- After four years of wider war, Ukraine is on the cutting edge of drone tactics and technology
- Ukrainian forces learned to spread out their drone teams on land and keep them moving in order to dodge Russian attacks
- That's a lesson Iranian naval forces should have internalized, but didn't
- Now an 800-foot Iranian drone carrier is on fire following US strikes
Iran made a critical error when it converted an 800-foot commercial container ship into a do-it-yourself aircraft carrier optimized for launching drones. As Ukraine has learned the hard way in 49 months of hard fighting, drones work best when they're spread out, not concentrated on a single easy-to-track, easy-to-sink ship.
It's not that Iran doesn't also distribute many of its drones, including Shahed attack models, in small launch teams across the 1.65 million square km expanse of Iran. It does. But Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps Navy wasted years of effort, millions of dollars and probably the lives of many sailors when it converted that container ship into the carrier IRIS Shahid Bagheri starting around 2022.
On 5 March, the sixth day of the US- and Israeli-led air war on Iran, US forces found Shahid Bagheri and hit her with several munitions. "US forces aren't holding back on the mission to sink the entire Iranian navy," US Central Command stated. "Today, an Iranian drone carrier, roughly the size of a [World War II] aircraft carrier, was struck and is now on fire."
The strikes on Shahid Bagheri, which are likely to result in the vessel's sinking, could be some of the final blows in a successful anti-shipping campaign. Since 28 February, US and Israeli forces have been hunting down and sinking ships operated by the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps Navy and the separate Iranian navy. The former is a more ideological force. The latter is the inheritor of Iran's pre-revolution secular naval tradition.
Most dramatically, the US Navy attack submarine USS Charlotte torpedoed the Iranian navy frigate IRIS Dena off the coast of Sri Lanka on 4 March, killing 87 sailors. In all, US and Israeli forces have sunk or badly damaged around 30 Iranian warships representing the majority of Iran's naval power.
Vulnerable ships
The anti-shipping campaign is like an accelerated version of Ukraine's own anti-shipping campaign targeting the approximately 30 large vessels in the pre-war Russian Black Sea Fleet. In four years of missile and drone raids, the Ukrainians have sunk, or destroyed in drydock, around a dozen Russian vessels including the cruiser Moskva and the submarine Rostov-on-Don—and damaged several others.
The majority of the Black Sea Fleet survives, however, including five frigates and corvettes armed with Kalibr cruise missiles. But the fleet can't risk leaving its main bastion: the port of Novorossiysk in southern Russia. And Novorossiysk itself is hardly safe. Ukrainian drones—aerial, surface and subsurface models—have relentlessly targeted Novorossiysk, aiming to finish off what's left of the Black Sea Fleet.
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The Russians wisely never deployed a drone carrier in the Black Sea. If they had done so, the ship may have suffered the same fate as the rest of the regional fleet. Instead, the Russians have done what the Ukrainians have done: spread out their drone teams on land in order to complicate enemy efforts to strike the drones before they can launch.
The Ukrainians are experts at dispersing their air power, keeping manned and unmanned aircraft and their pilots and ground crews constantly moving—something that's impossible when you tether aircraft to a slow-moving ship. The Ukrainian air force's sole wing operating ex-European Lockheed Martin F-16 fighters even organized special mobile support teams to keep the precious F-16s moving between big bases, smaller outlying airfields and potentially even highway airstrips.
Ukrainian drones now hammer Russia’s last Black Sea Fleet refuge from the sky—and this time, there’s no escape
That fixation on mobility is how the Ukrainian air force and drone forces have survived 49 months of Russian efforts to pin them down and destroy them on the ground. It was a practice Iranian armed forces should've copied more widely, instead of building an 800-foot drone carrier that stood no chance in an intensive naval war.
Air power dispersal isn't the only thing Ukrainian forces can teach the wider world. Iran's surviving drone teams—those that weren't aboard Shahid Bagheri—struck back against the United States and its allies, launching the same Shahed attack drones that Russia launches at Ukraine by the hundreds.
Many of the small, slow, low-flying Shaheds flew right past US and allied air defenses, which are designed to intercept fast, high-flying ballistic missiles. Ukraine swats down Shaheds with an array of nimble systems, including tiny, maneuverable interceptor drones—a key defensive weapon mostly missing from other countries' arsenals.
Reeling from the Iranian Shahed impacts, the Americans looked to the Ukrainians for help. According to Ukrainian Pres. Volodymyr Zelensky, there have been "requests from the American side" for access to Ukrainian anti-drone technology and expertise.
