After just three days of conflict, the Iran war has become a conflict. Waves of drone attacks by the Islamic Republic are straining the security of the United States and its partners from Bahrain to the United Arab Emirates, depleting weapons stockpiles. The outcome of the battle may depend on which side runs out of ammunition first.
Shaheed-136 single-attack drones, carrying small, rudimentary cruise missiles, continued to hit targets across the Middle East on Monday. Drones have targeted US bases, oil infrastructure and civilian buildings in recent days, as US and Israeli airstrikes on Iran – a barrage of cruise missiles, drones and precision-guided bombs – began on Saturday.
According to the UAE, US-made Patriot air-defense missiles have been largely successful in intercepting Iranian Shahid and other ballistic missiles, with an interception rate of more than 90%. But using $4 million of missiles to destroy a $20,000 drone reflects a problem that has plagued Western military planners since the beginning of the Ukraine war: Cheap weapons can swallow up resources meant for more complex threats.
The result is that both Iran and America may run out of weapons within a few days or weeks. Whoever can last longer will gain a serious advantage.
Iran’s regional proxies were severely weakened by the war in Gaza and its missile capabilities were damaged by Israeli-US strikes earlier in the 12-day war in June. Iran’s emphasis since then has been on increasing its warnings about the consequences and costs of Trump’s attack, knowing that his supporters are largely opposed to drawn-out, dirty wars. Iran’s supreme leader Ali Khamenei – who died in Saturday’s air strikes – warned that the US attack would spark wider conflict across the region.
“The attrition strategy makes operational sense from Iran’s perspective,” said Kelly Grieco, a senior fellow at the Stimson Center think-tank. “They are calculating that the defenders will eliminate their interceptors and that the political will of the Gulf states will break and put pressure on the US and Israel to cease operations before they run out of missiles and drones.”
Qatar’s stock of Patriot interceptor missiles will last four days at the current rate of usage, according to an internal analysis seen by Bloomberg News. Doha is privately urging an early end to the conflict.
Following last year’s conflict with Israel, it was estimated that Iran had about 2,000 ballistic missiles. This would likely entail a very large number of Martyrs, which Russia, the other main producer, is capable of producing at a rate of several hundred per day, according to analysis by Becca Wasser, head of defense at Bloomberg Economics.
Tehran has fired more than 1,200 projectiles since the start of this year’s conflict, killing many – perhaps most – of them. This suggests they can save more damaging ballistic missiles for sustained attacks, Wasser said.
According to Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi, Iran’s military is apparently acting without close or consistent coordination with the civilian leadership, including the Foreign Ministry.
“Our military units are now really independent and somehow isolated and they are acting based on instructions, general instructions that were given to them in advance,” Araghchi, a veteran of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, said in an interview with Al Jazeera on Sunday.
On the U.S. side, Wasser said, attack planners are unlikely to carry enough weapons to continue in the region for four weeks, as President Donald Trump has estimated.
US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said at a press conference on Monday: “This is not Iraq, this is not endless.”
Defensively, Iran has little left to fight. Air attacks in the early hours of the war hit its surface-to-air batteries, the most modern of which were Russian-made S-300s. Since then US and Israeli fighters have been operating in Iranian airspace without any reported difficulties.
The US and its regional partners primarily use Lockheed Martin Corp Patriot air-defense systems that fire PAC-3 missiles. Although the Pentagon has pushed to increase production, only about 600 PAC-3 missiles will be built in 2025, according to Lockheed. Depending on how many missiles and drones are reported shot down, thousands of interceptors are likely to have been fired over the Middle East since Saturday.
Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates also operate THAAD, a Lockheed system designed to shoot down more advanced, faster-moving missiles at the edges of the atmosphere. These are unlikely to be used against anything else, and are even more expensive, about $12 million per missile.
The US has also used fighter jet patrols using Advanced Precision Kill Weapon System missiles, which cost $20,000 to $30,000 in addition to the operating costs of each jet.
Purpose-built anti-drone defenses are less common in the region. Using lasers, automatic cannons or even other drones to protect towns, cities and installations could be a cheap way to save expensive systems for bigger problems.
The Iron Beam laser developed by Israeli defense company Rafael Advanced Defense Systems is meant to address this issue, but the Israel Defense Forces said on Monday that it has not yet been used in conflict.
If the current intensity of Iranian attacks continues, PAC-3 stockpiles in the region could become dangerously low within days, according to a person familiar with the matter, who asked not to be identified discussing sensitive details. If offensive weapons are also used, a standoff may occur.
“Meanwhile, Iran’s inventory of missiles and drones may be depleted and the regime may be able to sustain itself in the event of chaos,” said Ankit Panda, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “This appears to be the likely outcome based on the first 60 hours of this war.”