It's fascinating to me that Iran was able to develop this nascent drone industry on their own, while under a very aggressive sanctions/embargo system. It reminds me a bit of Soviet Union and how they were able to come up with, essentially, parallel industry with different flavors. How were they able to do this? Presumably PRC and Russia were supporting this industry either directly or indirectly with material and supply chain assistance, perhaps engineering expertise though I don't think Iran was in short supply of this. Interesting nonetheless, beyond the cost implications of defeating these cheap systems with very expensive missiles.
It's the Persian Empire, a titanic object, with an advanced civilization, quality scientific culture and a highly educated population (.... in the Persian-Azeri core, not the brutalized ethnic periphery). There are sanctions, but relations with Russia and China make up for the few inputs that the sheer extent of the Persian empire cannot yield. (Israel is a bit over 1% its size and mostly intractable desert but has more convenient external supply.)
The ingenuity is kind of astonishing, there is something of a mad febrile energy to it. Thus Houthi and Hamas mostly did not need external supply chains for rocketry etc.: a complete industrial chain could be devised in Iran and deployed on site. Part of it seems to be that a chief objective of design is minimizing what seems to us as inevitable external supply chain dependencies.
The product is indeed largely replication of external industry: as I understand, they seem to have done a lot of reverse engineering of enemy drones. But none of these can bee too much like the shahed, I think, as is evidenced by the fact that Uncle Sam has reverse engineered versions in production and appearing in the Gulf now.
Similarly, I suppose, the Chinese AIs that to some extent mirror US AIs, but on the cheap and with way less computing power, will be replicated in US.
> Presumably PRC and Russia were supporting this industry either directly
Not during development/early phases, they were created during time where sanctions were somewhat enforced. Debris analysis of earlier models show they were full of western COTs parts, including stripped components, i.e. think RU breaking washing machine for chips. Incidentally they were also fairly expensive, 4 digits, for otherwise a rudimentary - though elegantly simple form factor. At least given sanction constraints and relative to what Iran industrial base can muster at relative scale.
Realistically the BOM for one of these things should be low $1000s if value engineered by competent industrial power like PRC. Who has contract to acquire 1m loitering munitions/drones this/next year. There's have factories that can churn millions of of engines per year, i.e. 10s of 10000s of 1500-2500km fires per day.
Iran is a huge mountainous country, they have everything they need for industry right on their own land. In their case it's purely about competence whether they have a nuclear weapon or not. Whether they have rockets or not. Certainly ballistic rockets.
They also have 95 million people, which is certainly enough to do it. They have inherited/stolen somewhat functional infrastructure (ie. schools, universities, research labs, ...) from the Shah.
Additionally they absolutely do not care about the consequences for the Iranian people. By that I mean once a ballistic rocket's motor goes out, at the top of it's trajectory it is more or less unstoppable (it just falls down essentially). Which means fighting ballistic rockets can only happen above (at the very least close to) the launch site, which means in Iran, and that means above the heads of ordinary Iranians. And of course what works best is disabling them on the ground.
They're not competent enough to build things themselves ... yet. Neither Shaheds nor the ballistic rockets, and certainly not things like centrifuges. But China and Russia are helping them out with a bunch of components. So there you are. Again, China and Russia know perfectly well that this can only end in war against the Iranian people, and yet they still do this.
Btw: yes Hamas' and Hezbollah rockets are ballistic missiles too and suffer from this problem. But they're ... shall we say "tactically using" the problem, blaming the target for the inevitable deaths. The only way for Israel to defend itself against those rockets is to make them impact Gaza/Lebanon instead (if you hit them on the ascent you're essentially massively reducing the range of the rocket). But of course they're pretty small compared to what Iran is firing.
Now, of course Iran COULD build these rockets like the west does: so that when they're intercepted they don't kill. To have an active fuse system and you only activate the fuse near the target. Then, if anything happens you still have the rocket impact, but not the explosion, no or minimal shrapnel, etc. But no, they make their weapons like the Soviets did. These weapons are meant to kill in all cases. If they get intercepted, if they have an accident, if the maps aren't up to date, they just kill anyone they can where they fall and if they fail entirely they kill the launch crew. These weapons are designed for maximum killing, whether it's their target or someone else, and then they blame the resulting deaths on the target.
Of course in an honest/sane system such deaths would be blamed on the manufacturer of the weapons, but apparently we're not intelligent enough for that to happen.
It is worrying that Iran itself is now also using human shield tactics with their own people. That girls' school that was hit in Iran ... was an IRGC base until 3 years ago. The school is surrounded on 3 sides (about ~half) by the IRGC base, and the road into that school is the road into the base. The school is inside the outer wall of the base. In other words: this was specifically arranged by the Iranian government to try to get a foreign adversary to hit the school. Luckily they've also totally failed to show even a single corpse and the school was hit at a time the building should have been empty. So hopefully, this is just a lie.
But if true, this incident is 3 years of 100% intentional human rights violation by Iran's government, and one miscalculation on the US or Israeli side, or perhaps even a screwed up missile launch by the IRGC. And let's just not consider the possibility that they boobytrapped the school on purpose (it just happens to be an area where a minority lives ...)
