ROBERT POTTER: The world is woefully underprepared for the new reality of war
The time to build drone interception capacity is not when the first swarm arrives. It is now.
Since Saturday, the Middle East has again seen waves of drone and missile strikes. This is becoming normalised across multiple theatres. Iranian-linked actors and regional proxies have demonstrated the ability to launch large salvos combining missiles and one-way attack drones, reinforcing what Ukraine has been living with for two years.
What still surprises many observers and planners is the scale. It shouldn’t.
Hundreds of drones in one day across the Middle East is treated as escalation. In Ukraine, that tempo is routine and it has defences to manage this as a weekly event.
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By continuing you agree to our Terms and Privacy Policy.States across the Middle East, and across the Indo-Pacific, would struggle to manage relatively modest volumes of inbound attacks. Most countries should assume they will perform no better than the UAE did without serious investment in layered counter-UAS and air defence.
The problem is ubiquitous now, the quiet revolution of procurement of the weapon has already occurred. In Ukraine, Russian-made shahed drones attacking cities is a daily occurrence.
Ukraine now launches domestically produced FP1/2 drones at Russian military targets on a rising scale as well. The United States used its LUCAS (Low-Cost Unmanned Combat Attack System) in its attacks on Iran. All of these platforms are relatively similar. Small propellor in the back, large warhead in the front. Cheap and very easy to make.
Our defences are not calibrated for this challenge. Large expensive interceptor systems don’t work as well as cheap ones as the problem scales. A patriot battery can absolutely shoot a shahed down, but no one in the world makes enough interceptor ammunition to make this the reliable option to manage a wave of drones.
So don’t expect patriots and jets to be something that works on the 20th wave.
From our work embedded with dozens of Ukrainian drone and interceptor units, the trend is pointing towards things becoming more difficult:
- One-way attack drones are getting faster and smarter
- Radar signatures are dropping
- Jet-powered variants are emerging
Even sophisticated air defence networks have already shown gaps. A Houthi drone strike in 2024 showed how a relatively cheap platform could evade detection and hit a target in Israel.
The strategic takeaway is simple. Cheap, attributable deep-strike drones are no longer an irregular threat. They are something you need to expect and plan for as part of every day in a fight. China has the ability to take this scale to another level, and planners in our own region are not showing that they will perform better in the future than UAE has.
Ukraine is currently the world’s most experienced laboratory in using and countering drones. Partners in the Middle East and Asia-Pacific who assume this is a distant problem are learning the hard way.
Most drones intercepted in the Middle East today will be shot down by expensive missile defence systems. In Ukraine, they’ll be shot down by smaller drones and machine guns.
People assume that Ukraine does this because it does not have the same defence budget, and this is true, but they have solved for scale in a way we need to learn from.
Our team regularly embeds with teams like Nemesis in Ukraine which defends the skies of Kyiv against thousands of drones per week. Their key advance is in taking down a drone for less than it costs, so the scale problem works to their advantage. NATO platforms get logarithmically more expensive as the waves get larger.
Australia’s plan right now is structurally set to depend on the F35 and the navy, the most expensive approach to the problem. Even before the F35 opens fire, it costs more per hour to operate than the price of the drone it would be sent to shoot down. The economics of using air warfare destroyers are not more favourable.
While, in Kyiv the cost gets incrementally lower as the wave gets larger as interceptor drones and 50cal are less expensive than the shaheds they are shooting down. This is an approach designed to scale and one we must learn from.
The time to build drone interception capacity is not when the first swarm arrives. It is now.
Robert Potter is the founder of Cyber Activities Group
