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.

Israel will likely respond directly against Iran after yesterday’s attack, and has made known that it will calibrate its retaliation based not on the extent of the damage, but on the scale of the attack. The specifics are anyone’s guess, but Edward Luttwak has a suggestion, put forth in an article published just hours before the missile barrage: cut off Tehran’s ability to send money and arms to Shiite Arab militias.

In practice, most of this cash comes from a single source: oil. . . . In other words, the flow of dollars that sustains Israel’s enemies, and which has caused so much trouble to Western interests from the Syrian desert to the Red Sea, emanates almost entirely from the oil loaded onto tankers at the export terminal on Khark Island, a speck of land about 25 kilometers off Iran’s southern coast. Benjamin Netanyahu warned in his recent speech to the UN General Assembly that Israel’s “long arm” can reach them too. Indeed, Khark’s location in the Persian Gulf is relatively close. At 1,516 kilometers from Israel’s main airbase, it’s far closer than the Houthis’ main oil import terminal at Hodeida in Yemen—a place that was destroyed by Israeli jets in July, and attacked again [on Sunday].