After four years of watching the war in Ukraine, NATO defense decision-makers are finally beginning to pour money into drones. The Iran conflict has drawn further attention to these investments. The assumption is that unmanned aerial systems will ensure a long-term advantage in conflicts requiring ground operations and infrastructure defense.
But the battlefield in Ukraine is already pointing toward a different future. Russia is transforming slow, propeller-driven Shahed drones into cheap, missile-like systems by equipping them with turbojet engines. This has sharply complicated Ukrainian air defense, as the new platforms now fly two to three times faster (about 460 miles per hour, compared to 90 miles per hour) and at higher altitudes (about 29,000 feet, versus 6,500 feet) than propeller-driven drones.
As a result, Ukraine’s propeller-based interceptor drones (maximum speed 280 miles per hour) have become much less effective at intercepting their targets. The previous tactic of chasing a target from behind is obsolete. Their only remaining viable interception tactic is a head-on approach, which significantly reduces the hit rate of interceptor drones. The entire concept of low-cost, counter-drone defense based on propeller-driven systems no longer looks as promising as it did two to three years ago.
Meanwhile, Iranian engineers have also designed a counter-drone solution of their own: the so-called 358 missile, reportedly priced at around $90,000 per unit. The 358 missile can efficiently intercept a broad class of aerial threats, including Shahed-type systems as well as more advanced platforms such as the MQ-9 Reaper, Wing Loong II, the AH-64 Apache, and others. Unlike Western counter-drone efforts, the Iranian approach seems both more forward-looking and more flexible and durable in practice.
Western defense establishments, however, perhaps facing industry pressure or falling prey to narratives about drone dominance, appear to be doubling down on propeller-based unmanned aerial systems for both offensive and counter-drone operations, despite physical ceilings that adversaries can exploit and outmaneuver.
If NATO’s adversaries achieve meaningful progress in scaling production of turbojet drones and solid-fuel missiles, thus driving down their per-unit cost — while laser technologies mature into a credible defense against the full spectrum of aerial threats — propeller drones will no longer be the versatile, game-changing platform they are made out to be in today’s media coverage. In the wars of the near future, they will be neither decisive in offense nor sufficient in defense.
As I have previously argued, the West should assume a cautious approach toward adopting Ukrainian innovations. In this case, NATO countries are betting too heavily on a class of systems that may already be on the wrong side of the curve. Propeller drones will still matter where they are cheap enough to absorb losses, but they will be poorly suited to a battlefield characterized by higher speeds, faster interception windows, and the potential future role of lasers. To compete in this new phase of drone warfare, the United States and Europe should prioritize the development of cheap missiles and directed-energy systems instead.
The Drone’s Ceiling Is Physical, Not Political
The limitations of propeller-driven drones are not engineering problems waiting to be solved. In many cases, they are architectural constraints derived from the physics of rotary and fixed-wing propulsion at low speeds. No amount of tinkering can overcome these fixed, physical realities. Quadcopters and propeller-driven platforms are optimized for a specific flight envelope: relatively low altitudes, moderate speeds, and limited payloads. Adversaries have learned how to exploit these parameters.
The upgraded Shahed and Geranium variants Russia is deploying in Ukraine — and which Iran has not yet deployed in the Persian Gulf — are fitted with turbofan engines that permit them to fly much faster than the original models. Investing tens of billions of dollars into propeller-driven quadcopter interceptors that cannot close the speed gap with turbojet-powered drones, and that lose effectiveness at higher altitudes, is not a long-term counter-drone strategy.
Ukraine is learning this lesson the hard way. In 2022 and 2023, Kyiv and its allies bet on propeller-based counter-drone systems. But the threat — driven by capable Russian engineers — has evolved faster than the platform could adapt. What was once an effective intercept solution now struggles against modernized Shaheds that illustrate a classic truism of air warfare: speed and altitude buy survival.
This Ukraine-specific problem is about to become NATO’s as well, as alliance members accelerate their investment in the same category of unmanned aerial systems.
The Case for Cheap, Smart Missiles
If the propeller drone is the wrong answer for counter-drone tactics at scale, what is the right one? The logic points to missiles: not the million-dollar precision-guided ones that dominate current inventories, but a new class of cheap, autonomous, mass-producible interceptors that can be manufactured at the scale the threat demands.
The math is unforgiving. If an adversary can potentially scale production of turbojet-powered drones to thousands of units at $20,000–$50,000 each, the answer cannot be a $500,000-plus missile, nor a propeller-driven counter-drone, which have shown results against turbojet-powered drones only while they are flying at a cruising speed of 186 miles per hour.
A hypothetical low-cost autonomous interceptor missile — say, in the range of thousands of dollars, or low tens-of-thousands of dollars — would change the economics of air defense. Such a missile does not yet exist, primarily because no one has built it at the scale required for the product to be economically feasible. That cost estimate may appear unrealistically low today, much as it would have seemed unrealistic in 2021 to predict that the average drone price in the Russo-Ukrainian War in 2026 would be measured in thousands of dollars rather than hundreds of thousands. The concept, however, is straightforward: an AI-guided interceptor with autonomous targeting and navigation that does not rely on satellites or a remote operator. Such a system could engage everything from propeller drones to turbojet Shaheds and even low-end cruise missiles, all within a common architecture. The key difference is that it would scale with the threat, instead of being priced out of it.
None of this requires breakthrough science. The core components — miniaturized seekers, onboard navigation based on visual or inertial references, and low-cost solid-fuel propulsion — already exist. What’s missing is not technology, but integration and production at scale.
Early signals from the startup ecosystem reinforce this direction. Companies such as Perseus Defense and Ares Industries, backed by Y Combinator, along with European players like Frankenburg Technologies and Origin Robotics, are moving toward low-cost, scalable interceptor architectures rather than doubling down on drone-based solutions. However, most of these efforts remain at the prototype or minimum viable product stage, and are far from achieving the production scale required to deliver cheaper systems in short manufacturing cycles.
Drones and Unmanned Ground Vehicles as Motherships and Logistics Platforms, Not Weapons
None of the above means abandoning drones, but it does mean demoting them. A propeller-driven unmanned aerial vehicle or ground robot carrying two to ten low-cost interceptor missiles, with autonomous launch upon target detection, is a fundamentally different system from either a bare drone or a bare missile on its own. The platform provides mobility through permissive airspace or across rough terrain, and the missile handles everything that happens in the final seconds. The drone’s job would be cheap delivery over distance — the same role propeller aircraft still play in militaries worldwide, and so-called “mothership” drones already play. Together, they cover the threat envelope that neither can address independently.
In other words, the drone becomes a truck. The mistake today is trying to force the same airframe to do both jobs at once.
This matters even more because logistics are often decisive in war. And that is precisely where aerial drones and unmanned ground vehicles already play, and will continue to play, a major role: delivering ammunition and supplies, evacuating wounded personnel, and gradually replacing some of the work now done by traditional trucks or crewed aircraft in high-risk environments. Crucially, these systems will need to be fully autonomous rather than remotely controlled. Autonomy itself is becoming a core domain of competition, as future battlefields will not reliably support human-in-the-loop control or stable communications.
Why the West Is Not Moving
While the logic is clear, the procurement community hasn’t acted on it due to structural factors.
The first is institutional momentum. Drones are visible, demonstrable, and politically legible. A defense minister can hold a quadcopter. It can be harder to explain to a parliamentary committee why funding a new solid-fuel micro-propulsion research program is more urgent than buying another thousand units of a system that worked last year. Bureaucracies usually reward the tangible and the precedented.
The second holdup is the production complexity gap. Missiles are harder to manufacture than drones or robots. The supply chains for propulsion, guidance, and fuzing are more specialized, more regulated, and more concentrated in legacy defense primes that have little incentive to drive costs toward commoditization. An average drone in Ukraine can be assembled from commercial off-the-shelf components in a startup’s garage. A missile cannot.
The third challenge is scaling sensor and navigation systems production. Drone guidance has benefited enormously from the civilian autonomy ecosystem in areas such as computer vision, machine learning, and low-cost photography. However, missile-class targeting and visual-autonomous AI navigation in GPS-denied environments require a different category of sensors and processing power, because these systems should operate at much higher speeds, process more data per unit of time, and withstand far greater physical stress. As a result, sensors and algorithms developed for civilian use cannot be transferred directly into workable defense systems at scale. This, in turn, requires additional investment either to adapt existing technologies or fund sufficient production to drive down costs per sensor.
The fourth structural factor is regulation. Startups developing drones can operate for a relatively long time without facing strict regulatory constraints on development and testing, which helps conserve resources in the early stages. By contrast, as soon as a company starts working on systems involving turbojet or solid-fuel propulsion — or anything resembling a missile — it immediately falls under International Traffic in Arms regulations and encounters a different level of complexity in testing, compliance, and development.
The fifth is workforce scarcity. Propulsion engineers, guidance specialists, and systems architects with missile experience are a thin community. They exist, concentrated in a small number of primes and national laboratories. But there is no pipeline feeding new talent into this domain at anything approaching the scale of the software and drone engineering communities.
It would be naive to expect missile development to become as simple as building civilian drones. Still, the faster regulation and supporting infrastructure are adapted for developers, the faster progress will follow in this space.
The Strategic Stakes
Russia understands the trajectory of counter-drone technology and is acting on it by launching more turbojet-powered Shaheds every day — drones that propeller-based interceptors cannot effectively engage. China understands it even better, because China is the primary supplier of components making that trajectory possible. Every turbojet engine bolted onto a Shahed variant reflects a supply chain running through Chinese manufacturing.
China’s role across nearly every critical component does more than support current production. It helps the country accumulate industrial capacity, deepen supply-chain control, and train the engineering talent needed for the next generation of systems. That creates a powerful feedback loop: The more China participates in today’s drone and missile ecosystem, the better positioned it is to field more competitive products.
That is potentially why China is not just rolling out endless copycat versions of propeller-driven drones, but is also investing heavily in affordable missile platforms for counter-drone warfare. Open reporting already points to systems such as the Yitian short-range system on Yema4x4 and the FK-3000, an air defense platform carrying 96 missiles to defend key sites against drone swarms. Russia is moving in the same direction, developing a new generation of lower-cost missiles such as the S8000 Banderol, sometimes described as an “AliExpress missile.”
The West has a window of time to respond. It still has enough companies, engineering talent, and technical institutions to build not only large space rockets, but also the lower-cost missile systems and turbofan drones that future regional wars will demand. But that potential will remain trapped unless political demand changes and procurement shifts with it.
Ukraine gave propeller drones their moment. It also gave them enormous visibility in defense circles and among politicians. But technological progress does not wait for political fashion. It is shaped by physics, industrial competition, and by the fact that America’s adversaries are pursuing their own technological roadmap. From Ukraine to Iran, U.S. adversaries are already preparing for the next phase of warfare — one in which advantage will go to systems that move and react faster than propeller-driven systems ever can.
Vitaliy Goncharuk is an American entrepreneur of Ukrainian origin, specializing in autonomous navigation and AI. He is the CEO of A19Lab, a company developing autonomous systems for drones and robots. In 2022, his previous company, Augmented Pixels, which focused on AI autonomy, was acquired by Qualcomm. From 2019 to 2023, Vitaliy chaired Ukraine’s AI Committee. He is also a former regional youth champion in model aircraft and model car construction.
Image: Staff Sgt. Tim Andrews via DVIDS.
