The news that Russia has begun to use Iranian military equipment in its war against Ukraine has led some observers to frame that conflict as a proof point for Iran's military technology.
While the impact of these weapons on the trajectory of the Russia-Ukraine War will be subject to extensive debate, the implications for military dynamics in the Middle East are far from clear, as Russia has so far employed its Iranian drones in a way that Iran itself may not.
In order to understand the implications of these developments for Iran's military posture vis--vis the United States, Israel and Gulf Arab states, it is necessary to appreciate the context in which Iran developed its drones and how Iran and its nonstate allies have employed these systems to date.
Iran has spent more than a decade modernizing its strike capabilities, which have been overshadowed by its missile program. The majority of Iran's missile force is of limited accuracy.
Over the past decade, the situation has changed and Iran now has a growing and diverse array of missiles.
The January 2020 strikes against an Iraqi air base housing US soldiers in reprisal for the assassination of Iranian military commander Gen. Qasem Soleimani have made Iran's missile force more effective.
The United States, Israel and Iran's Gulf Arab neighbors have been able to improve their missile defense capabilities. Iran's achievements in improving the accuracy of its missiles have come at the cost of affordability, just as Tehran needs an ever-larger force of missiles to overcome the improving missile defenses of its enemies.
Efforts to develop jet-powered land-attack cruise missiles and similar propeller-driven drones dating back to the 1990s have taken on new importance as they offer a more cost-effective way to fight.
Iran has been experimenting with the use of drones since the Iran-Iraq War in the 1980s.
As early as the 1990s, Iran began to develop expendable attack drones, which are typically propeller-driven and carry explosives that crash into a target and blow it up.
The first notable employment of Iran's drones dates back to 2006 when Hezbollah employed small numbers of them against Israel in a war shaped by Hezbollah.
Since 2015, the Houthis have employed more advanced Iranian drones against Saudi Arabia. In the attacks on Saudi oil facilities, Iranian drones were used.
The Shahed-131 and Shahed-136 drones are the latest examples of a long-running trend.
The Shahed-131 is a smaller and lighter design of the same configuration as the Shahed-136 and other attack drones.
The Shahed-131 and Shahed-136 are powered by a small engine that can sustain a cruise speed of 95 mph, which is more than the smaller and lighter drones that can be launched by hand.
The Shahed-129, one of Iran's larger drones, is powered by a propeller and has a loaded weight of 2,200 pounds.
Attack drones in the Shahed-131 and Shahed-136 class are more affordable and simpler to make, and they can be used in larger numbers.
It's not clear how Iran will use its strike capabilities in a conflict with the United States or Israel. The country's continued investment in cruise missiles alongside attack drones indicates that it is pursuing an increasingly hybrid set of strike capabilities in which lower end and higher end systems are complementarily employed in pursuit of combined arms synergies.
Unlike the Houthis in Yemen, who have largely employed strike capabilities provided by Iran at a small scale and in a rather sporadic fashion, the limited available evidence of Iran's real-world employment of attack dronessuggests that it appreciates the role that combined arms integration can play in striking complex
Iran's military knows the strengths and weaknesses of its various strike systems and is able to skillfully integrate them in complex operations, as shown by the examples of Iranian strikes against Saudi oil facilities in 2019.
Given the lack of examples in which a state, rather than a nonstate actor, has employed Iranian drones in combat operations, it is tempting to view Russia's use of them against Ukraine with an eye on military dynamics in the Middle East.
Although Russia's use of Iranian drones may provide some evidence of the reliability of Iranian designs and their relative effectiveness, as Ukraine's air defenses improve and adapt, Russia seems to be employing these systems in very different ways than what Iran's military planning and objectives may dictate.
Russia is using its newly supplied attack drones on a stand-alone basis, without integration with crewed combat aircraft and missiles of various types. For a number of reasons, this is consequential.
The types of targets that the drones can damage are limited by the small amount of cargo they carry.
While the 45-90 pounds of high explosives that drones of this type typically carry can destroy a vehicle or a small building, larger structures vital to the Ukrainian war effort, such as bridges or steel mills, would be able to sustain the damage from such strikes.
Russia doesn't have enough combat aircraft or missiles to seriously damage targets inUkraine. Eight months into the war, most of the Ukrainian transport system is still functioning.
Iran's strike capabilities appear to complement one another, with low-end drones used to degrade defenses so that they can be used to destroy more resistant targets.
Iran is in a better position to damage critical infrastructure in a conflict if it doesn't destroy it, and the relatively low-cost kamikaze drones that have been used by the Russians in Ukraine serve a more meaningful purpose than the damage they have inflicted. These are a nuisance in terms of military effectiveness because they have incurred humanitarian costs.
The propeller-driven Iranian drones that Russia is now using are slow and can be detected if they are in transit. This can paralyze defenders by forcing them to wait for a slow-maneuvering object to strike one of any number of potential targets in a wide area, but it still means that these drones are unsuitable against certain types of targets.
The only way to overcome these limitations without making the attack drones as expensive as conventional cruise missile designs is to use them in a combined arms fashion.
Russia has not employed its Iranian-sourced drones in this way, and Iran's large arsenal of fast conventionally armed missiles with various ranges suggests that an Iranian strike campaign may look very different from what Russia is currently undertaking against Ukraine.
Ukrainians may not be the proving ground for Iran's drone technology that many observers are expecting. Russia appears to be using Iranian drones in a way similar to the Houthis in Yemen, albeit on a larger scale and at a higher pace, rather than as Iran itself appears to intend.
The employment of Iran's latest military technologies in a new context is an unexpected turn of events not only for the Russia-Ukraine War but also for military dynamics in the Middle East.
Shahryar is a graduate student in the Department of Political Science at the George Washington University.
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