Laura Coates is a sharp interviewer. The kind who does her homework, listens for the thread you’re pulling, and follows it somewhere you didn’t expect. Going on CNN at 11pm to discuss drone warfare, Ukrainian interceptors, and whether the U.S. has its act together on counter-UAS strategy is not the kind of segment you wing.
So I didn’t.
You can watch the video at the top, and what follows below are my actual show notes: the framework I built before walking into that studio.
Some of it made air. Some of it didn’t, because television being television, you get about forty-five seconds to explain something that deserves forty-five minutes. I’m posting the full version here because you deserve to see how a defense writer prepares for national television when the subject is a live shooting war.
Fun fact: Several CNN producers thought my background was fake. Nope. I really do have 10,000 books. I’ve been accumulating books since I was a kid, plus some of my YouTube viewers mail me books because they know I’m a reader. SEND MORE!
Wes’s Show Notes and Prep:
Topic One: What the Shahed Actually Is
Drone warfare isn’t new. The U.S. military has had Predator and Reaper drones for most of the Global War on Terror. But what we’re watching now is two distinct evolutions happening simultaneously, and conflating them produces confusion.
Ukraine essentially invented tactical ground-level drone warfare using FPV drones and small quadcopters: cheap, fast, lethal at close range, flown by operators with first-person camera feeds like a video game that ends badly for someone. That innovation changed land warfare in ways that military doctrine is still catching up to.
The Iranian Shahed is a completely different animal. It’s not a tactical drone. It’s a slow, cheap, dumb cruise missile with wings.
The Shahed-136 is a delta-wing, one-way attack drone. No pilot. No return trip. No recovery plan. It costs Iran roughly $50,000 to manufacture, flies low and slow to avoid radar, navigates via GPS or inertial guidance, and detonates on impact. Its genius is economic, not technical. For every dollar Iran spends building a Shahed, it costs the UAE approximately $20 to $28 to intercept it.
Iran doesn’t need to win every exchange. It just needs to keep the exchange rate favorable until the other side runs out of interceptors or political will, whichever comes first.
I described it to Laura as the artillery barrage of the 21st century. You don’t aim artillery to hit every target with precision. You aim it to suppress, exhaust, and force the enemy to keep their heads down. Iran is doing the same thing from the air, for $50,000 a round. In the first five days of the conflict, Iran launched over 800 missiles and more than 1,400 attack drones at UAE, Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan. Six American service members died in Kuwait in the opening hours.
Trump administration officials acknowledged to lawmakers in a closed-door briefing, reported by CNN, that U.S. air defenses cannot intercept them all. Radar systems optimized for fast-moving ballistic missiles struggle with a drone cruising at the speed of a small propeller aircraft, fifty feet off the ground. That is not a failure of technology. It is a mismatch of doctrine. The system was built for a different threat.
The American answer to all of this is LUCAS: Low-Cost Unmanned Combat Attack System, built by SpektreWorks in Arizona. It is, without diplomatic softening, a reverse-engineered Shahed. The Pentagon captured a damaged Iranian drone, handed it to SpektreWorks, and said: build us a better version. Eighteen months later, LUCAS flew its first combat mission over Iran. Some variants are equipped with Starshield, SpaceX’s military-grade satellite communications network, which makes them significantly harder to jam than GPS-guided systems. Multiple LUCAS drones can communicate with each other in flight and coordinate simultaneous strikes without a human managing each one individually.
The statistic I came prepared to drop.
One in every three Russian aerial targets destroyed over Ukraine is now brought down not by a missile or a gun, but by an interceptor drone costing less than a used car. Over Kyiv in February alone, more than 70 percent of incoming Shaheds were downed by interceptor drones. Shooting down one Shahed with an interceptor costs over 25 times less than using a Western air defense missile.
Ukraine is now the world’s foremost expert on destroying Iranian drones, because Russia gave them no choice. Since fall 2022, Ukraine has faced the same Shahed now hitting Gulf states, and built interceptors costing as little as $2,000 to take them down. The Gulf states are burning through Patriot interceptors at millions of dollars per shot against a $50,000 drone. That math is not sustainable. Zelensky knows it. Washington finally knows it. The Gulf states are learning it in real time.
Ukraine produced 100,000 interceptor drones in the past year alone, ramping to 1,500 FPV-based interceptors per day as of January 2026. More than 20 Ukrainian companies are working in this field. The Gulf states are not being asked to trust a prototype. They are being offered access to a mature, scaled, combat-proven industrial ecosystem stress-tested against 57,000 Iranian-designed drones over four years.
That is institutional knowledge you cannot manufacture overnight in a Pentagon conference room.
Topic Two: Is the U.S. Lacking in Drone Strategy?
This was the question I was most prepared for, and the one that required the most careful framing, because the honest answer is more complicated than either “yes, we’re hopelessly behind” or “no, America is fine, relax.”
The U.S. is not lacking in drone capability. Patriot, THAAD, and Aegis are performing. LUCAS just had its combat debut. The technology works.
What the U.S. is lacking is drone doctrine, procurement speed, and cost-per-kill discipline. Those are three different problems and collapsing them into one produces bad analysis.
The cost-per-kill problem is the most immediate. Firing a Patriot interceptor worth over a million dollars to destroy a $50,000 drone is not a sustainable exchange rate at scale. The U.S. has known this for years. Ukraine solved it out of necessity. The question Laura pushed me on, and it is the right question, is why the U.S. is still learning this lesson the hard way in 2026 when it had a front-row seat to Ukraine’s four-year laboratory.
My honest veteran answer: the Pentagon procurement system is structurally incapable of moving at the speed this threat requires. Ukraine built $2,000 interceptors because it had no other choice. The U.S. has always had the option of spending more. That option is now meeting its limit, and the people paying for that institutional slowness are service members in the Gulf.
LUCAS represents the inflection point. The Drone Dominance Program, the $1 billion investment in low-cost attritable systems, and now the Ukraine knowledge transfer all signal that the Pentagon has finally internalized the lesson. Whether it internalized it fast enough is a question that is being answered right now in Kuwait and Bahrain by people wearing American uniforms.
The Questions I Was Ready For That Didn’t Come
Television moves fast and topics get compressed, so a few things I was fully prepared to discuss didn’t make the segment. For the record:
On whether helping the Gulf hurts Ukraine: Zelensky was explicit that aid cannot weaken Ukraine’s own defenses, and the interceptor drone technology is something Ukraine now produces at scale. Sharing expertise costs Kyiv very little while building the diplomatic goodwill Ukraine will need when this war eventually ends and reconstruction begins.
On whether this is appropriate while Ukraine is still at war: This is exactly what a mature military partner does. Ukraine is not a charity case asking for handouts anymore. It is a credible military force being asked for help by the world’s most powerful nations. Britain deployed Ukrainian drone specialists to the Gulf alongside British forces. That is a fundamental shift in Ukraine’s global standing, and it happened in a week.
On the broader Iran picture: The Shahed is a cheap, asymmetric weapon designed to do exactly what it’s doing: force expensive responses, saturate defenses, and inflict psychological and economic costs over time. The sooner Ukraine’s counter-playbook transfers to Gulf partners, the faster Iran loses its most effective tool. That is not just good for the Gulf. It degrades the same weapon Russia has been using against Ukrainian cities for four years.
The Line I Came to Deliver
I prepared a closing line for if Laura gave me the floor at the end, and I got to use it.
Russia handed Iran’s drone playbook to the world and called it warfare. Ukraine read every page of it, rewrote the counter-playbook under fire, and is now offering it to our allies. That’s Ukraine earning its seat at the table of serious military powers.
END
The interview was everything I hoped it would be. Laura Coates is the real deal. And if CNN calls again, I’ll be ready. On a technical note, next time I’ll broadcast from my YouTube ‘Studio A’ with my good camera and audio, and not from my workstation with my shitty webcam.
Glory to Ukraine. Glory to the heroes. Crimea is Ukraine.
