Up Close and Personal with Iranian Drones

Adam Rawnsley 0:02

We always complain about automation taking jobs. Now even suicide bombers aren't safe.

Aaron Stein 0:10

You are listening to the Arms Control Women podcast, the leading podcast on arms control, disarmament, and nonproliferation. I'm Aaron Stein, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council's Rafiq Hariri Center for the Middle East.

Adam 0:22

I'm Adam Rawnsley, and I co-author Foreign Policy Sitrep with Paul McCleary, and I'll be talking drums today.

Aaron 0:29

And you're also my friend.

Adam 0:30

Yes, and fellow Philadelphia.

Aaron 0:33

That's right. The last time I saw you, we were having beers in a bar.

Adam 0:36

Yeah, now it's a little less atmospheric here. I'm in a Wawa parking lot because there's a little bit of construction going on in my home office.

Aaron 0:44

Excuse the car sounds.

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And just so everybody knows, Jeffrey is safe and sound at home in California, but this podcast is a follow-up to the Nikki Haley Wonk Porn Fest about the Qiam missile that came out two podcasts ago. And one thing that Adam and I are particularly passionate about is the two other components of that presentation, that Wonk Porn field presentation, which is Iranian drones and And maybe Iranian water drones?

We'll get into it. And there was a lot of high-res, very, very cool pictures in that presentation that I think needs to get talked about. And there's really nobody else to talk about it besides you, Adam. So what was your takeaway from the original, when you saw those pictures, what did you think?

Adam 1:58

You know, it was interesting. It's nice to see the extra graphic, or rather pornographic detail, but It seemed more – a lot of this stuff is not new if you've been paying attention. They showed off three extra items in addition to the, I guess, alleged Qiam. They showed off a Tufan anti-tank guided missile, which is Iran's tow knockoff.

Iran tends to take a lot of the disco vintage stuff that we sent to them in the 1970s. And update it, keep it going. And one of their sort of weird idiosyncratic homebrew weapons is the Tufan ATGM. They had a bear two-fan, the actual missile. They didn't have the launcher. But the thing is, we've actually seen seizures of two-fans before.

The U.N. Panel of Experts report had, I think it was about 56 two-fans that had been seized off an Iranian Dow and shown off to Panel of Experts folks by the U.S. They also had the Qasef-1, as it's called. Which is in reality an Iranian Ababil-2 variant, which is a target drone being used as sort of a poor man's cruise missile.

But again, we've seen that before in the good people at Conflict Armament Research, who are sort of an independent arms consultancy that travel to different conflict areas and document the weapons in use. They released a report about the Kossuth-1 and its origins, going through all the lovely components. And they also showed a little bit more about the Shark 33, which is the Houthi drone boat or WB, waterborne IED.

It's basically an unmanned boat with a warhead and a remote apparatus. We've seen that. The Saudis released a fact sheet. After one of those they released the fact sheet actually after the the most recent or the second most recent attack on Riyadh with a ballistic missile. But we've seen that for a while. We, we knew that there was a an unmanned boat unmanned suicide, but I guess it doesn't count as suicide because robots aren't people.

We've known that since at least January, 2017, that one of those boats existed, but the DIA Nikki Haley's ballistic show and tell had a neat extra little bit of information that we had not seen in the original conflict on report on it.

Aaron 4:38

Yeah. And I think it's important to sort of step back and put this all in context. I mean, because you and I came together to originally talk about this within the context of how Iran is using drones in the Syrian and Iraqi conflicts. And what's interesting about this is the way that they're using this stuff. In the Yemeni conflict.

And so let's start in the Yemeni conflict, which is they're using, you know, what are, You know, largely mature technologies for them, both the Ababil target drone and even the idea of suicide-borne IEDs, but they're using them in new and creative ways to attack American kit, you know, operated by the Saudis. And it's really interesting to watch.

So let's start with the Ababil variant and what we know about, or at least what's reported about how they're using it and what we can talk about and then what the pictures, how the pictures reinforce that.

Adam 5:40

Yeah, so the Houthis did a dog and pony show months ago, maybe even about a year ago. And they showed off four drones which they said were indigenously produced, which were pretty obviously not indigenously produced. One of them was a crappy little Skywalker UAV that you can buy online. It's a little kit. One of them looked like an RQ 11 and another, they called the gossip one, which after I saw it, I was like, that's not a gossip one.

That's an automobile too, because it's a very, you know, it's, it's a small target drone. It's not like, you know, not like your little quadcopter thing.

Aaron 6:18

It's a few feet long.

Adam 6:20

It's got a sort of tubular fuselage little canards up front. And it's target drone. It's, it's made basically for target practice. Iran has been using these since the nineties. And you see them every once in a while during the air defense force exercises. They'll light them off and shoot them down. And so Conflict Armament released a report saying that they're not being used for target practice in Yemen.

What they're doing is they are basically turning them into a poor man's cruise missile. They're using GPS waypoints to target – The Saudi-led coalition's American-made Patriot missile defense batteries. In particular, they're supposed to crash into the radars, blind the radars on the theory that, you know, it'll make it easier to sail through ballistic missiles after you blind the missile defenses.

There's a slight difference between the DIA's dog and pony slides and Conflict Armaments' report I don't believe the Conflict Armament Research got access to them through the Saudi-led coalition. I think it was the UAE who showed them off. But the ones they found and were showed did not have warheads, whereas the DIA mentions warheads. So I don't know whether it's just a matter of.

You know, on the particular seizure that that CAR Had access to, you know, the warheads weren't with them or they're using them differently. But there's at least that difference. But, yeah, it's it's it's a pretty novel usage. And it's interesting because there's a real difference between how Iran uses its drone technology in Yemen and how it uses its drone technology in Syria.

And, you know, in Syria, they have their Shahed 129, which is a an armed predator like looks a bit like a predator, looks a little bit like a. The Watch Keeper slash Hermes 450. Yeah. And they're using it for very sort of counterinsurgency kind of things.

Aaron 8:26

Yeah, let's put a pit in that because I want to come back to Syria later back in the podcast. Because one of the things that I find interesting is that in my work on early Iranian drones, because a lot of people don't understand that Iran has been operating drones, I mean, to a certain level of sophistication since the Iran-Iraq war.

Yes. And the Ababil family has its lineage back there. Towards the tail end, is A, that this is a relatively mature technology for Iran, but two is when I was digging around in Phibis, I found some old interesting articles towards the end of the Iran-Iraq war about how they would conceptualize using drones to mess with American Aegis radars and then pair them with suicide boats.

Adam 9:20

Yes, and that's, you know, just – The idea of blinding radars and, and blinding sensors is, is kind of a common theme. It's not just in the eighties, the Iranian television had a documentary. I think it's called face to face with the devil. It's always very, very, very colorful. And it was a, it was a documentary about IRGC Navy stuff.

And you know, they have this wonderful cheeseoid simulation where it shows missiles and I think drones, but you know, they're, Their big thing that they were signaling is we're going to target and blind the 3D radars on American aircraft carriers in the Gulf. Like, you know, if we can't sink you, we're at least going to blind you and make you useless.

So that, you know, that's an idea that has lineage. And obviously, as you mentioned, you know, their drone program dates back to the Iran-Iraq war when the IRGC basically kidnapped, not kidnapped, but, you know, They assigned a bunch of university students to help them with their ISR because they basically had none. And the way they looked at it was, hey, man, you know, the U.S. has given Iraq satellite imagery.

We need some sort of idea on what's on the other side of the border there. And you know, the earliest days of the Iranian drone program was basically putting a little Japanese camera on a toy RC car, which eventually evolved, or not, RC car, excuse me RC RC plane. and I love that because some dude had to sit at the front lines, you know, and fly the thing. Like, no, they've got, they've actually got another documentary where they show like they're interviewing some of the scientists, and it's like, it's like, you know.

Iran's version of the History Channel where a bunch of old farts talking about the war. Yeah, and that's where the first mohadra came from. If you want to talk Cheezoid, I think it's Ibrahim Khatamakia. I will stipulate that I'm going to butcher all Persian names because I don't speak Farsi, but it's one of the sacred defense cinema genre of directors.

It has a really cool, interesting movie called Mohajir about a tender story about a man and his drone. It's a war movie. It's a war flick that came out towards the end or slightly after the Iran-Iraq war, showing off the Mohajir, which is now we see those in Syria and Iraq. They're up to Mohajir 4 is the most common one.

They recently released – jeez, I want to – Blank on this, Mohajer 5 or 6. But yeah, you can see the original series Mohajer in a tender Sacred Defense Cinema flick about a man and his drone.

Aaron 12:08

Right, right. And then the Ababil comes off of that later.

Adam 12:13

Yeah, the Ababil program sort of, you know, the Ababil 2 series were basically target drones that doubled as reconnaissance platforms In the 1990s. And now, you know, the most common that's evolved into the Ababil three, which is one of the most common drones that you'll see anywhere. Iran does drone stuff. You're going to probably see an Ababil three sooner or later.

And they basically ripped that off. I believe it was the South African seeker. And in 2005, Iran was sort of Feeling out South Africa about whether or not it wanted to export it. And there were some sort of furtive negotiations. There's some, I think Al Jazeera reported some of this stuff. They released South African classified documents. But they ended up just making something that looks a lot like it.

But yeah, they're up to the Ababil three series now. And you see those, those will drop out of the sky every once in a while in Iraq. Yeah. You know, the, the Ababil three ended up being Pretty useful for helping to trace the Ababil 2 variants being used in Yemen because Ababil 3s tend to crash a fair amount.

We know a lot more about Iran's drone program because of the wars in Iraq and Syria. Every time one of these things crashes, it's like a pinata of export violations and details about Iranian production and procurement. And one of them went down in February of, I believe it was 2017 and ISIS ended up showing off the video of it as they tend to do.

They've, they've released a fair amount of video of crashed Iranian drones and we got a really, really, really nice sweet closeup of the vertical gyroscope. And when conflict armament documented the CASF one that was seized From known overland Iranian smuggling routes from Oman into Yemen, they had a picture of a vertical gyroscope. And if you do a side-by-side, it's a really, really, really nice match.

It's the Model V10. It doesn't exist, as far as I'm aware. This is not a commercial model. It doesn't exist anywhere else. And it's more than a little coincidental that you have the same model of bespoke... Vertical gyroscope in the Ababil-3 crashing in Iraq and the Ababil-2 being, or quote-unquote, Kassaf-1 being seized in Yemen.

Aaron 14:51

And it's the same one that was in the Nikki Haley presentation, correct?

Adam 14:55

Yes, exactly. And, you know, the DIA was made sure to know that, you know, they even use the same. You'll see this on all the... All the Ababil two imagery that comes out of exercise photographs in the news in Iran, whenever they're doing a big military exercise or whether they're doing a an air defense thing, you see the two, two prefix on the T on the tails.

It's, you know, two dash two, or it'll be 22 dash. They the ones that they seized in, in Yemen, of course, I'll have you know, the two, two prefix. And of course, you know, it's, it's a very It's a very unique identifiable shape. You don't see other people using drones. Nobody makes a drone like that. And the interesting thing is that the, the cost of ones you know, that usage was sort of conceptually developed in 2006 in the Israel Hezbollah war.

Aaron 15:52

Yeah. That was like a preview to this preview in Yemen and should be a tip off in evolution and, and how to conceptualize how Iran uses these things asymmetrically.

Adam 16:03

Yes. And and I God forbid there's another, you know, Israel Hezbollah throwdown. They certainly seem to be doing a lot of smack talking now that the war in Syria is winding down. I have a feeling we'll see more of that. But in 2006, you had a very similar looking UAV described. I think it was Flight Global did the most detailed reporting on it.

Described as an Ababil T, which is another variant from the two family of Ababil's. Launched by Hezbollah and shot down by Israeli F-16s. And they were basically – it's the same sort of concept as you fill them with explosives and fly them into Israel with the hopes that they'll plow into something.

Aaron 16:48

Right. It cost Israel a lot of money. They had to dedicate – I think a two-ship F-16 fighter cap every single day of that war to watch for Hezbollah slash Iranian drones because of the concern that they would run into things. And they pose problems because they fly low and slow.

Adam 17:09

Yes, and that's, you know, there's a good RAND report on the air war in the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah war. And, you know, those were two F-16s that had a lot of things they could be doing, but had to sit around and wait for, you know, the Ababil-2 to be sailed into Israeli airspace. And the funny thing is that whenever Iran transfers one of its drones or its drone technology to some group in the Middle East, it tends to take on another name.

So I think that you can see actually Hezbollah has a resistance museum. Kids eat free.

Aaron 17:53

The season pass is cheap.

Adam 17:55

Yeah, exactly. And you can you can actually see it looks a little bit larger, but they call it the Mursad because I mean, they've flown drones like that into Israeli territory that were not armed just to sort of annoy them and do their usual sort of we're going to poke you to kind of stuff. And you can actually see one of those.

You know, people have taken photographs of it and it looks like I mean, it's same shape, maybe a little bit larger. But they call it Mursad. And the same thing you saw a I'm going to blank on the name. But we saw I believe it was Kataib Hezbollah in Iraq showed off footage of supposedly them operating an Ababil three and they called it under something different.

So it's it's not not unusual to me that, you know, they would. Transfer a drone and that it would get some sort of Potemkin name and be unveiled as something different.

Aaron 18:53

We should back up. Kataiba Hezbollah is one of the Shia groups in Iraq that is most notoriously linked to the Iranians. And then second to this is, flipping back over to Hezbollah, is They do run, you know, their version of this, the Mossad or the Ababil 2 variant, whatever you want to call it, across the border in Israel every once in a while.

And it prompts a Patriot launch.

Adam 19:20

Yeah, which is that's I mean, that's that's an expensive trade, man. You are trading, I think one of those is like a few million dollars a pop, right?

Aaron 19:30

I mean, it depends which pack they use. I mean, if it's a pack two, it's a little cheaper. I think the estimate is about 750 K per missile, whereas pack three are upwards of $3 million per missile.

Adam 19:41

Yeah. And that's, you know, I guarantee, you know, if you, I, we've seen the parts. I mean, you can probably do a list and do a little catalog of what's in these things because they keep crashing. You get to look at them and that's, you know, Whether it's Ababil 2 or Ababil 3, that's not a few million dollars worth of drone.

Aaron 20:00

Let's be honest, it's a janky piece of hardware that gets the job done because Iran has lower threshold standards than the U.S. Exactamundo.

Adam 20:08

These are a few dozen CC engines. It's not a particularly spectacular piece of hardware. It gets the job done. I mean, that's the thing is that it's not relative to how difficult and how expensive it is to make a drone. It's relative to what you need to do. And for what Iran has been using them for largely is, you know, helping out smaller proxy groups and allies with ISR assistance.

You know, it's better than nothing. You know, it's more it's more than the 15 to 20 minutes of flight time you'll get with a DJI Phantom. Certainly a lot, a lot better imagery. But, yeah, no, that's that's it's an expensive trade when you fire a Patriot at an automobile.

Aaron 20:52

Yeah, because I think now this is the good transition into how they're using them in Syria and Iraq, which is different than how they're using them in Yemen. And I think it's worth fleshing that out because in Syria in particular and in Iraq, we may disagree with who they're giving support to. But what they're doing is giving support to groups on the ground in much the same way that you could conceptualize how the U S uses its own drones to give support to its groups.

Adam 21:23

Yeah. And so in, in Iran or excuse me, in Syria thankfully Galen Wright, who's a, I mean, this guy's just a whiz. Galen is the, the what, what Dave Schmerler is to geolocation Galen Wright is to Iranian weapons. And he did a handy chart at the around about a couple of years ago about the frequency of drone Iranian drones seen in Syria.

And the Ababil three is the workhorse. Every once in a while, you'll see a Mohajer four, which is very similar looking size and model. And then you see their smaller Yassir, which is their ScanEagle knockoff, which is a smaller sort of hand-launched one. And so those provide kind of basic ISR. And at a certain point in the conflict, they shipped over the Shahed 129, which is a predator-sized armed drone.

It's their only known actual armed UAV, armed in the sense of having an air-to-ground missile, not armed in the sense of being a missile itself. Like the Ababil 2 variant we see in Yemen. The Shahed 129, when it was originally seen, I think it was seen first floating over East Ghouta. But when we saw it, it was not armed.

There were no visible munitions under its wings. And just talking to people who are sourced up with the Iranians, there were rumors that they were having a little bit of production with the munitions. It has the Sadid series. Of munitions. There's a guided missile and a smart bomb. And there were rumors that maybe the Sadiq was having a little bit of teething problems, but around about the the, after the Russians intervened and there was that big push on Aleppo, that's when we saw the first documented use of an Iranian drone firing an air to ground munition.

They released a video and it was sort of big news among the 10 people who follow this stuff. Yeah. But you know, they're using it very much the same way. Americans used armed drones in Iraq, in Syria, or excuse me. Oh yeah. I guess in Syria, Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan, the sense that, all right, here's close air support.

Here is you know let's find this little target here in the middle of the desert and track it. It's not you know, it's not the kind of asymmetric creative gee whiz stuff that we see. Smaller groups using Iranian technology in Israel and Yemen.

Aaron 24:13

Yeah, and I think that's important because when we were looking at it and I remember it, we were sitting in a coffee shop in Philadelphia and you were showing me You know, imagery, and you were looking at it to geolocate it, is like you were, we were able to sort of, it tracks with where we knew Iranians were either deployed with Syrian forces or operating independent of Syrian forces in what were big battles around that time.

And so you could put two and two together is that they were using these things to support offensives by their own allied forces on the ground.

Adam 24:48

Yeah. And the most recent stuff is that, okay, so we, you know You know, we've been goofing around with a little bit of geolocation of Iranian drone imagery because they're not always the best at censoring things. And so if you follow the, you know, imagery, the feature scene in the imagery, and if you follow sometimes the coordinates up there, it's very clear that, you know, you can watch it march forward.

North as the offensive towards aleppo to retake aleppo goes north and more recently you've been seeing them use out east in the desert near uncomfortably close to the united states as two unfortunate she had 129s who got smoked by the u.s coalition ended up learning So that, yeah, it, it generally tracks with the movement of Iranian proxy forces on the ground and the most recent stuff.

You know, they've been what happened was around that time in August ISIS overran an Iranian position there and ended up it's pretty nasty. They, they captured Mohsen Hajaji, I'm going to butcher that name, but he ended up getting beheaded by ISIS in a particularly graphic and nasty way, as they tend to do. And after that, he became kind of a cause celebre in Iran, and they released a lot of drone footage, sort of as, you know, this is our revenge for Mohsen for taking over this stuff.

And the The strikes were allegedly in support of the Sayyid al-Shuhada brigades and the Temiyun, the Temiyun being the Afghan Shia who the RGC sort of recruits and uses as basically cannon fodder to fight its war in Syria.

Aaron 26:56

Yeah. No, they're just there to defend the shrines.

Adam 27:00

They're not actually out there on the front. Armed tourism.

Aaron 27:05

They use these things. They recruit Afghan Shia with the promises of Iranian citizenship. But, oh, by the way, you have to go fight in Syria first.

Adam 27:12

Yeah. And, you know, that's that it once again shows is that I would be surprised if there was not some form of IRGC, you know, JTAC or equivalent on the ground directing these things. But the units on the ground that these strikes are happening in support of appear to be Iranian-backed militias, proxy groups.

Aaron 27:34

Yeah. And you see the same thing in Iraq. And Iraq is interesting, too, because you first got wind of this. It was the New York Times. It was the al-Rashid Air Base. And I remember you and I, when we got this, we started looking around for these things because it's always the question about range limitations and who's actually flying them on the ground from their little ground control stations.

Adam 27:56

Yeah, that's... You know, put a gun to my head and force me to make a bet. I, you know, I guess that it's, it's an IRGC soup to nuts operation. But you know, you can't tell who's got his hands in the back of those little those cramped little trucks that they use as ground control stations. But yeah, they first deployed them.

That was, that was a big thing. It was a political sign as well from Iran because after the fall of Mosul, all of a sudden Iran opened the floodgates and said, you know, Here's everything we got. We're here for you. Yada, yada. Screw the United States. One of the first things they did was send over Ababil 3s to do ISR northwest, northeast of Baghdad.

And every once in a while after that, we'd see these things crashing. They would show up in ISIS videos. Where ISIS would show off a crash top of BL-3. There were a few Mahajer-4s, even some of the esoteric sort of hipster, you probably don't know about this, drones, like the, they should have had one, two, three. But yeah, we saw a lot of Iranian hardware falling out of the sky in Iraq.

Aaron 29:11

Oh, I know the Shahed 123 quite well, because I think the Turk shot went down.

Adam 29:15

Yes. And the thing I should caveat that we're, you know, that's a notional designation. The thing with Iran that you have to realize is that their designations will drive you to suicide because it's the most, I mean, you know, every once in a while I complain about American defense industry and how complex and bureaucratic we can get.

But the Iranians basically have 50 names for weapons systems. And every time there's a new weapon system, they just there's no new name. They just, you know, rename it something else. So, like, you know, there's a bunch of different things called some org. There's a few different things called Rod. It can be very, very, very difficult to keep track of.

What things are actually called. But yeah, the Shahed 123 is the notional name for a small... It looks like a mini Shahed 129.

Aaron 30:05

Yeah, sometimes it has skis rather than wheels.

Adam 30:09

Yeah, it has skids on the bottom. I've heard it described as sort of a tech demonstrator for the Shahed 129. I'm not terribly sure how reliable that is, but that's an interesting... It certainly makes sense. But yeah, you've seen those, the 123s, they got shot down. One got shot down in Turkey. We saw one in flight in Syria.

And they've also gone down near the Pakistani border. That's a less well-reported, well-known area for Iranian drone operations is in Balochistan by the Pakistani border. They do a lot of sort of coiny stuff with their drones there.

Aaron 30:45

Yeah. Big picture, let's zoom out as we begin to wrap up here is that, you know, we've just spent 32 minutes talking about an Iranian drone program. No, it's great. I mean, because we talked about it because this was in the pictures that Haley put out. They use these things all the time. And a lot of people, you know, they want to make it scary.

And there is some scary stuff in here in how they're using them in Yemen. I think that's a demonstrator. But also how we think, you and I, that they conceptualize what drones are for.

Adam 31:23

Yeah. And I think what you're seeing in Yemen, I think, is sort of a sneak preview of how a US-Iran throwdown would go down in the Gulf is that I wouldn't be surprised if, God forbid, the US and Iran came to blows over some incident in the Gulf. It's a crowded waterway, lots of angry people in it.

I wouldn't be surprised at all to see the explosive drone boats, which is kind of funny. I always thought it's like we always complain about automation taking jobs. Now even suicide bombers aren't safe. But, yeah, I mean, in Yemen we've seen them doing sneaky things, hiding anti-ship cruise missiles and launching them at U.S. ships. We're seeing what I gather to be, at least from the DIA presentation and from what Jeff said, we're seeing them use ballistic missiles.

We're seeing them use drones as missiles. I think, you know, Yemen is probably closer to how they would conceptualize using drone and remote control technology at a throwdown with the United States, because in that case, you know, in Yemen, they're acting as the insurgent. In Syria, they're acting as the counterinsurgent. And just to me, I find they're at their most creative, they're at their most novel.

And I don't know whether to say they're at their most effective, but certainly at their most interesting when they're acting asymmetrically. And I would I think they've probably got a few more surprises up their sleeves in that regard.

Aaron 33:04

Yeah, and before we wrap up here, before we forget, they also showed off the Suicide Boat, which I know that you've been doing a lot of work on as well. Me less so, to be completely frank with the listeners, about this type of stuff that they're using in there and the implications of the Suicide Drone Boat.

Adam 33:20

So, yeah, in Yemen, they're using boats in the same way conceptually that they're using the Kassaf-1 in the sense that, you know, you take a vehicle, you add some remote controls to it, slap a warhead on it, and, you know, you're on your bike. There you go. And so it's called the Shark 33. Conflict government research got a look at it.

And obviously the DIA got a look at it because it showed up in Nikki Haley's Dog and Pony show. And the Conflict Armament Research Report is a little bit more cautious in its conclusions because the difference between the Conflict Armament Research Report on the WB, as they call it, the Waterborne IED, and the DIA one is that the DIA actually got access.

They exploited the computers found that controlled it. And if you look at the components, there are some Iranian components in there. There's a keyboard with Farsi writing on it. There's Iranian wiring. There's a pressure plate that was very similar to a pressure plate found on a seized Dow from Iran. But really, I mean, I was cracking up when I saw this.

The DIA did some forensics on the computer and found... Like, you know, so there's like a camera on this thing that they can use to sort of figure out where it's going and navigate it and drive it. And, you know, so that can plow into the right ship. And they they did a dive on the software and they found pictures of the damn thing being assembled.

So it's like some sleepy dude on like a Monday or something like that. You know and there's like an IRGC hat in the background. And they also pulled the previous GPS coordinates for where that thing had been. And there were obviously in the Red Sea, but there were also some coordinates in Iran. And the locations were consistent with the IRGC's location of the IRGC's Self-Sufficient Sea Jihad Organization, which does weapons development.

And I think, like, you know, as far as evidence goes that those parts are from Iran, I think the only thing better would be, like, you know, Supreme leader like artisanally cobbling a series of wooden fuzzy dice to put on the to put on the dashboard but yeah that's you know that's the interesting thing and you're starting to see i think the u.s pay attention to this kind of thing because after mosul you know we had that report from townsend who's now head of tradeok the former head of the u.s anti-islamic state coalition said wow we sort of got caught unprepared by the islamic state drone threats And we're starting to hear rumblings that, you know, the Defense Department is going to start spending big on counter UAS stuff and not just, you know, I've seen reporting saying they're not just interested in counter UAS stuff, but also just counter unmanned weapons, because it's not just not just drones that they have to contend with anymore.

It's also remotely operated boat IEDs, which, you know, if they're after the After the USS Cole experience in 2000, I imagine the Navy's probably paying close attention to that kind of threat. Obviously, as I said before, the chances that you would see this kind of stuff used in a U.S.-Iran conflict in the Gulf are probably pretty high.

So it's an interesting sort of new threatscape. It's not just unmanned aerial vehicles we have to worry about being turned into bombs, but Unmanned vehicles generally. And we're also seeing, you know, ISIS had sort of a little, you know, 1945 here at the Wonder Wafa propaganda blitz as Mosul was falling. And they showed off. And they look super duper crappy, but they were little tiny remote controlled landmines, pretty much.

Little tracked vehicles carrying anti-tank mines.

Aaron 37:37

Yeah. Thing that we've talked about a lot is that you're seeing both funding and appropriation for these type of threats coming through particularly and also through centcom as well is that clearly people are starting to pay attention to this and to start thinking through how to defend u.s forces from this i guess on this bevy of unmanned systems even if they are crappy and yeah and it's you know i would i would also add that it's

Adam 38:06

There's at least a small chance that this is not just a Middle Eastern phenomenon. You remember that the North Koreans got a drone over the THAAD deployment in South Korea. And it appears the thing ended up crashing on the way back. But, you know, it appears that the goal of that thing was to just take pictures. But, you know, in theory, it could have been carrying a warhead.

Aaron 38:28

Yeah, yeah, you know, and we have talked about that too. I mean, it's just, it's something that happens in proliferation where, you know, I mean, the focus of this podcast is usually on nuclear and missiles, but at the lower level in, you know, small arms, light weapons, and even in, let's call them janky innovations on relatively... Relatively easy to produce things like an Ababil 3 or something along those lines, a creative adversary using them creatively.

Adam 38:59

Yeah, I mean, this is what's always fascinating to me is that, you know, the United States is obviously the leader in unmanned technology, but it's always fascinating how that technology trickles down to smaller actors and how they use it in ways that, you know, the people who originally developed and maybe even proliferated it would not normally anticipate.

Is that, you know, I guarantee you a few years ago, the idea of tiny little quad rotors that you can buy at the Apple store, dropping 40 millimeter grenades down your tank hatch was not something that they were, that was a front burner issue. And now, you know, you, you, that was a obviously it was not, not enough to save the Islamic state, but you know, that was, that was a real genuine pain in the ass for them to deal with.

Yeah. And it's fascinating to see small actors adopt technology that is not necessarily their own, but using it in ways that even the developers would not anticipate to basically make a bunch of poor man's missiles.

Aaron 40:06

I'm going to end this on a positive note. Do you know what it is? I don't know. You are a true Philadelphian. And you are recording this podcast from none other than a Wawa parking lot. Yeah, this podcast is brought to you by the letter W. And I have a transplant. Can you explain to me why you love Wawa?

Adam 40:31

I mean, can you explain to me why you love a sunset? Can you explain to me what a symphony makes you feel? It's like trying to explain color to a blind man. It's an experience. You just have to enjoy it yourself. That's right.

Jeffrey Lewis 40:50

Aaron Maeda is going to hate this episode.

Aaron 40:53

That guy.

Adam 40:54

Keep that in. They're friends, so we can keep it.

Aaron 41:00

Yeah, and as we round out here, Adam made a mistake.

[Sponsor message]

Hey, Scott, with that said, how are things going over in the Slack channel?

Jeffrey 41:35

The Slack channel is good. And if part of your New Year's resolution is to join an awesome group of people discussing arms control wonk related things, for $3 a month if you're a student or $5 a month if you're a regular human being, you too can join the arms control wonk community. If you head over to patreon.com slash acwpodcast.

Again, that's patreon.com slash acwpodcast.

Aaron 41:59

Hey, Adam. Hey. Thanks for joining me. Thank you. And everybody, thanks for listening.