From printing drones to looking at lasers. 300 reports have revealed that Iran’s battle manual has one name: Ukraine

Barely a year after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, groups of volunteers began to assemble drones fighting in improvised workshops using parts purchased online and open manuals, managing to put operating systems on the air in a matter of days. The scene, closer to a technological garage than a military factory, reflected the extent to which modern warfare was about to change without making almost noise.

Ukraine as a war manual. I told it a few hours ago in exclusive to the Financial Times. The war in Ukraine has become a central reference for Iranian military thinking, to the point that much of its current doctrine is being built on what is happening there. That has now been known through more than 300 reports prepared in military centers that analyze everything from industrial production in conflict to tactical adaptation in the face of a superior enemy.

This effort is not theoretical, but applied: there is great number of manualstraining and planning that have been updated to incorporate direct lessons from the battlefield in a process that reveals a clear idea, that the future of war is already written in Ukraine and that, possibly, those who do not study it will be late.

From cheap drones to doctrine. One of the most decisive learnings we have been counting these years: the role of low cost dronescapable of changing the balance of forces with a completely different logic from the traditional one, where volume and price weigh as much as precision.

Iran has understood that cheap systems, produced even with commercial components and accessible techniques such as 3D printing, can overwhelm advanced defenses and exploit structural weaknesses of technologically superior armies, replicating a model that has already proven effective in both Ukraine and in their own confrontations recent.

The problem of the West. Not only that. The expansion of these drones has exposed a critical gap in Western defenses, designed to intercept expensive and sophisticated threatsbut not massive waves of cheap systems, which has generated an obvious economic imbalance.

While a drone can cost tens of thousands of dollars, intercepting it is the opposite and can involve missiles in the equation. extremely more expensivecreating financial and logistical wear and tear that has already become visible in recent conflicts, where spending skyrockets and arsenals begin to become dangerously strained.

Beyond the present: AI and emerging weapons. Featured in an interactive special The New York Times that, however, Iranian learning has not stopped in the immediate present, but rather projects the conflict into the future, incorporating into its planning technologies such as artificial intelligence, cyber warfare or even emerging systems such as directed energy weapons.

The own internal analysis They point to the need to integrate these advances in decision making, weapons guidance and combat management, in a transition that seeks not only to adapt, but to anticipate the next phase of the technological conflict.

An evolving doctrine. There is no doubt, this change is also doctrinal, with a commitment to more units agile, decentralized and capable to operate with greater autonomy, inspired by the way in which Ukraine has managed to resist and adapt to a more powerful adversary such as Russia.

If you like, what the combination of operational flexibility and accessible technology is doing is redefining the concept of superiority military, moving it away from large platforms and towards distributed and resilient systems that can evolve quickly, and there the massive use of FPV drones appears with its own name.

From Ukraine to Iran. Ultimately, all of this results in a profound transformation in the way in which Iran conceives warone where Ukraine acts as a real reference manual of battle that guides from the manufacture of cheap drones to the ambition of integrating artificial intelligence and more advanced systems such as lasers.

From that perspective, it is not just about copying each Ukrainian step, but about adapting, scaling and combining solutions to build our own strategy that turns kyiv’s experience into future advantage, in a scenario where we are already seeing that rapid innovation and low cost can outweigh the most sophisticated technology from the United States.

Image | RawPixelWild Hornets

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