US race to counter Iranian drones echoes response to roadside bombs in Iraq and Afghanistan

By Haley Britzky, CNN

(CNN) — Facing deadly Iranian drone attacks across the Middle East, the US military has been rushing defensive systems into the region while adjusting to a threat that has come to dominate modern battlefields and carries echoes of a weapon that haunted service members during the 20 years of the war on terror.

Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Dan Caine and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told lawmakers in a closed-door briefing this month that the one-way drones were posing a bigger problem than anticipated, and that US air defenses wouldn’t be able to intercept all of them.

A drone was responsible for the first American military deaths of the war, striking a temporary operations center from above, killing six US soldiers and wounding more.

George Barros, director of innovation and open source tradecraft with the Institute for the Study of War, said there was some level of shock within the national security community that the US did not appear fully prepared for the threat given how drones have transformed warfare in Ukraine.

“We were kind of all aghast,” Barros said, “because it was clear the extent to which the American planners had not been truly implementing or properly internalizing the lessons that we thought were learned from the war in Ukraine.”

The US military is working to buttress defenses that were in place ahead of the war, including traditional air defense systems, directed-energy weapons, and other new systems that have been proved on the battlefield in Europe.

The Army purchased 10,000 Merops anti-drone systems in the last couple of months, along with 13,000 Bumblebee counter-drone systems, a US official said. It’s unclear the extent to which those systems were already deployed in the Middle East before operations began in late February, or how many systems have been sent into theater since.

But the urgency over the last few years for the US to adjust to the new reality of the battlefield — an urgency that has become more acute now — is reminiscent of another pressing threat two decades ago: improvised explosive devices.

“Both were new threats that the United States scrambled to adapt to and develop countermeasures, and willing to spend a fair amount of money to do that,” Mark Cancian, a retired Marine Corps colonel and senior adviser with the Center for Strategic and International Studies Defense and Security Department, told CNN.

“The difference is that the IEDs were new; we did not anticipate that … but the counter-drone is something we’ve been thinking about for a decade and have started thinking very seriously and much more aggressively since the beginning of the war in Ukraine.”

Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell placed blame on the Biden administration for ignoring “the battlefield evidence” of drones, saying it “did not meaningfully increase budgets, organize around drones or field them.” Hegseth “has done all three,” Parnell said, “demanding urgent change when he launched Drone Dominance last July and organizing a coherent defense by establishing [Joint Interagency Task Force]-401 in August.”

The task force has bought “over $262 million of equipment, including thousands of interceptors and sensors,” a task force spokesperson told CNN.

At the start of the war on terror in Iraq and Afghanistan, the threat of improvised explosive devices, or IEDs, was similarly ever-present. By 2006, the bombs were responsible for half of combat casualties in Iraq, a Congressional Research Service report said at the time, and roughly 30% of combat casualties in Afghanistan. The US military set up task forces and consulted academics, industry leaders and other experts to develop countermeasures to save lives as troops didn’t initially have the equipment or training to counter the threat.

With their light price tag, IEDs were produced by the thousands, and counter-IED equipment, like heavily armored vehicles, were very expensive and took years to be fully rolled out.

The lessons learned and technology developed continue to shape US military planning.

The building that was struck killing six US soldiers in Kuwait was protected by tall concrete barrier walls that are helpful for guarding against IEDs on the ground. But they do little to protect troops from threats coming from above.

Since the start of operations in late February, roughly 200 US troops have been wounded, the vast majority of whom have since returned to duty. Eight were considered seriously wounded. Caine said the majority of those casualties were due to drone strikes.

‘We’re moving as quickly as we can’

The damage that relatively cheap drones can do and how the military should combat them has been top of mind for military leaders for years, particularly while watching the war between Russia and Ukraine and the latter’s dire need for counter-drone technology. The Pentagon has thrown itself into catching up, training troops on not only building cheap drones, but also fighting with them, and pushing the industrial base to produce more, faster, before the war with Iran started.

A source familiar with current US operations in the Middle East said military planners had certainly been watching the war between Ukraine and Russia, but still said the US was “not prepared for the scale” of the drone threat from Iran.

Others, however, say it’s an unfair criticism to say the US wasn’t adequately prepared, particularly when US military officials have worked closely with the Ukrainians and other European partners over the last few years. Many US Army officials have leaned into solving the problem aggressively, including Secretary of the Army Dan Driscoll, who is referred to by President Donald Trump as the “drone guy.”

The US official said that the Army has been “pushing as hard and as fast as they can” to accelerate counter-drone purchases and innovations but that one of the biggest frustrations has been Congress, which has not bought in quickly enough.

“We’re moving as quickly as we can and the congressional appropriations process is challenging, especially when they want to fight us on multiyear buys from some things, flexible funding for other things,” the official said.

“I think [the military’s] perspective as we were watching it is, now everybody’s going to see what we’ve been screaming into the void for, and why we’ve been pushing as hard as we can for these things,” they added.

Cancian said that similar to how the US adapted to IEDs, the counter-drone era will be one of constant adjustment, both on the US’ side and on the side of those employing drones against American forces.

“Iran and other countries will be watching what happened and will be developing new tactics and new adaptations of drones,” Cancian said. “This dynamic of measure, counter-measure, counter-counter-measure will be seen here with drones, just as we saw with IEDs.”

The-CNN-Wire
™ & © 2026 Cable News Network, Inc., a Warner Bros. Discovery Company. All rights reserved.