Where Is India's Shahed?

The United States is now striking Iran with a weapon that is modelled on a system Iran originally developed itself. Last week, America debuted its LUCAS kamikaze drones, or the Low-cost Unmanned Combat Attack System, during Operation Epic Fury, the ongoing joint US-Israeli operation against Iran.

LUCAS is modelled on the Shahed-136, Iran's cheap, expendable, delta-wing one-way attack drone that has altered the cost calculus of air warfare. The US military reverse-engineered a captured Shahed, worked with American defence startups, and produced a clone at roughly $35,000 a unit.

Kamikaze drones, also called loitering munitions or one-way attack drones, are essentially guided munitions with wings. They fly to a target area, loiter if needed, then dive into the target and detonate. Unlike conventional drones, they don't come back. Think of them as cruise missiles that cost a fraction of the price and can, because of their low cost and low sophistication, be fielded in the hundreds or thousands.

The Russia-Ukraine war turned this concept into the defining weapon of modern conflict. Ukraine demonstrated that swarms of cheap drones could neutralise tanks, artillery, command posts, and supply lines. The lesson was stark. In a prolonged conflict, the side that can produce and expend more cheap precision-strike platforms faster wins. Expensive, exquisite systems run out. Affordable mass endures.

No weapon embodies this logic better than Iran's Shahed-136.

Powered by a 50-horsepower engine, with a range of 2,000 kilometres and a 40-kilogram warhead, the Shahed is not sophisticated. It navigates using inertial guidance and GPS to hit pre-programmed targets.

What makes it fearsome is its economics. Each unit costs an estimated $20,000 to $50,000, a rounding error compared to a cruise missile. Iran has also kept iterating on the original platform, improving it considerably over the last few years. The newer Shahed-238 adds jet propulsion and radar-guided seekers, evolving from a dumb munition toward increasingly dynamic targeting.

It proved so potent that even Russia purchased thousands Shaheed drones for use in Ukraine and now manufactures its own variant, the Geran-2.

Even a major military power with its own defence-industrial complex chose to license and copy Iran's design rather than reinvent the wheel.

India, meanwhile, has been doing something quite different.

During Operation Sindoor in May 2025, India deployed loitering munitions in significant numbers. The IAI Harop, bought from Israel, was used extensively to neutralise Pakistani air defence systems, including radars, surface-to-air missile batteries, Chinese-origin HQ-9 and HQ-16 systems. By all accounts, the Harop performed well, striking targets across the depth of Pakistan, from Karachi to Rawalpindi.

But the Harop is a prohibitively expensive, imported system. Made by Israel Aerospace Industries, it is designed primarily as a SEAD/DEAD weapon or SuppressionDestruction of Enemy Air Defences. It is engineered to home in on radio-frequency emissions from enemy radar. And it is undoubtedly effective. It is also not something India can buy in the thousands, or expend freely in a sustained conflict.

This is the affordable mass problem. India demonstrated it can wage precision non-contact warfare for a brief, intense burst. It has not built the capacity for sustained non-contact warfare of the kind now unfolding in the Middle East, where Iran fires wave after wave of Shaheds because they can be built at scale. India's long-range loitering munitions, by contrast, are imported, finite, and irreplaceable at speed.

As journalist Sandeep Unnithan has pointed out, India is perhaps the only large country without a plan to produce kamikaze drones at scale. The US, Russia and Iran have already deployed their long-range kamikaze drones. Turkey has its own ecosystem. China is mass-producing loitering munitions including the CH-901. Even Pakistan now fields Turkish-origin YIHA-III kamikaze drones built with cheap commercial components.

Ironically, India, the country that hasn't stopped talking about precision strike and non-contact warfare since Operation Sindoor, has no Shaheed equivalent or a long-range, expendable Kamikaze drones that can be built in large numbers.

India does have homegrown short-range Kahamaze drone options. For instance, the Nagastra-1, developed by Solar Industries, is a promising indigenous loitering munition, that was put to good use during Operation Sindoor. But even the proven Nagastra-1 has not been ordered in large numbers when Ukraine has used tens of thousands of such drones in conflict in the last year alone.

India is ordering in the hundreds, at volumes where manufacturers cannot justify investing in production lines that would bring costs down and output up.

Meanwhile, India signed a $3.5 billion deal for 31 MQ-9B Predator drones, high-end platforms that won't arrive until 2029. At Shahed economics, that sum could theoretically fund over 70,000 expendable strike drones.

The point is not that India shouldn't buy MQ-9Bs. It must have capable surveillance and reconnaissance platforms. The point is that it is investing heavily at the high end while the low-end, high-volume capability that determines who can keep fighting after the first week of attrition in any sustained conflict barely exists on paper.

This asymmetry risks leaving Indian forces vulnerable in scenarios requiring drone saturation or rapid replenishment after losses. A truly layered approach of combining elite, long-endurance platforms like the MQ-9B with a robust, mass-producible low-end systems would better align with contemporary battlefield realities, where quantity and adaptability often prove decisive over individual platform superiority.