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Iran’s strikes against other Middle Eastern countries are increasingly reliant on Shahed-style drones, drawing on its deep stockpiles of the relatively cheap devices as its drone launchers evade detection from the air.
Tehran’s capacity to sustain those strikes may determine the course of a conflict that has come down to a contest between US and Israeli air power and Iran’s dispersed missile and drone forces on the ground, said analysts.
Data from defence ministries in the United Arab Emirates, Qatar and Bahrain shows that the vast majority of projectiles directed towards their territory in recent days have been drones, while numbers of ballistic missile strikes and interceptions have declined sharply.
The total drones fired at the UAE alone since the start of the conflict topped 1,000 on Thursday. Iran’s ballistic missile firing, meanwhile, has declined as the US and Israel targeted the large launchers that such missiles require.
Most drones fired by Tehran’s forces are variants of the Iranian-made Shahed, a long-range device that has also been extensively used in “swarms” by Russian forces against Ukraine.
Iranian drone attacks have targeted US diplomatic buildings in Riyadh, Kuwait City and Dubai since the start of the conflict. A Shahed hit a US naval base in Bahrain, while a drone strike on a US command centre in Kuwait killed six US soldiers at the weekend.
Israeli intelligence officials say Iran is likely to have more than 10,000 Shahed drones in storage, which would give Iran a further two to three weeks at present firing rates. But stockpile levels of the devices are difficult to estimate with accuracy.
Other analysts say the numbers may be higher. Robert Tollast of the Royal United Services Institute in London said he estimated Iran’s drone stockpile at “tens of thousands”, “based on Russian rates of Shahed production and the fact that the weapons have long been a cornerstone of Iran’s conventional deterrence”.
But Iran’s ability to keep launching the devices — which serve to overwhelm and deplete interceptors, as well as to cause damage on the ground — will also depend on the success of US and Israeli efforts to suppress their firing.
“It’s not just about how many they’ve got, it’s about the ability to fire them and co-ordinate salvos,” said Tollast. “That will depend on the US and Israeli efforts to suppress and destroy them on the ground.”
Iran’s industrial base for the Shahed has been heavily targeted by the US and Israel since they began strikes at the weekend.
While Russia has manufactured its version of the Shahed 136 drone — known as the Geran 2 — in “mega-factories” in Alabuga and Izhevsk, Iranian production is believed to be distributed across multiple sites. Kyiv says Moscow launched roughly 54,000 long-range strike drones at Ukraine in 2025 alone.
Nicole Grajewski, professor at Science Po in Paris, said that Shaheds were comparatively easy to produce. “Many components are commercially available and facilities are easier to conceal.”
She added: “UAV production leaves far fewer observable signatures than missile programs, which makes estimating production capacity and stockpiles significantly harder.”
The cost of a single Shahed drone has been previously estimated at $30,000—35,000, far below the cost of a ballistic missile or of the interceptor missiles usually used to defend against them.
Some analysts said Iran’s model may echo aspects of Ukraine’s decentralised wartime drone industry, where assembly and integration can occur in small workshops — and, in some cases, private apartments — reducing vulnerability to air strikes.
Military analysts have expressed surprise at the battlefield performance of the Shahed, which was first unveiled in 2021. Despite its origins as a relatively low-cost loitering munition, Shahed drones have been credited with precise daylight strikes, including attacks claimed against US and allied facilities in Bahrain, Qatar, Cyprus and Saudi Arabia.
Shaheds themselves vary: investigators examining downed drones in Ukraine have found examples built with plywood and styrofoam, but some reveal far more sophisticated components.
A Geran-2 recovered in Ukraine’s Sumy region last year reportedly contained a western-made supercomputing module enabling advanced computer vision capabilities.
Recent iterations appear to incorporate further upgrades. The Shahed-136 MS series is reported to feature an improved eight-channel Iranian-made jam-resistant satellite navigation system known as Nasir.
Some variants are said to include a radio modem and subsystems capable of transmitting video, telemetry or group control commands — pointing to growing networking and resilience.
The US has used its own cheap drone, the Low-Cost Uncrewed Combat Attack System (Lucas), for the first time in the Iran conflict.
Data visualisation by Alan Smith and illustration by Ian Bott