A foam-and-plywood drone is forcing the world’s most advanced militaries to burn through US$4 million interceptor missiles at a rate that has defence planners openly warning of depletion. That is according to analysts tracking Iran’s deployment of the Shahed-136 drone across the Gulf, where the Iranian Revolutionary Guard deployed 2,000 in the first six days of the conflict alone.
Wood Central understands its delta-wing airframe is constructed from non-metallic foam and plywood — chosen not just for cost, but because both materials reduce the drone’s radar cross-section, making it significantly harder to track on conventional air defence systems. Inside a 50-horsepower piston engine, which produces a sound comparable to a moped, sits at the rear of the fuselage, driving a two-bladed pusher propeller.
At 3.5 metres long and navigating by satellite at around 185 kilometres per hour, it sits in a gap in modern warfare that previously did not exist — above the cheap quadcopter that cannot carry a meaningful payload, and well below the cost of a cruise missile most militaries cannot afford to fire in bulk.
Western sanctions forced thrifty Iranian engineers to look outside the box
Iran’s Aircraft Manufacturing Industrial Company first unveiled the weapon in 2021, having designed it amid four decades of sanctions. Iranian engineers produce drones using aluminium, composites, and mass-market components, with the manufacturing process resembling a car assembly line more than an aerospace one. Local firms fabricate engines, airframes and guidance modules, with no specialist facility required to assemble the airframe, and the entire launch system is a portable rack on the back of any commercial truck.
Estimates of what Iran actually pays per unit vary significantly by source. US intelligence figures place the per-unit cost at between US$20,000 and US$50,000, whilst the geopolitical review Le Grand Continent puts Iranian manufacturing cost considerably lower, at just €3,500 to €7,000 — consistent with Iran’s ability to exploit domestic automotive supply chains and local labour.
As of yesterday (25 March 2026), Iran has launched more than 1,815 of the drones in attacks against the United Arab Emirates (UAE), killing nine people and injuring 166. Ports, data centres, airports and luxury hotels have been struck — including Dubai International and an AWS data centre, which caught fire after a direct hit.
“Gulf countries are at risk of depleting their interceptors unless they are more prudent about when they fire them,” said Joze Pelayo, a Middle East security analyst with the Atlantic Council.
Whilst the plywood drones are cheap, US-based Patriot missiles fired at the Shahed cost upwards of US$4 million each, whilst THAAD interceptors cost even more. According to a study by the Foreign Policy Research Institute, US Patriot batteries fired 943 interceptors in the first four days of Operation Epic Fury alone — equivalent to eighteen months of combined production from Lockheed Martin and Boeing. And whilst Lockheed hopes to scale to 2,000 interceptors a year by 2027, the scale would be outpaced by a single Russian factory in Yelabuga, which is running out 3,000 plywood Geran-2 drones a month.
Thomas Karako, director of the Missile Defence Project at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, noted that the drones are not necessarily hard to take down once seen, but they are hard to see, crossing the horizon relatively late and flying rather low. At low altitude, Iran’s Shaheds are dominating, threatening bases, ports and the Strait of Hormuz.
In December 2025, the Pentagon announced it had reverse-engineered the Shahed into its own system — the Low-Cost Uncrewed Combat Attack System, LUCAS — and deployed it under Task Force Scorpion Strike after an eighteen-month acquisition sprint. LUCAS entered combat against Iranian forces in February 2026. Ukraine has taken a different approach: its STING interceptor costs about US$2,000, has downed more than 3,000 Shaheds since mid-2025, and is now manufacturing 10,000 or more a month. So far, President Trump has rebuffed Kyiv’s offer to assist US forces.
Open-source analysis of debris recovered in the UAE has indicated possible use of a Russian-produced Geran-2 — incorporating jam-resistant navigation and, as Wood Central reported, assembled from Chinese plywood routed through the same supply chains underpinning Russia’s timber export trade — during Iran’s March retaliation. “The Shahed-136, among other unmanned aerial systems, has allowed states like Russia and Iran a cheap way to impose disproportionate costs,” said Patrycja Bazylczyk, analyst with the Missile Defence Project at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies.
- To learn more about plywood drones used in war, click here for Wood Central’s special feature on DIY Chinese Kamikaze drones, which are now being used on the Ukrainian front by Russian soldiers.
