Advanced fighter jets have been mobilised across the Gulf this month to hunt down enemies they were never designed to fight: waves of slow-moving and low-flying attack drones fired by Iran.
Fighters have been the Gulf nations’ main means of intercepting drones, analysts and western officials said. But while they have been highly effective, this round-the-clock fighter defence has come at high cost both financially and for the overworked pilots and planes.
“It is not sustainable in the long-run in any way, shape or form,” said Lauren Kahn, a former Pentagon adviser now with the Center for Security and Emerging Technologies in Washington.
The Gulf states and their allies face a stark problem: Iran’s drones are cheap, but using fighter planes to defeat them is ferociously expensive.
The workhorse of the Iranian arsenal, the Shahed-136, costs $20,000-$50,000 according to the Center for Strategic and International Studies. But it costs more than $25,000 an hour to keep a single F-16 fighter in the air.
The weapons fighters use to down the drones can also be costly. Videos indicate they have been intercepting drones using air-to-air missiles such as the AIM-9X Sidewinder, which costs the US military around $485,000 each, and the AIM-120 AMRAAM, which costs over $1mn.
The US has kits that can turn unguided rockets into drone-killing missiles, but these cost more than $20,000. While the State Department has approved proposed sales of around 27,000 such kits to the United Arab Emirates, Qatar and Saudi Arabia since 2018, it is unclear if they have been delivered.
Even for cash-flush Gulf nations and their lavishly-funded militaries, the economics of drone warfare are challenging.
“It is obviously a very bad cost ratio for intercepting a cheap threat,” said Samuel Bendett at the Center for Naval Analyses, who said fighters should ideally be used as backup for less expensive options. “We know what the ratio must be: as a defender, you must use cheaper resources.”
Gulf fighters have been trying to use onboard guns as their primary weapon against drones. Their cannon rounds are much cheaper than missiles, but require the fighter to approach much closer to its target while posing greater risk of civilian casualties if used over populated areas.
Each aircraft also carries a limited number of rounds. The F-16 can fire its gun for only around five seconds before exhausting its magazine.
Iran has launched over 3,000 drones since it was attacked by Israel and the US on February 28, most to targets in the Gulf. The majority have been intercepted.
The UAE, which has borne the brunt of the attacks and is being assisted by French and British fighters, says it has destroyed over 1,600. But some have got through to hit military bases, energy installations, and civilian infrastructure, sometimes with remarkable precision.
Cost is not the only reason to worry about over-dependence on fighters for defence against the drones.
“It is exhausting on air forces to keep up this operational tempo,” said Kelly Grieco at the Stimson Center. “You can push these aircraft hard, but at a certain point, you are going to see them having greater breakdown rates and needing more significant maintenance.”
Even for the most advanced fighters, shooting down drones can be a difficult task. The Shahed-136 flies at around one-fifth the average cruising speed of an F-35, making it easy for less experienced pilots to overshoot and miss their target.
Gulf militaries appear to have been wrong-footed by Iran’s drones. “It is clear that they prioritised the ballistic missile threat,” said Grieco. “What they did not take seriously, it seems, is the lower-end threats.”
This matters because drones are much smaller, slower and fly far lower than ballistic missiles. Radars must be specially calibrated to pick them out from among birds and buildings, though networks of sensitive sensors are also being used to listen for acoustic signatures such as the whirring lawnmower-like engine of the Shahed-136.
The Gulf states have been relying on fighters in order to preserve stockpiles of ground-based interceptors, including precious US-made Patriot missiles that cost nearly $4mn per interception. These missiles are launched against drones only when all other measures fail.
Gulf militaries have turned for advice to Ukraine, which has become a world leader in efficiently fending off such drones since Russia’s full scale invasion in 2022.
Anatolii Khrapchinsky, a senior executive at Ukrainian defence manufacturer Fly Group, said that “one of the few truly economically effective tools” against attack drones was using other specialist drones to intercept them.
The US has said it has sent 10,000 such Ukrainian-developed interceptor drones to the Middle East. Ukraine also dispatched an advisory team to the Gulf on how to deal with the drone threat.
“Fighters can be part of your countermeasure system, but they cannot be the foundation,” Khrapchinsky said. “If the enemy launches hundreds of cheap drones, and you shoot them down with missiles worth millions of dollars, your model will not work in the long-term.”
Like Ukraine, Gulf forces have been making use of helicopters, which routinely operate at speeds and altitudes similar to drones and can shoot them down with short-range missiles or onboard guns. UAE attack helicopters, have proven adept at the task. But militaries in the region have fewer such helicopters than fighters and each can cover less ground.
Anti-aircraft guns, heavily used in Ukraine against drones, are also in shorter supply in the Gulf.
Israel has also used fighters, its Iron Dome missile defences and helicopters against Iranian drones, but has used a laser-based system that promises “almost zero” costs per interception. The UAE is also looking to buy bespoke anti-drone defences, including laser-based systems.
Still, Tom Karako of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, believes it is a mistake to focus too narrowly on the cost imbalance of defending against drones, noting that war is always expensive and the “affordability ratio” is more important.
The success of efforts to degrade Tehran’s stockpiles of drones and ability to launch them would be much more decisive than what methods Iran’s neighbours used to defend against them, Karako said.
“It really comes down to how quickly you can stop the launches,” Karako added. “You cannot sit and play catch indefinitely.”
Additional reporting by Simeon Kerr in Dubai, Andrew England in London and Fabrice Deprez in Kyiv
Illustration by Bob Haslett and Ian Bott and data visualisation by Alan Smith