How Russia and Iran Are Draining the West’s Best Defenses
Cheap drones are reshaping war — and Ukraine may be building the answer.
– 11 min read
A drone does not have to reach its target to accomplish its mission.
It may succeed by forcing a fighter to scramble, compelling an air defense battery to activate its radar, drawing the launch of an expensive interceptor or revealing where defensive systems are positioned. It may carry no meaningful warhead at all. If the defender cannot safely distinguish it from the real threat, the defender must still react.
That is the logic behind one of the most consequential strategies in modern warfare: make the enemy expend scarce resources against threats that are cheaper and faster to replace.
The attacker is not simply trying to penetrate the defense. It is trying to exhaust it.
The strategy of depletion
Military reserves are often discussed as quantities: how many missiles, aircraft or artillery shells a country possesses. But a strategic reserve includes much more:
- Interceptors ready for launch
- Aircraft available for combat
- Pilots and ground crews
- Fuel and spare parts
- Radar operating time
- Maintenance capacity
- Trained personnel
- Industrial capacity to replace what is used
- Command attention and decision-making time
An attack can therefore be effective without destroying anything directly.
A relatively inexpensive drone may force the defender to launch a missile costing far more. Even when a fighter uses a cheaper weapon — or destroys the drone without firing a missile — the response still consumes fuel, flight hours, maintenance and crew readiness.
One incident is manageable. Repetition changes the equation.
If inexpensive threats arrive every night, the defender faces an increasingly difficult choice: intercept everything and gradually exhaust limited resources, or preserve those resources and accept the possibility that a real weapon will get through.
Saturation is only part of the strategy
Large drone attacks are commonly described as attempts to overwhelm air defenses. That is true, but incomplete.
The attacker may pursue several objectives simultaneously:
- Consume interceptors.
Every missile used against a drone is unavailable for a later cruise or ballistic missile. - Expose defensive positions.
Activating a radar or launching an interceptor can reveal the location of an air defense battery. - Map the response.
Repeated attacks show which targets are protected, how quickly aircraft scramble and where gaps exist. - Exhaust people and platforms.
Pilots, radar operators and mobile air defense teams cannot remain at maximum readiness indefinitely. - Create uncertainty.
Decoys and armed drones may appear similar enough that defenders cannot safely ignore either. - Prepare the decisive strike.
Once defenses are depleted, displaced or exposed, more capable missiles can attack the targets that matter most.
The drone wave may therefore be the opening mechanism rather than the principal attack.
From Iran to NATO’s eastern flank
The United States has confronted this problem during its war with Iran. Iranian missiles and drones have required repeated use of American and allied air defenses across a wide geographic area.
The individual interception rate may be impressive while the strategic exchange remains unfavorable. The relevant question is not simply how many threats were destroyed. It is how many scarce interceptors were used, how quickly they can be replaced and what those weapons will no longer be available to defend elsewhere.
The Iran war has already created concern about the availability of munitions for a potential conflict in the Indo-Pacific. Replenishing sophisticated American missiles can take months or years, not days.
Russia is now presenting NATO with a version of the same problem.
When a Shahed-type drone enters allied airspace, NATO cannot assume it is harmless. Fighters may have to scramble, air defenses must track it, commanders must determine its trajectory and authorities must decide whether to engage.
Romanian F-16s and Italian Eurofighters recently scrambled under NATO command after a drone approached and entered Romanian airspace. The aircraft shot it down — but the interception also demonstrated the asymmetry Russia can repeatedly impose.
The question is not whether an F-16 can destroy a Shahed. It is whether Europe can afford to scramble fighters every time Russia sends one — and what happens when one drone becomes 200.
History has seen this equation before
During the Second World War, Germany’s V-1 flying bombs forced Britain to reorganize significant parts of its air defense.
Fighter aircraft conducted interception patrols. Anti-aircraft guns were repositioned. Radar stations, barrage balloons and observation systems were integrated into a defensive belt. Britain eventually became much more effective at destroying the weapons, particularly after adapting detection, gun control and proximity-fuse technology.
But the V-1’s strategic effect was not limited to the damage caused when one reached London. Germany forced Britain to dedicate aircraft, guns, crews and attention to stopping pilotless weapons that were cheaper and simpler than the systems sent to intercept them.
Later militaries refined the logic through unmanned decoys. Decoys could provoke air defense radars into activating, reveal their locations and cause missiles to be launched — allowing follow-on aircraft to attack the newly exposed defenses.
Today’s drones combine these roles. They can be weapons, decoys, reconnaissance platforms and instruments of economic pressure within the same attack.
The concept is not new. Its scale, accessibility and rate of production are.
Continue with ONEST+
The public question is whether a drone was intercepted.
The strategic question is what the interception consumed — and whether the defender can replace it before the next, more dangerous attack arrives.
In the full ONEST+ analysis:
- How Iran can weaken America’s position beyond the Middle East
- Why scrambling NATO fighters is an unsustainable long-term model
- How drones now threaten troops and equipment far behind the front
- What Ukraine understands that traditional defense procurement still does not
- Whether U.S. weapons remain indispensable — or are becoming too scarce to use at scale
Join ONEST+ for independent analysis connecting today’s events to the strategy shaping what comes next.
Iran does not have to defeat the United States in Iran
The United States entered the Iran war with overwhelming advantages in aircraft, intelligence, precision targeting and missile defense. Iran does not need to neutralize those advantages symmetrically.
