A little off subject but someone please tell me how the Iranians had drone technology that we didn’t have and according to what I have heard we had to reverse engineer that tech and use it against the Iranians. Tech so good the Iranians were supplying that tech to the Russians. Something just doesn’t add up.
We have the technology and have had for some time. It’s not that sophisticated. We never had the interest until now of weaponizing it. The Russo-Ukraine War showed we were missing something. Also are defense industry probably wasn’t that interested in pushing it. Why? I guess maybe less profit per unit produced. Why copy the Iranian one. If it does the job why not? Better then 5-10 year development.
I'm wondering why people think drones are so special. They aren't. We've had them a long time, and ours are effective. Autonomous drones would be something new; but, Iran doesn't have those. So, we are back to small aircraft with radio controls. Radio controls can be intercepted, studied, duplicated, and then overpowered with a stronger transmitter.
The United States is profoundly ahead of everybody in electronic warfare. The drones are susceptible to that sort of penetration.
Iran sells the to Russia because Russia is behind even Iran in technology.
What happened was that we were mostly using large drones and foreign countries like Ukraine and Iran were using cheap and small drones. Techs india helped get hardware/software components scaled down to work with the smaller drones.
Due to low density of population in large areas of many foreign nations, drone abilities have been developed and proven for years. Hobby, Medical Aid, Medical Supplies, and Food are often delivered by drones of various types (quadcopters/winged craft). They can be programmed , launched, and then the craft does the rest.
Heck, you can buy a drone from TEMU that uses GPS, programmed flight mapping, can Deliver or pickup a package, has collision avoidance radar, hover, .face recognition,follow, and circle programs for $50.