In the past few years, Tehran and its proxies have carried out a number of attacks on Israeli, American, and Saudi targets using drones. Unlike America’s Predator drones, which can fire missiles and then return to their bases, these are laden within explosives and simply crashed into their intended targets. The Wall Street Journal reports that these aircraft are “often made with widely available components used in the ever-growing commercial drone market and by hobbyists,” but some borrow engines or other design features from U.S. and Israeli models, likely based on pirated blueprints or, in at least one case, reverse-engineering components of a downed drone. Seth Frantzman observes:

Iran’s drone program, unlike its nuclear-weapons program, is not secretive. The Islamic Republic openly brags about its drone capabilities. It highlights every new drone and makes outrageous claims about [them]. Iran has claimed that its drones can fly thousands of kilometers and that it can arm some of them with missiles.

What we know is that Iranian drones can carry out precision attacks, pre-programmed using a set of coordinates. They can wreak havoc, but they are not a weapon that wins wars. . . . The drones themselves . . . can be transported or assembled in different places. For instance, Iran launched drones from its T-4 base in Syria and used them to target Israel in February 2018 and May 2021. It has provided drone-making technology to the Houthis in Yemen.

The drones [give Tehran both] plausible deniability and an ability to overcome air defenses and radar by using swarm attacks of large numbers of drones. Iran has shown proficiency in getting around Saudi and U.S. air defenses in some cases. Israel has used the Iron Dome and missiles fired from aircraft and helicopters to shoot down the relatively slow drones. . . . But there are not enough radar and air-defense systems around the region to defend everything.

While it is commendable that administrators of several universities finally called upon police to crack down on violent and disruptive anti-Israel protests, the actions they have taken may be insufficient. At Columbia, demonstrators reestablished their encampment on the main quad after it had been cleared by the police, and the university seems reluctant to use force again. The school also decided to hold classes remotely until the end of the semester. Such moves, whatever their merits, do nothing to fix the factors that allowed campuses to become hotbeds of pro-Hamas activism in the first place. The editors of National Review examine how things go to this point:

Since the 10/7 massacre, Columbia’s Jewish students have been forced to endure routine calls for their execution. It shouldn’t have taken the slaughter, rape, and brutalization of Israeli Jews to expose chants like “Globalize the intifada” and “Death to the Zionist state” as calls for violence, but the university refused to intervene on behalf of its besieged students. When an Israeli student was beaten with a stick outside Columbia’s library, it occasioned little soul-searching from faculty. Indeed, it served only as the impetus to establish an “Anti-Semitism Task Force,” which subsequently expressed “serious concerns” about the university’s commitment to enforcing its codes of conduct against anti-Semitic violators.

But little was done. Indeed, as late as last month the school served as host to speakers who praised the 10/7 attacks and even “hijacking airplanes” as “important tactics that the Palestinian resistance have engaged in.”

The school’s lackadaisical approach created a permission structure to menace and harass Jewish students, and that’s what happened. . . . Now is the time finally to do something about this kind of harassment and associated acts of trespass and disorder. Yale did the right thing when police cleared out an encampment [on Monday]. But Columbia remains a daily reminder of what happens when freaks and haters are allowed to impose their will on campus.