Iran's missile sites and military bases, but Iran still has cheap, easy to assemble drones that pose a real threat on the battlefield. Michael Horowitz, senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, tell us about them drones. So today, these one-way attack drones like the Shaheed 136 are used essentially as a substitute for a cruise missile. So if you imagine something like the U.S. Tomahawk missile, if you think like way, way back to the war, for someone like old like me to the first Gulf War. A perfect example was the Tomahawk cruise missile.

33 cruise missiles were launched during the war against heavily defended targets such as air defense headquarters, key radar facilities, major communication centers. When we would see these images of missiles sort of hitting a building and the idea that you could, if you were the United States, target not just a neighborhood, but a building and not just a building but the third floor, and not just the third floor, but the second window from the left. These drones are capable of that almost exact same level of accuracy. And so Iran is using them to do things like target American air defense radars, which are necessary to find other drones and shoot them down.

Iran is using them to target government buildings like embassies. Iran is using them to target critical infrastructure that countries in the Middle East, use for oil and gas, you can hit lots of things with them today. The thing that somebody like me worries about is that American aircraft carriers in general are extremely well protected. There's generally a whole set of ships around them, and they have these enormous defense systems designed to ensure sort of nothing happens. And a drone in and of itself would never take out an American aircraft carrier. They're just too small.

but a lot of them could. And the real risk here is that suppose you fired not one, you know, not 100, but 500, added American aircraft carrier at once, even if the U.S. could shoot down 450 of them. That's still a lot that are getting through. Like, who knows, I mean, whether the aircraft carrier would actually sink or not. But the point being that the scale of these one-way attack drones that you can launch generates the potential ability to not just target the kinds of infrastructure and things that we're seeing Iran doing, but really important military targets as well, including our ships.

Iran presumably does not have an infinite number of these drones, or am I just telling myself that to calm myself down? Like, how many do they actually have on hand? We don't actually know exactly how many Iran has on hand, but we know that they have thousands. We also know, for example, that Russia has the ability to produce a, you know, thousand or more every couple of weeks of their knockoff in some ways of the Shaheed 136. And so Iran likely has the ability to do something in that range as well, except that the U.S. and Israel obviously targeting their manufacturing capabilities. But Iran has a lot of manufacturing that's more underground.

And because you can use commercial manufacturing to be, build these systems, you can do that almost anywhere. I mean, that's one of the reasons why, like, I have been very vocal that the United States needs to invest more in these capabilities and why I was thrilled, frankly, in the context of this conflict, regardless of what and thinks of the conflict itself, to see the U.S. use its own first precise mass system, the Lucas, against Iran early in the conflict. This is the Lucas drone, low-cost, unmanned combat attack system. An Arizona company developed the drones with a range of about 500 miles and a maximum payload of 40 pounds.

The American military arsenal is based on quality over quantity. It's based on having small numbers of exquisite, expensive, hard-to-produce systems that are the best in the world. But they were designed to be essentially craft producer, bespoke produce, like you, buy them on Etsy or something. They were not designed for mass production. The issue is that that's not enough anymore. In a world where it required having those expensive, exquisite kinds of systems to do things like accurately fire weapons at your adversaries, then that was a source of a kind of unique advantage, generational advantage for the United States military. But because everybody, both smaller states and militant groups can launch more accurate precision strike at lots of

different targets, it means that just having those kinds of systems is not enough for the United States. Like if Iran is firing a $35,000 Shahid 136 at the United States, and the United States is shooting it down with a weapon that costs anywhere between $1 million per shot and $4 million per shot, you do not need to be a defense planner to understand. that that cost curve is in the wrong direction. Yeah, does that cost curve mean that the U.S. can't win this war? Like, how does this play out?

The cost curve does not mean the U.S. can't win the war. One of the many factors that will influence whether the U.S. wins the war is Iran's continuing ability to launch the Shahid 136s and other weapons in their arsenal, and then the ability of the United States and its allies and partners to shoot them down. But this is really interestingly one of the reasons why the U.S. and Israel have been so focused on trying to destroy the launchers and launching areas for Iran's ballistic missiles and some of its drones. Iran's air defenses flattened.

Iran's defense industrial base, the factories, the production lines that feed their missile and drone programs being overwhelmingly destroyed. And the U.S. and Israel have been really effective at going after many of those ballistic missile sites because it takes so much more infrastructure essentially to to fire a ballistic missile, and so those are easier to find. The challenge is that these drones, you could kind of launch from anywhere. Like, you could launch them from the back of a pickup truck. So it's tough to, like, tough to, like, hit all the areas that could launch those. How did Iran, a country that is under sanctions, a country that's economy has been, I don't know,

kind of a mess over the last generation, how did it get so well armed? I mean, you know, the necessity is the mother of invention. Huh? A country like Iran has felt intense security threats in the region. I mean, in, it's a And in part, that's because of Iran's own ideology. Like, if you're, if you're going to roll around chanting death to America. So that was the scene chanting death to Israel, death to America in the Iranian parliament. Then you need to be prepared for the United States and the region to, like, maybe have some questions.

So Iran for, in Iran, fought a war against Iraq in the 1980s. Iran has been in continual tussles, essentially, at a smaller scale with various neighbors over the years. And so Iran built up a pretty extensive military arsenal, like not as fancy as the United States, not anywhere near as good as the United States or Israel. But Iran, in some ways, because they had to, was a pioneer in developing these low-cost, long-range, precise mass weapons that they then shared with Russia. And Russia's used tens of thousands of them now, hundreds of thousands against the Ukrainians. Is there a way for the U.S. to defend against these Iranian drones without spending so much money?

Absolutely. The U.S. has options. It's just going to take some time to get there. Another country where necessity has been the mother of invention has been Ukraine, facing down the Russian invaders now for four years. So that is how you stop in Iranian drone. That's the Ukrainian-made Sting Interceptor drone that flies over 300 kilometers per hour. Drones like this destroyed more than 1,000 Russian Shahed and other drones in just four months. One operator says using a model called the Sting, he managed to shoot down 11 Russian attack drones. And because Ukraine is the victim of dozens to hundreds of launches of these Shaheeds almost every day, Ukraine has pioneered lower-cost air defense systems, like using even less expensive drones, for example, to take out those $35,000 drones,

or even some cases using old like World War II-style anti-aircraft guns. The issue is getting enough of them scaled and in place. And the U.S. was already experimenting with some of these cheaper Ukrainian defenses. So the U.S. has just more options, essentially, to defend against these Iranian attacks. If a fairly cheap unmanned drone can overwhelm a, you know, billion-dollar aircraft carrier. Does the U.S. need to start rethinking the way it fights wars? 100%. The plan to rely only on these exquisite, expensive, hard-to-produce weapons is no longer going to be enough for the United States. That would especially be true in a war against the most

sophisticated potential adversaries the United States could face, like China or Russia. Instead, What the United States needs to pursue is what's called a high-low mix of forces. Some of those high-end systems, you know, these best in the world like Tomahawk missiles and F-35s and things that the United States has been pioneered and worked on for a generation. But then also a new wave of these lower-cost systems that need to be treated not as the kind of thing you might hold on for 50 years, but things that are cheaper, more disposable, and that are upgraded on a regular basis. So that high-low mix is going to be critical to the ability of the United States to succeed moving forward. So this war is actually changing in real-time the future of warfare.

What do you think war looks like a generation from now? I mean, the character of warfare is always in flux. And the way that I would think about this is just like the introduction of the machine gun at scale in World War I fundamentally changed the character of warfare. And the machine gun then just became a ubiquitous weapon. Everybody had machine guns. And then in World War II, it was the tank. And everywhere since then, there have been tanks.

What we are now seeing between the Russia-Ukraine war and this war with Iran is these one-way attack drones. It's not that they're the only things that militaries need, but these are now just going to be part of the arsenal moving forward. and if you don't have them, and if you can't defend against them, you're going to be in trouble. Michael Horowitz of UPenn and the Council on Foreign Relations. Hadi-Mawagdi produced today's show, Jolie Myers, edited. Patrick Boyd is our engineer, and Andrea Lopez Crusado checks the facts.

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sand, snow, the track, places where excuses don't work, where capability is something you prove one race at a time. Off-road racing. Formula One.

Different worlds that pose the same question. What are you made of? Every ground is our proving ground. Ready, set. Ford.