Before the US conflict with Iran and Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, cheap strike drones were used to attack energy targets in the Middle East, setting the stage for a new type of warfare.
NATO, however, ignored the warning signs, a top alliance commander told Business Insider. Now, it’s scrambling to catch up to rapidly changing modern combat tactics.
Inexpensive loitering munitions — or one-way attack drones — are being used in large-scale strikes at low cost by Russia against Ukraine and Iran against the US and its allies in the Middle East. NATO is only just starting to wake up to the threat.
Adm. Pierre Vandier, Supreme Allied Commander Transformation of NATO, who oversees modernization efforts, recalled in a recent interview the first time Saudi Arabia was struck by Iranian-designed Shahed one-way attack drones in 2019. They struck Aramco oil processing facilities at Abqaiq and Khurais.
Iran and its regional proxies used Shaheds for sporadic Middle East attacks in the aftermath. Then, in 2022, Russia began launching them at Ukrainian cities and infrastructure, eventually scaling up to hundreds of drones in a single night as the war dragged on.
And, in recent weeks, Iran has launched thousands of Shaheds at the Gulf states in response to the US-Israeli bombing campaign.
Vandier said the Saudi Arabia strikes were a warning call; however, NATO has done little since then to prepare for massive attacks involving cheap attack drones. Allies have ordered more multimillion-dollar surface-to-air missiles, but these are cost-inefficient against a $50,000 Shahed.
The only country with mass-produced solutions against the Shaheds is Ukraine, Vandier said, warning that NATO will feel pain if it doesn’t address this question with urgency.
Stringer/Anadolu via Getty Images
Pushing the limits
NATO has been increasingly involved in joint efforts with Ukraine to find low-cost defenses against some of the war’s most dangerous threats, including Shaheds.
NATO and Ukraine launched a new initiative in February 2025 called the Joint Analysis Training and Education Centre, or JATEC, focused on using real-time lessons from the war to inform alliance defense planning, and one of the first projects was the development of cheap, quick-turn air defenses.
JATEC is one of several ways that NATO is leveraging Ukraine’s battlefield experience to prepare for war. Kyiv has also joined allies in various exercises, sometimes role-playing as the enemy force to test alliance capabilities.
“Ukraine has helped us to push the limits,” Vandier said, something to which NATO has not been accustomed, “because we had a supposed superiority.”
“We thought that our warfighting was the best in the world. That’s the reason why we trained Ukraine,” he said. Four years of watching Ukraine fight back against Russia have changed NATO’s approach — the alliance now feels that it needs Kyiv’s help to prepare for evolving modern warfare.
Vandier said that “the bad news for Russia is that we have an exquisite, up-to-date experience from combat, which is coming from Ukraine.” Moscow has also learned from the war, making it a potentially more dangerous foe.
Ukraine’s expertise is being felt far beyond NATO as well. It sent more than 200 counter-drone specialists to a handful of Middle East nations to help them defend against Iranian drone attacks in one of the most pointed examples of how Kyiv has emerged as a leader in modern warfare.
NATO officials acknowledge that Kyiv has a lot to teach the alliance — from technology-enabled, affordable mass production to deep-strike drone operations.
“We need to find something new,” Vandier said. “And this ‘new’ has been invented by Ukraine. So we need to bring that into our arsenal.”
