How the Shahed Navigates and How Ukraine Can Shut the Door in Its Face

Despite recent Russian upgrades, most Shaheds are dumb. And that actually makes them harder to jam.

AFU

Ah, the Shahed drone. Arguably the most important invention of 2014. We just didn’t realize it at the time.

Iran couldn’t have known that by 2025, nearly every modern military, including their oldest enemies, would be rushing to duplicate the delta wing monstrosity.

For a writer and YouTuber who covers cutting edge military technology, imagine my surprise that one of the most consequential weapons of this war would be a flying go-cart with the brain of a calculator and the persistence of a drunk raccoon trying to find your Thai food leftovers in the trash can.

It’s now Russia’s favorite loitering munition, mass-produced by Iran, mass-produced by Moscow, and sent westward like a passive-aggressive postcard that explodes.

It’s not smart. It’s not fast. But it is frustratingly effective. And that’s because it doesn’t need to be brilliant when persistent and cheap will do.

Let’s unpack how this $20,000 flying appliance knows where to go, why GPS jamming alone won’t stop it anymore, and how Ukraine’s defenders can break its brain mid-flight.

The Shahed’s Navigation Playbook

The Shahed isn’t a seeker, it’s a mailman with a grudge and bad breath. It doesn’t scan terrain, adapt to threats, or engage in dynamic rerouting. It doesn’t even bother with real-time targeting.

The entire plan is hardcoded before launch, like a 1990s MapQuest printout taped to your grandpa’s steering wheel. Someone in occupied territory keys in the coordinates, uploads the route, and the drone flies that route like a Branch Davidian cultist on autopilot.

The navigation logic is simple.

Routes are designed to avoid known Ukrainian radar coverage, skirt air defense umbrellas, and thread the needle between urban centers. That’s why you often see them coming in low and slow through rural corridors, hugging terrain, or even flying along highways.

Their guidance is crude, but their routes are handcrafted by humans.

That pre-planning also creates a vulnerability: if defenders can spot a pattern like launch times, ingress angles, altitude profiles, they can build predictive kill zones. But the flip side is this: Russia doesn’t need perfect accuracy to hit a substation or a grain silo. If the drone gets within 20 meters of the aimpoint, it’s done its job. Precision is optional when your warhead is built for general mayhem.

Once it’s airborne, the Shahed isn’t taking any more terrestrial calls; it has no uplink, no real-time control, and no human whispering sweet nothings into its circuit board. But it’s got GPS, inertial backup, a magnetic compass, and just enough stubbornness to punch through a jamming zone and still remember its way to the target. Unfortunately, that makes it immune to certain types of interference, but also incapable of adapting. If you throw a curveball mid-flight, it won’t dodge. It’ll just keep going, like a wind-up toy someone forgot to turn off.

And that simplicity is part of its design philosophy: cheap to build, cheap to fly, mildly expensive to stop. You don’t need cutting-edge autonomy when you can launch ten for the price of one interceptor. You just need them to get close.

Inertial Navigation: Flying Blind, But Confident