Iran's 800-Foot Drone Carrier Was A Huge Waste Of Time, Money And Sailors
Drones should spread out on land instead of crowding onto a single vulnerable ship
After four years of wider war, Ukraine is on the cutting edge of drone tactics and technology
Ukrainian forces learned to spread out their drone teams on land and keep them moving in order to dodge Russian attacks
That’s a lesson Iranian naval forces should have internalized, but didn’t
Now an 800-foot Iranian drone carrier is on fire following U.S. strikes
Iran made a critical error when it converted an 800-foot commercial container ship into a do-it-yourself aircraft carrier optimized for launching drones. As Ukraine has learned the hard way in 49 months of hard fighting, drones work best when they’re spread out, not concentrated on a single easy-to-track, easy-to-sink ship.
It’s not that Iran doesn’t also distribute many of its drones, including Shahed attack models, in small launch teams across the 1.65 million square km expanse of Iran. It does. But Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps Navy wasted years of effort, millions of dollars and probably the lives of many sailors when it converted that container ship into the carrier IRIS Shahid Bagheri starting around 2022.
On March 5, the sixth day of the U.S.- and Israeli-led air war on Iran, U.S. forces found Shahid Bagheri and hit her with several munitions. “U.S. forces aren’t holding back on the mission to sink the entire Iranian navy,” U.S. Central Command stated. “Today, an Iranian drone carrier, roughly the size of a [World War II] aircraft carrier, was struck and is now on fire.”
