Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) has conducted successful tests of
a high-precision long-range kamikaze drone equipped with a 50 kilogram (110 pound) warhead,
the head of the IRGC's R&D department, gen. Ali Kouhestani, said on Sunday.
Kouhestani told state media that this drone was one of a series of kamikaze
drones of the IRGC ground forces, which was developed and produced by young specialists.
The general specified that the UAV named Me'raj-532 has a piston engine,
and its maximum range is 450 kilometers (280 miles).
The maximum altitude of Me’raj-532 amounts to
12,000 feet and it can stay in the air for up to three hours, according to Kouhestani.
The drone can be launched from any light vehicle, a pick-up truck,
for example, as photos published by the news outlet demonstrates.
Additionally, the IRGC officer said that his department is going to
come up with more new drones to support operations of the Iranian ground forces.
In fact, Iran has been using surveillance and combat drones for roughly thirty-five years,
starting with Ababil and Mohajer combat and
surveillance drones deployed in the mid-1980s during the Iran-Iraq War.
A drone unit was even the subject of a 1990s-era war movie Mohajer.
Modernized iterations of the Ababil and Mohajer followed in the 1990s and 2000s.
In the early 2010s, Iranian companies began introducing a diverse spectrum of new designs.
All or most of Iran’s modern drones—even those with the range to fly many hundreds
of miles—still lack satellite communication links allowing for
remote control over distances greater than one hundred to two hundred miles.
However, many areas of interest for Iran either lie within or just across its
borders and coastline—or in places where there are allies happy to receive or host Iranian weapons.
These allies consist of Hezbollah in Lebanon, Houthis rebels in Yemen,
Shia militias in Iraq and the Syrian government under Bashar al-Assad.
It’s notable that crashed Iranian drones or their components have been recovered in Afghanistan,
Bahrain, Iraq, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, the United Arab Emirates, and Yemen.
Iran’s drones most prominently serve with the air, sea and ground branches of the “expeditionary”
Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps but are being introduced into the regular Iranian military too.
It’s important to note that most military drones are employed for surveillance and
reconnaissance missions—which could include locating targets for, and observing the
results of ballistic missile attacks—or as practice targets for air defense units.
Even combat drones usually engage in far more reconnaissance than strike missions.
Keeping track of Iranian drone projects is complicated by Tehran’s tendency
to circulate fabricated, exaggerated or inconsistent propaganda about its weapons.
Numerous Iranian companies are developing and manufacturing drones,
though these draw to a degree on off-the-shelf drone components,
especially engines, acquired from China or Europe via international middlemen and shell companies.
In fact, the sheer number of different types in development or production may indicate
reflect inefficiency due to competing industrial and bureaucratic interests.
Iran has also recovered many crashed U.S. drones including Boeing ScanEagles,
RQ-170 surveillance drones, and Predator and Reaper combat drones,
and developed domestic designs clearly modeled after them—namely the Yasir,
Saegheh-2, Shahed-129 and Kaman-122.
Iran has also developed a container-launched anti-radar drone that can be carried atop
a small car and allegedly attack targets at long distances (more than nine hundred miles).
This type of loitering munition could prove difficult to detect prior to launch,
and might be reasonably accurate by relying on integrated artificial intelligence to home in
on the emissions of active ground- or sea-based air defense radars.
To what extent the Arash’s control/artificial intelligence scheme is more flexible than
that of a radar-homing cruise missile is unclear, however.
In 2018 Houthi rebels began fielding the more capable Sammad drone.
While the Sammad-1 has a surveillance role, the Sammad-2 (or UAV-X) recon/kamikaze drone can carry
a forty-pound warhead and the Sammad-3 allegedly has an extended attack range of 932 miles.
While the Sammad doesn’t correspond to a known Iranian drone, it uses several
Iranian drone components, as well as German motors acquired by Iran via a Greek company.
Sammad-3s were used in an attack on a Saudi oil processing facility in
2019 that cut that country’s oil production by half for two days.
They were also reportedly in two strikes on Dubai International Airport.
Saudi F-15 and F-16 jets have shot down many Qasef drones and Sammad drones with
Sidewinder missiles, as you can see in this remarkable footage.