Reference News Network, March 20 report: According to the Japan Daily News website's March 16 report, the United States and Iran have clashed in the Middle East, and the U.S. military has used a large number of expensive "Patriot" intercept missiles, which has sparked widespread attention within the United States. In response to Iran's low-cost drone attacks, the U.S. military uses "Patriot" missiles for interception, which is inefficient in terms of cost-effectiveness. For this reason, the U.S. military is currently accelerating the deployment of drones.

The report states that according to Bloomberg on March 10, after the outbreak of this conflict, Iran has launched more than 2,100 drone sorties and at least 680 ballistic missiles. The U.S. military and its Gulf allies have intercepted more than 1,000 "Patriot" missiles.

The "Shahed" series of drones deployed by Iran are suicide attack drones, with an estimated single-unit cost of about $20,000. In comparison, a single "Patriot" missile costs about $4 million, which is 200 times the cost of the Shahed series drones.

The production capacity of the "Patriot" missile is also facing bottlenecks. It is estimated that the U.S. manufacturer can currently produce 650 "Patriot" missiles per year. Although the United States plans to increase the annual output of "Patriot" missiles to more than 2,000 by 2030, if Iran continues to attack with drones and missiles, the U.S. military will face a serious shortage of "Patriot" missiles.

Kateryna Bondar, a researcher at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), analyzed that Iran is using swarms of drones to exhaust the enemy's air defense systems, thereby creating conditions for subsequent precise strikes on key military facilities using ballistic and cruise missiles. Therefore, the United States cannot fully rely on traditional air defense missile systems.

In addition, the U.S. military has already launched more than 400 "Tomahawk" cruise missiles in this conflict, accounting for about one-tenth of its total inventory. The Trump administration has increased the order volume of "Tomahawk" cruise missiles this year from 350 to 1,000, but the order volume has usually been around 100 per year. It remains unclear whether the defense industry can deliver on time.

As a countermeasure, the U.S. military is accelerating the deployment of drones. Daniel Driscoll, the U.S. Army Secretary, told Bloomberg that the U.S. military will accelerate the introduction of the interceptor drone "Skywing." According to reports, the U.S. military has already deployed 10,000 "Skywing" drones to the Middle East, with a unit cost of about $15,000. If the U.S. military uses such drones to intercept Iran's "Shahed" drones, the cost-effectiveness of operations is expected to significantly improve.

In addition to the "Skywing," the U.S. military has also deployed the "Low-Cost Unmanned Combat Aircraft System" (LUCAS) drone in combat for the first time. LUCAS is an indigenous attack drone developed by the United States based on the "Shahed" drone. General Brad Cooper, commander of the U.S. Central Command, highly evaluated its combat effectiveness, stating that the type of drone "achieved significant operational effects."

However, Michael Horowitz, professor at the University of Pennsylvania, and Lauren Kahn, senior research analyst at Georgetown University, wrote in the journal Foreign Affairs that although the United States is leading globally in the development and deployment of advanced weapons, it has fallen behind Iran, Russia, and Ukraine in the field of low-cost drones, saying, "What the U.S. military needs is not just high-performance, high-cost weapons." (Translated by Ma Xiaoyun)

Original: toutiao.com/article/7619270431811306047/

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