Bazookas needed to kill flies'; $20,000 drones changing war

Over four decades, a series of public interest litigations filed by environmental lawyer MC Mehta became the scaffolding of India's environmental jurisprudence. Here is a summary of the landmark outcomes from the petition wrapped up today, and some others he filed

- Shweta Taneja

ince Iran was attacked by US-Israel, they have had a simple strategy: Target US-funded infrastructure and cripple oil reserves of the world. And do it with single-use cheap autonomous drones.

Three Amazon Data Centres in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Bahrain were damaged earlier this month, while 17 submarine cables passing through Strait of Hormuz, which Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps has declared closed, were destroyed.

At the same time, oil infrastructure has been attacked across the Middle East, making many countries, including India scramble for oil and gas.

What’s enabling them to do all of this at a rapid scale and at a cheap cost are their arsenal of autonomous drones: The infamous Shahed-136.

The low cost and precision targeting of these suicide drones makes it easier for them to be used at scale. A Shahed-136 costs about $20,000 while a Patriot missile which the US uses to defend these assets costs $4 million, according to Council on Foreign Relations in the US. Even if an Iranian drone is successfully countered, it’s a financial drain for its enemy. A recent piece in The New York Times called it “using a bazooka to kill a fly”.

It’s this reason that Pentagon recently approached Ukraine to help them tackle Iranian drones. Ukraine, after all, thanks to the war it's been at for four years with Russia, has experience in dealing with these drones.

Before the Russia-Ukraine war, autonomous drones had been a prototype, tested but never used in wars. Throughout its aggression, Russia has primary depended on autonomous drones - Shahed or similar models - to constantly bombard Ukraine. Ina recent tweet, Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelenskyy claimed that Russia has used more than 57,000 Shahed-type attack drones against Ukraine over the last four years.