The Shahed isn’t impressive because it’s high-tech. It’s impressive because it isn’t.
These military components aren’t hard to get. You could find similar parts in factories or farm machinery. That’s exactly what makes the Shahed so tough to deal with.
Why can’t the U.S. churn out a solution of its own? Because the U.S. military doesn’t have a technology problem but a bureaucracy problem.
The U.S. Department of Defense typically can’t just buy things. It follows a long, complicated process that can take a decade or more to go from “we need something” to “here it is.” That process runs through three separate bureaucratic systems, each of which can cause years of delay.
Add it up and you get a system where the military sees a threat, begs for a solution, argues for money and waits a decade.
It would be easy, but inaccurate, to blame the military for the decade-long contract process. The real answer is more complicated.
The problem is that those rules were built for a world where the biggest threat was another superpower’s expensive jets and missiles. It wasn’t built to fight a flying bomb made from tractor parts. This type of threat requires fast innovation from lean companies, the exact companies that struggle in the current budget process.
The most important reforms still need Congress to act, and Congress moves slowly, too. Congress has launched studies into reforming this system numerous times, with the answers being too politically difficult to implement.
This quick fix would reload the military’s stock of interceptors with existing weapons systems, which is the source of the bad math. The math would get worse and at the same time the operational imperative to find cheaper and better solutions might disappear.
So, as the Shahed keeps flying, the most powerful military in the world is still figuring out the paperwork and looking to other countries for help.
