Iran Builds Thousands Of "Suicide Drones."

Iran’s arms industry is growing rapidly, turning the country into a large-scale exporter of low-cost, high-tech weapons whose clients are vexing the U.S. and its partners in the Middle East, Ukraine and beyond.

One of Iran’s top arms exports, a Shahed suicide drone, designed to carry explosives and crash into its target, was used to kill three American servicemembers in Jordan in an attack by an Iraqi militia group on Jan. 28, U.S. officials said.

Iran’s suicide drones gained international prominence in 2019 when Saudi Arabia said Iran or one of its militia allies was behind a complex missile-and-drone attack on Saudi oil facilities, accusations that Iran denied. By 2021, defense officials in the U.S., Europe and Israel were warning that Tehran’s rapidly developing ability to build and deploy drones was changing the security equation in the Middle East.

But Iran’s suicide drones at the time were often made with widely available components used in the commercial drone market and by hobbyists. In 2021, the Houthis were firing 30 Iranian drones a month on average, according to the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

“By exporting these technologies and proving their efficacy in battle, Iran has likely changed the nature of asymmetric warfare forever, potentially giving substantial leverage to previously disadvantaged nonstate actors,” said Adam Rousselle , a researcher at the Militant Wire, a network of experts that examines weapons used by nonstate actors. “The consequences…could be disastrous for major powers around the world.”

“Iran faces no restrictions or prohibitions on the purchase and sale of weapons” under international law and United Nations Security Council resolutions, the Iranian mission said. Restrictions on Iran’s weapons trade, while lifted by the U.N. last year, have been maintained by the U.S. and the European Union.