The threat in this particular version of a scene played out at its bases with increasing regularity in the world’s contested skies was a Shahed-series drone — basic fiberglass wrapped around a lawnmower engine — costing less than $20,000. The Americans won the engagement. But it should give pause to anyone still invested in the mythology of American military supremacy that the Americans are losing the war of arithmetic.
This is the central irony of what strategists are now calling the drone revolution, although “revolution” may be too dramatic a word for what is really a very old story in new clothing.
Empires have always faced the problem of cost asymmetry, the gap between what it costs a great power to defend its position and what it costs a weaker adversary to challenge it. The British learned this lesson in the American colonies. The French learned it in Algeria. The Americans themselves learned it, or should have, in Vietnam, Lebanon, Iraq and Afghanistan.
The drone is not a new argument. It’s the same argument, delivered by fiber optic cables at 100 miles per hour.
When Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, it expected Kiev to fall within days. When the United States and Israel bombed Iran in early 2026, they predicted the rapid collapse of the Islamic Republic. In both cases, overwhelming military power failed to defeat the smaller and weaker side.
Ukraine and Iran did not win these confrontations in any conventional sense. They just refused to lose like they should have. And they refused, in large part because they owned the drone.
The economics aren’t complicated, even if Washington’s procurement bureaucracy seems constitutionally incapable of understanding them. Every time a $2 million interceptor destroys a $20,000 drone, a superpower’s global influence shrinks a little more. Multiply this exchange ratio by thousands of engagements, across multiple theaters, over years of conflict, and you arrive at something that looks less like a military campaign and more like a slow financial hemorrhage.
Iran’s strategy, like the Houthis before it, is not to defeat the United States in battle. The goal is to make the cost of Western intervention so politically and economically unsustainable that the superpower simply ceases to exist.
This is, of course, a limited form of victory. Drones do not hold territory. They don’t sign treaties or install governments. Russia’s experience in Ukraine shows that layered electronic warfare, short-range air defenses, camouflage and dispersion mean that many drones fail before reaching their targets, and those that do often struggle to achieve decisive effects against hardened or mobile systems.
Drone enthusiasts, like any generation of enthusiasts for the latest cool weapon, are prone to overstatement. No, a bunch of Shahed won’t sink a carrier strike group. No, FPV drones will not make the armored division obsolete tomorrow morning.
But this framing completely misses the point. The question was never whether drones could defeat a superpower in a given engagement. The question is whether they can raise the cost of intervention high enough, for long enough, to change the superpower’s political calculus. And here the evidence is quite clear.
Ukraine’s Operation Spiderweb in June 2025 saw five Russian air bases, hundreds of miles apart, deep inside Russian territory, simultaneously attacked by drones, destroying or disabling around $7 billion worth of warplanes.
Drones were not the assets of a peer competitor. They were the improvised weapons of a country fighting for its survival, assembled from commercial components and flown by operators who learned their trade on game consoles. The Kremlin, a nuclear superpower, found its fleet of strategic bombers degraded by what amounted to a very ambitious hobby-drone operation.
Washington has noticed. The U.S. defense budget in 2026 is expected to spend about $7.5 billion on anti-drone air systems alone. Beijing, characteristically, is thinking in bigger numbers: China recently launched a program to make one million tactical drones available by 2026, while the United States reported buying 50,000 by 2025.
The production gap is not a gap that more Pentagon budget lines will close. It reflects deeper structural realities about industrial capacity, supply chains, and the willingness to build things quickly and cheaply rather than expensively and perfectly.
The deeper problem, as always, is cultural and political rather than technological. The United States is still clinging to hardware that is too expensive to lose. In modern warfare, if a weapon is too expensive to lose, it is too expensive to use. Shifting a military culture built around great, irreplaceable platforms to an “assigned” model, weapons designed to be expended, not stored, requires not only new procurement rules, but a fundamentally different theory of what military power is about.
Can drones defeat a superpower? The answer, characteristically, is: It depends on what you mean by defeat. They cannot conquer one. However, they can exhaust one, financially, politically, strategically. They can turn any intervention into a referendum if the price is worth the price. They can make the arithmetic so unfavorable that the constraint calculation begins to look more attractive than the commitment calculation.
History suggests that it is rare for an empire to fall to a single weapon. Empires fall when the costs of maintaining their position exceed the political will to bear those costs. The drone didn’t invent that dynamic. It has simply made it faster, cheaper and more available to a wider range of actors than ever before.
Washington should see that thought as clarifying, not reassuring.
Originally published in Leon Hadar’s Global Zeitgiest, this article is reprinted with permission.
