Iran’s ‘Gaza’ drone bristles with missiles in drills but can it survive in combat?

Iran’s Gaza drone, first revealed in 2021, has been used in military drills, the state-linked Mehr news agency reports, apparently destroying eight targets.

The drone, which was brimming with missiles in images released on Sunday, is technically designated the Shahed 149 and has been compared to the US Reaper drone.

That American unmanned system is known for combat operations in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen, capable of carrying a range of guided bombs and highly sophisticated camera and electronic warfare equipment.

The Shahed 149 is slightly larger, with a wingspan of 22 metres to the Reaper’s 20m, although its take-off weight is lower at 3,100 kilograms to the Reaper’s 4,760kg. According to Mehr, the Gaza drone, named in honour of the struggle of the Palestinian people during Israel's war on the enclave, has an “endurance” or maximum flying time of 35 hours and can carry at least 500kg of weapons for more than 1,000 kilometres.

To navigate such a that distance, the drone is believed to use China’s BeiDou or Russia’s Glonass satellite navigation system, after deals in 2021 and 2022, respectively, between the countries, meaning the Gaza does not need to rely on the commonly used GPS system.

Reapers, which have a flight range of 1,850km, have clocked 42 hours of flight time on one mission, carrying 450kg of bombs, and have a maximum payload of 1,700kg that can include external fuel tanks and equipment for electronic warfare – jamming or confusing enemy communications and radars.

They can be operated from many thousands of kilometres away using the American GPS navigation system, although the US is working on a dedicated satnav signal known as M-code, because satellite navigation is notoriously easy to jam.

Drones such as the Reaper have proven increasingly vulnerable to dense air defences and the Gaza is likely to be similarly at risk in a large-scale war.

Copy-and-paste drones

Iran has a long history of reverse engineering US technology, particularly drones, most famously the Shahed 171 Simorgh, which was based on the stealthy US RQ-170. The RQ-170 was brought down in Iran in 2011, supposedly using electronic warfare, although there are conflicting accounts of its demise.

But Iran’s reverse engineering, even with intact US drones to work from, has limits. The Iran-backed Houthis in Yemen have captured a number of shot-down Reaper drones – most destroyed but some partially intact – during US efforts to strike their positions and stop their blockade of the Red Sea. Equipment on the drones could have been sent to Iranian engineers for study.

US systems, however, contain technology that would take a team of skilled engineers years to perfect and Iranian work would be limited by a lack of access to required microchips, due to sanctions.

Nearly 80 per cent of electronic components in Iranian Shahed 136 drones found in Ukraine had been smuggled and were of US origin, components that help with navigation and flight-control systems.

Having the right chips from civilian companies is not enough: electronics need to be “ruggedised” to operate at very low temperatures above 12,000m where it can plummet as low as minus 60°C, cold enough to render most circuits inoperable.

Reaper drones have camera systems known as Wide Area Motion Imagery sensors, arrays of cameras capable of capturing high-resolution video of entire cities, processing the vast amounts of imagery and sending it to ground forces through encrypted data links that are hard to intercept.

Making a similar system in any quantity would require access to large amounts of high-quality microcircuitry, much of it subject to US and European export controls.

Reaper drones have special aspherical lenses that are difficult to manufacture because of requirements for no imperfections that can distort images. They can also carry synthetic aperture radar, which produces photographic quality images at night or through clouds, and Ground Moving Target Indicator technology that can spot people over vast areas. All of this equipment needs to be carefully stabilised due to the vibrations of flight.

Iran claims to have this technology, or some domestic variant of it, which if effective could be useful for surveying ocean near its territorial waters.

But the capabilities of Iran’s most advanced home-grown drones, like the Shahed-149 and the smaller Mohajer-6 in the Middle East are untested. In the Ukraine war to date, Kyiv has intercepted more than 90 per cent of Russian Geran drones launched at the country, a variant of the Iranian Shahed 136.