An Out-of-Touch Theocracy, but a Highly In-Tune Drone Strategy: How Iran Exports UAVs, and Influence

Following its cutoff from top-tier American defense systems after the ousting of the Shah in 1979 and the subsequent war with Iraq in the 1980s, Iran found itself in need of developing indigenous weapons systems to wage asymmetric warfare. Since then, it has developed a broad set of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) that have not only operated out of Iran's mainland but also been exported to its proxies across the region and countries as far as South America.

Today, the use of Iran's Shahed line of UAVs by Russia (rebranded as the Geran) in Ukraine has brought international attention to its drone industry. The Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) has leveraged its indigenous technology and propagated it to allied terrorist and militia groups such as Hezbollah in Lebanon and Harakat Hizbullah al-Nujaba in Iraq. These systems have been forward-deployed and operated in theaters including Israel, Syria, Iraq, and hotspots in the Strait of Hormuz and the Persian Gulf.

While its nuclear program is recovering from a devastating missile exchange with Israel and the U.S., Iran has maintained and leveraged a highly cost-efficient and asymmetric indigenous UAV program that is strikingly in touch with today's battlespace. It is one of few countries to have developed extensively battle-tested drones that operate in the world's most contested airspace -- electronically and kinetically -- in Ukraine. As such, it is crucial to develop a comprehensive understanding of Iran's drone program, which has become a highly effective tool of asymmetric power projection in the region.

Brief History

As it transitioned away from American-made F-14s, M60 tanks, and AH-1 helicopters, the post-revolutionary Iranian regime quickly identified the value in cheaper UAVs to surveil the WWI-like trench warfare of the Iran-Iraq war. Development and use of UAVs quickly fell under the purview of the IRGC Air Force, as aerospace manufacturers such as the Iran Aircraft Manufacturing Industrial Company (HESA) and the Qods Aviation Industries (QAI) emerged to populate the market.

Largely cut off from the West, Iran focused on a few models throughout the 1990s, such as the HESA Ababil and Qods Mohajer, both single-engine multirole UAV families used primarily for Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance (ISR). Iran widely exported the Ababil-2 and -3 and Mohajer-2 models to governments and paramilitaries across the world, including direct shipments to Hezbollah in Lebanon and licensed production in Venezuela (rebranded as Arpia).

By the late 2000s, Iran had unveiled several platforms, including the jet-powered HESA Karrar strike drone and the Shahed family of loitering-munition drones. These have since been used extensively both within and beyond Iran's borders, including in the Baluchistan region bordering Pakistan, on Saudi Arabian oil facility strikes, and against opposition forces in Syria. While design and assembly have remained largely indigenous since 1979, Iran's program has also relied heavily on circumventing import restrictions, often smuggling smaller electronic components through IRGC front companies.

Cost & Modularity

The cost-effectiveness of Iranian drones is a key pillar of their appeal. Shahed drones such as the Shahed-136 may cost between $20,000 and $50,000 per unit, which is still far cheaper than any U.S. legacy drone. These platforms are sometimes referred to as the "poor man's cruise missile" for good reason.

While American startups and the DoD are just now starting to embrace lower-cost UAVs (accelerated in large part by lessons from the war in Ukraine), Iran has leveraged cost asymmetry for decades, all the while bypassing economic isolation from the West. The strategic bet on attritable systems made long before 2022 has proven to be an extremely successful military prediction, aligning perfectly with Iran's geopolitical constraints.

Iran's Operation True Promise -- the April 14^th^, 2025 mass attack on Israel -- involved the British Royal Air Force (RAF) using $200,000+ air-to-air ASRAAM/AIM32 missiles to intercept incoming Shahed munitions. Despite its domestic weaknesses -- a failing economy, sluggish R&D, and a politically isolated population -- Iran has managed to project global power and even meaningfully shape the conflict in Ukraine, with Russia's long-range strike capability now reliant on Shahed drones.

Export Strategy

Case Study 1: Russia

Iran's drone exports to Russia have become instrumental to Russia's ability to sustain deep strike operations in Ukraine, including Kyiv. Thousands of Shahed-131/136 drones have been shipped, with Iran also providing technical blueprints, training, and possibly key components to support localized production. The construction of a dedicated manufacturing plant in 2023 in Russia's Alabuga Special Economic Zone (staffed in part by students from Yelabuga Polytechnic College and operated by Russian aerospace firm Albatross) marked a new phase in this cooperation.

Russia has since implemented various modifications to its Shaheds, integrating Chinese-supplied antennas to enhance electronic warfare (EW) resilience and mounting its own warheads. These changes reflect the modularity of the Iranian design, which appeals to countries seeking both the adaptability in design and the diplomatic permissiveness in utility (unlike Western systems that often come with restrictions and political conditions).

The Iranian supply of Shaheds has not been perfect -- 25% of initial shipments to Russia were reported to be damaged or inoperable, and Russian engineers have gone as far as redesigning and replacing certain Chinese avionics that were deemed unsatisfactory. Russian use of Shaheds has involved overwhelming Ukrainian defenses in large waves, a tactic on which it seems to be doubling down as it aims to produce them in the thousands per day. As such, Iran has positioned itself as a crucial enabler to Russia's invasion, nearly single-handedly providing it with the ability to conduct deep strikes into Ukraine and directly sustaining the war.

Case Study 2: Houthis

The Yemeni Ansar Allah (Houthi) militant group has grown into one of Iran's most visible regional proxies after its attacks on commercial shipping through the Red Sea. Following the outbreak of war in Gaza in October 2023, the group targeted Israeli-affiliated vessels and began launching missiles and UAVs at Israel itself. The U.S. launched a month-long campaign against the Houthis in mid-March 2025 aimed at restoring freedom of navigation in the region.

Tehran has supplied the Houthis with drones since the mid-to-late 2010s. Interdicted shipments and seized smuggling vessels have revealed a pipeline of Iranian hardware, including KAS-04 Sayad drones (renamed Samad in Houthi service) and the Waids-1/2, which closely mirror the Shahed-131/136.

While the Houthis lack advanced aerospace infrastructure, they have still managed to modify Iranian systems in small ways, such as antenna and other avionics changes. However, unlike Russia or Hezbollah, they remain primarily reliant on imported kits rather than domestic assembly. This reflects both their limited R&D capacity and Iran's willingness to provide turnkey systems to ideologically aligned groups that can advance disruption at low cost.

Case Study 3: Hezbollah

Though the recent collapse of Syria's Assad regime may complicate supply lines to Hezbollah in Lebanon, the battered militant group is unlikely to fully relinquish its unmanned capabilities. For decades, Iran has provided the group with a wide range of ISR and strike drones, famously beginning with the flight of a Mohajer-4 over northern Israel in 2004. Since then, it has routinely used drones to monitor Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) movements near the border and map terrain for future offensive operations. Hezbollah has often publicized its drone flights, including releasing footage from surveillance missions to undermine the perception of Israeli airspace superiority and signal parity or technological advancement, with Iranian backing.

Hezbollah has not only fielded Iranian drones but also developed its own manufacturing base, reportedly growing its arsenal into the thousands. In many ways, this capability foreshadowed Iran's export of drone production to Russia. Hezbollah's integration of the HESA Karrar in Syrian operations against ISIS further underscored the group's operational reach.

In this sense, Hezbollah has served not only as a forward operating arm of Iran's drone warfare doctrine, but also as a model for how Iran exports technical know-how to proxies, ensuring that its asymmetric capabilities endure and proliferate.

Concluding Remarks

Iran's UAV program has quietly become one of the most effective asymmetric tools of statecraft in the modern era. Deprived of conventional airpower superiority and constrained by sanctions, the Islamic Republic invested early in cheap, modular, and attritable drone systems. Over time, this effort evolved into a scalable export model that pairs platforms, technical know-how, and permissive operational doctrine.

The cases of Russia, the Houthis, and Hezbollah demonstrate how adaptable this model has become. Russia has leaned heavily on Iranian loitering munitions to offset production shortfalls and sustain deep strikes, even establishing domestic mass production facilities. The Houthis, with limited R&D and industry, have nonetheless used Iranian drone kits to disrupt Red Sea shipping and draw renewed Western naval focus into the region. Hezbollah stands out as a more mature and hybrid partner: not only fielding drones provided by Iran, but producing its own variants, integrating them into regional operations, and serving as a testbed for tactics and technology that would later be scaled elsewhere.

What unites these cases is the model. Iran's UAV exports are deniable, modular, and unconstrained by Western-style end-user restrictions. They can be rebranded, modified, and redistributed with minimal infrastructure and diplomatic cost. This replicative asymmetric model has proved to be a low-cost method of extending Iran's regional reach without deploying conventional forces. Tehran's ability to export not just drones but factories, training pipelines, and blueprints underscores the depth of the strategy.

The result is a persistent, resilient architecture of influence that will likely survive political turnover and even the collapse of a key regime like Assad's in Syria. Even as Iran's nuclear program falters and its economy continues to stagnate, it has built a defense export model with staying power and high adaptability. Whether used by an industrial power, a proxy militia, or a hybrid actor, the underlying model has shown that low-cost platforms, when paired with technical assistance and permissive diplomacy, can sustain influence without requiring large deployments or high-end systems.

References

Image: Fatemeh Bahrami/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images

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