Iran’s Drones Are a Powerful New Weapon of War

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.

Read more at Jerusalem Post

More about: Iran, Iron Dome, Israeli Security, Middle East

Egypt Is Trapped by the Gaza Dilemma It Helped to Create

Feb. 14 2025

Recent satellite imagery has shown a buildup of Egyptian tanks near the Israeli border, in violation of Egypt-Israel agreements going back to the 1970s. It’s possible Cairo wants to prevent Palestinians from entering the Sinai from Gaza, or perhaps it wants to send a message to the U.S. that it will take all measures necessary to keep that from happening. But there is also a chance, however small, that it could be preparing for something more dangerous. David Wurmser examines President Abdel Fatah el-Sisi’s predicament:

Egypt’s abysmal behavior in allowing its common border with Gaza to be used for the dangerous smuggling of weapons, money, and materiel to Hamas built the problem that exploded on October 7. Hamas could arm only to the level that Egypt enabled it. Once exposed, rather than help Israel fix the problem it enabled, Egypt manufactured tensions with Israel to divert attention from its own culpability.

Now that the Trump administration is threatening to remove the population of Gaza, President Sisi is reaping the consequences of a problem he and his predecessors helped to sow. That, writes Wurmser, leaves him with a dilemma:

On one hand, Egypt fears for its regime’s survival if it accepts Trump’s plan. It would position Cairo as a participant in a second disaster, or nakba. It knows from its own history; King Farouk was overthrown in 1952 in part for his failure to prevent the first nakba in 1948. Any leader who fails to stop a second nakba, let alone participates in it, risks losing legitimacy and being seen as weak. The perception of buckling on the Palestine issue also resulted in the Egyptian president Anwar Sadat’s assassination in 1981. President Sisi risks being seen by his own population as too weak to stand up to Israel or the United States, as not upholding his manliness.

In a worst-case scenario, Wurmser argues, Sisi might decide that he’d rather fight a disastrous war with Israel and blow up his relationship with Washington than display that kind of weakness.

Read more at The Editors

More about: Egypt, Gaza War 2023