WASHINGTON—After absorbing a forty-day intensive bombing campaign by the United States and Israel from the end of February through April, Iran responded the only way it could have responded to ensure the survival of its regime: by avoiding a direct confrontation and adopting an asymmetric approach.
Iran expanded and extended the conflict by attacking energy facilities in the Gulf and blocking the Strait of Hormuz. It did this in an attempt to impose political and economic costs on the US and Israel to force them to stop fighting and lower their demands. Tehran appears to believe that in this prolonged conflict, its ability to tolerate economic pain is greater than that of its adversaries.
Only time will tell whether Iran is overestimating its resistance capacity and underestimating its opponents’ resolve. Yet, what is clear today is that Tehran is executing its strategy to the teeth.
Core to Iran’s attrition strategy is its deep missile and drone arsenal. So long as cheap Iranian drones are getting shot down by very expensive US, Israeli, and Gulf interceptors, and so long as these drones occasionally evade those defenses and hit high-value targets, Iran will remain unwilling to make serious concessions at the negotiating table.
It’s time to acknowledge Iran’s strategy and deliberately counter it. Doing more of the same—producing and deploying more technical countermeasures to Iranian drones—has played into Tehran’s hands. Such an exchange will always favor Iran because of economics and inventory depth. Simply put, Iran has and can produce more low-cost drones faster than its opponents can high-cost interceptors.
Countering drones with nets—which has been used extensively in Ukraine and potentially, according to open-source imagery, in Iraq—is a viable and lower-cost alternative, but it has limitations. The US military still doesn’t have standardized tactics, techniques, and procedures for counter-drone netting. Also, drones vary considerably in dimensions and build. Some are sturdier and carry heavier payloads than others, making nets less than effective.
The United States must rapidly diversify its non-kinetic counter-drone arsenal because interceptor-heavy defense alone is economically unsustainable against mass-produced drones. There are some promising technologies that offer pathways to cheaper scalability. These include high-powered microwaves, lasers, and electronic warfare solutions that also can disable drones, despite their limitations. High-powered microwaves can be fraught with deployment challenges; lasers can only take down one target at a time, and their performance can be affected by weather; electronic warfare methods can interfere with friendly forces’ radio systems, and they can’t defeat drones that are maneuvered via long fiber-optic cables.
The United States is in this counter-drone conundrum because of many years of US neglect, poor planning, and insufficient investment in air defense. Despite all the signs and warnings, the lion’s share of the US defense budget when it comes to aerial threats has been for ballistic missile defense, with far fewer resources directed toward air defense. Addressing that substantial gap won’t happen overnight.
The United States can’t do this alone. The best way to counter Iran’s attrition strategy and reduce the impact of its drones is by pooling resources and dividing labor among Washington and its allies and partners.
A timely, multilateral response to Iran’s asymmetric campaign should prioritize the most exposed vulnerability in the region: civilian infrastructure. The United States and its Gulf partners lack a coherent system to defend civilian infrastructure from sustained drone attacks, with fragmented responsibilities, unclear authorities, and no integrated approach to protecting energy, water, and communications networks under persistent threat.
At the same time, Ukraine has become the global center of gravity for counter-drone tactics under real combat conditions, and demand for its operational knowledge makes it essential to anchor a coalition model that unifies government, industry, and continuous adaptation.
The US Navy’s Task Force 59, which focuses on the operational deployment of unmanned systems teamed with manned operators to bolster maritime security across the region, should serve as the model for this joint effort. Task Force 59 worked because it paired a narrow mission with a familiar operating environment and should serve as the gold-star model for a joint effort with emerging tech. The United States should lead the formation of a trilateral counter-drone partnership with Ukraine and Gulf partners built around the idea of counter-drone-as-a-service—a new kind of deployment business model, as opposed to selling counter-drone hardware alone.
Many counter-drone tools, such as nets and lasers, already exist, but they’re not integrated, and they are slow to reach the infrastructure sites most exposed to attack. The proposed model should push US system integrators to incorporate cheaper defeat methods into layered defense architectures, test them in Gulf operating environments, and refine them with Ukrainian battlefield feedback. New development and tech will evolve naturally as a part of the effort, but it should be driven by gaps discovered during deployment rather than by another long procurement cycle built around idealized requirements.
But this model would carry greater political sensitivity given the tensions between the US and Ukraine and with Washington trying to restore confidence with Gulf partners. The partnership should therefore begin as a civilian critical infrastructure pilot routed through US integration channels, giving Gulf partners access to Ukraine’s battlefield lessons while keeping American defense technology firms central to deployment. If Gulf capital moves directly into Ukrainian counter-drone capacity because US export pathways remain too slow, Washington risks losing both industrial upside and a live learning environment for layered infrastructure defense. The administration may find this concept appealing if the partnership is framed around US industrial participation, Gulf self-defense and burden sharing, and faster foreign defense sales. This tracks with the current White House arms-transfer posture, which prioritizes partners with strategic geography, self-defense investment, and relevance to US economic security.
To enable this joint effort, the United States should sustain its overall support for Ukraine. The most relevant knowledge for modern asymmetric air defense is being produced on the Ukrainian front lines in real time. Preserving and integrating that knowledge strengthens allied readiness and accelerates doctrinal development. Toward this end, Congress should pass the Ukraine Support Act without delay, including the $1.3 billion in assistance and expanded sanctions on Russia. Doing so would be a direct investment in operational learning, infrastructure defense, and alliance credibility.