Why the US military is stuck using $1 million missiles against Iran’s $20,000 drones

It may sound hard to believe, but the almost trillion-dollar U.S. military is struggling to fight cheap drones in its war with Iran. Iran has built a simple drone, the Shahed, with a motorcycle-type engine, loaded it with explosives and successfully targeted its neighbors’ cities and power plants. Iran has also hit U.S. military bases with these drones, including an early April 2026 attack on the U.S. Victory Base Complex in Baghdad. The drones cost between US$20,000 and $50,000 to build. In response, the U.S. military sometimes fires missiles worth more than $1 million to shoot one down. As a former U.S. Air Force officer and now national security scholar, I believe that math is a problem: The U.S. military for now has a $1 million answer to a $20,000 question. This math tells you almost everything you need to know about one of America’s biggest national security headaches. And the frustrating part is that the U.S. military watched this happen in Ukraine for years. It knew the threat was coming. The weapon that changed modern war The Shahed isn’t impressive because it’s high-tech. It’s impressive because it isn’t. Inspection of captured Shahed drones has found that many of their…

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