By Seevali Abeysekera

The Cold War between America and the Soviet Union existed in an era where their joint strategies were to show each other the enormous destructive capabilities of their respective arsenal of weapons, which in turn acted as the ultimate deterrent to both sides.

Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) was the phrase used to showcase this doomsday scenario where both sides could literally destroy each other and, by default, most of humanity.

The amounts of expenditure required for this policy of building up an arsenal of weapons bigger and better than the other consumed most of their respective defence budgets.

That was until Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, and within a few months, a new type of weapon became commonplace on the battlefield.

The era of drone warfare had begun.

Initially, high altitude Turkish attack drones capable of firing missiles were used by Ukraine with great success, particularly against Russian ground armour, but these drones were both relatively expensive and vulnerable due to their slow speeds. They were essentially remote-controlled, slow-moving aircraft which returned to base after their missions.

A revolutionary concept in the modern battlefield

Enter the Shahed 136, a $20,000, very small Iranian Kamikaze one-way attack drone. An indigenous and ingenious Iranian drone, a revolutionary concept on the modern battlefield, that costs less than a second-hand car to manufacture.

Thus, from a military expenditure standpoint, where typical manufacturing of effective offensive weaponry is costed at millions of USD per unit, the Shahed 136 is an incredibly cheap, non-resource-intensive, non-labour-intensive, non-high-tech unit that can be manufactured quickly and in mass.

If one does the missile maths in terms of the production of cheap drones versus the cost of interceptor missiles and delivery systems required to destroy these drones, the doctrine known as asymmetric warfare makes complete sense.

The Shahed 136 is not only cheap to manufacture and thus mass-produced in their hundreds per day, but also made from materials such as balsa wood, which reflects radar waves better than........

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