五角大楼无视了关于伊朗无人机危险的警告The Pentagon Ignored a Warning About the Danger of Iran’s Drones

From a distance, the Iranian drone resembled an arrowhead, pointing downward as it dove out of the sky. Its propeller, powered by the kind of motor typically used in dirt bikes and lawnmowers, produced a high-pitched wail. It struck midmorning on March 1, the second day of the U.S.-Israeli war against Iran, hitting a logistics center in Kuwait used by the American military. Dozens of personnel from the Army Reserve were working at an office building there.

The incoming drone, a variant of the Shahed, slammed through the roof of the building and detonated its payload. Six American service members were killed and more than two dozen wounded, several of them critically—the deadliest attack on U.S. troops in the war. It will be hard for the survivors to forget the drone’s distinctive noise.

In Ukraine, which has faced years of attacks from this type of drone, people often compare its sound as it falls out of the sky to a Vespa revving its engine. But the noise no longer terrifies Ukrainians the way it once did. Last year, Ukraine’s arms industry developed a cheap and effective way to shoot down Shaheds. The U.S. military knew about this technology months before the war in Iran began. A group of senior American officers, worried about exactly the type of attack that killed those six soldiers in Kuwait, told me they repeatedly urged commanders in the Middle East to deploy the new Ukrainian technology.

The Pentagon ignored their warnings, which included detailed reports sent up the chain of command. Several of the officers who tried to raise the alarm about Iranian Shaheds have since been fired or forced into early retirement.

In a statement, the Pentagon disputed the officers’ account and said it was “disgusting” for the Atlantic to suggest that the U.S. military was “somehow unprepared” for the start of the war in Iran. “Central Command established the most extensive air defense umbrella in the world over the Middle East,” Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell wrote in the statement. “Make no mistake: The U.S. military has the best offensive and defensive capabilities of any nation on Earth, and we always protect our bases and our people.”

The warnings were based on Ukraine’s experience with Russia, which acquired Shahed drones from Iran in 2022. Waves of them have pounded Ukrainian cities ever since, often in swarms of a few hundred per night. Last summer, the armed forces of Ukraine deployed a new type of interceptor to destroy Shaheds in midair. U.S. Army officers stationed in Germany began training on these interceptors that fall, and they asked their Ukrainian allies to produce a report about their new invention.

The document, dated December 2025, was titled in the military’s turgid style: “Operational Experience in the Employment of UAV Interceptors in Countering Shahed-Type Aerial Threats.”It described in detail how Ukraine had developed these defensive weapons. A drawing of an interceptor appeared on the cover of the report, alongside a Shahed with a bull’s-eye on its belly. It was shared inside the military and with some U.S. allies in December, roughly two months before the war in Iran started.

The Army’s European Command, led at the time by General Chris “C.D.”Donahue, had by then deployed the new interceptors at bases in Europe, including in Romania and Poland. Donahue and his team in Wiesbaden, Germany, urged their fellow officers to do the same at bases in other regions, especially in the Middle East, where the threat from Iranian drones seemed most obvious to them.

No one involved in preparing the two reports knew the timing of the U.S.-Israeli attack on Iran, which was then widely reported to be in the works. But they understood that any Iranian response would almost certainly involve Shahed drones, which the regime had invented, mass produced, and stockpiled. The second report was published on February 23, too late, as it turned out, for its warnings to make much difference. The war in Iran would start only five days later.

This account of the Pentagon’s failure to defend against these weapons is based on interviews with more than a dozen current and former military officers from the U.S. and Ukraine, who were involved in the effort to warn about the danger of Iranian drones and arm U.S. forces with the most effective countermeasures. Most of them spoke on condition of anonymity, because they fear reprisals from their commanders and officials at the Pentagon. Since taking office last year, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has overseen the widespread use of polygraph tests to find and punish military officers who speak with journalists without permission. He has also ordered the military to cut 20 percent of the positions reserved for generals and admirals across the armed forces.

Donahue fell victim to that purge this summer. In the final months of his Army career, he worked with the team in Wiesbaden to send hundreds of Ukrainian interceptors to the Middle East, hoping they could defend against another deadly strike on U.S. forces. Hegseth did not support these efforts, the officers involved told me. “The technology is so effective. It’s so cheap,” one of them said. But the top officials in Washington did not want to accept it: “Because of arrogance, they said, Why do we need it?”

By now, nearly five years after Russia invaded, most U.S. military officers would agree that Ukraine offers important lessons on the future of warfare. Its innovations in drone technology have been forged in the deadliest conflict Europe has seen in 80 years. Few American generals recognized their value sooner than Christopher Cavoli, who served until last year as the supreme allied commander of NATO. Roughly a year into the war, he hosted a training exercise with Ukrainian soldiers, and he was stunned by how quickly one of them, a private, figured out how to use a U.S.-military radar system.

The soldier explained that, before volunteering to defend his country that year, he’d worked as professor of electrical engineering at a university in Kharkiv. “These guys were going to learn pretty quick,” Cavoli remembers thinking at the time. “They also worked all night,” he told me. “They didn’t take breaks.”By the second summer of the war, in 2023, the Ukrainians began to innovate in earnest, especially when it came to drone warfare. “That’s when we realized, Oh, these guys are doing stuff that we don’t do. Let’s go look at it seriously.”

About two years later, in the spring of 2025, NATO invited a team of drone operators from Ukraine to act as the enemy side—the red team—in a round of war games in Estonia. The blue team “took a whipping,” one of the American participants told me. The Ukrainians launched about 30 drone strikes in rapid succession, taking 17 armored vehicles and two NATO battalions out of the game before dinner. The U.S. troops were so unaccustomed to the red team’s tactics that some of them looked up at an incoming drone and waved their arms at its camera.

One of the organizers of the drills later used that footage in a presentation to show how much the U.S. military had to learn.

The Ukrainians also went home with a lesson. One of their commanders told me that the NATO troops, maneuvering around in their armored vehicles, had resembled a “golden-armored knight” who showed up for a gunfight with a fancy sword. “They are unable to accept reality,” he said. Drones now account for the great majority of casualties in the war. Ukraine’s military industry produced 4 million of them last year, far outpacing all NATO countries combined.

That spring, I visited a company called Skyfall, whose factory in Kyiv could produce up to 4,000 small drones a day. Its founder led me through a maze of workshops and testing labs with hundreds of workers. Some of them flew drones through wind tunnels and pools of water to test their toughness. The best engineers, the founder told me, had been tasked with solving the problem of the Shaheds.

The original design of the Shahed, with a propeller at the tail and a warhead at the tip, came from Iran in the first year of the war. But Russia soon began to manufacture its own Shaheds, adding new features to make them faster, more destructive, and harder to defeat. More than 6,000 of them were launched at Ukraine in the first 10 months of 2024.

At first, Ukrainian soldiers tried to shoot them down with machine guns, using spotlights to scan the sky. Whenever possible, they also relied on advanced air-defense systems, such as the Patriot missile, which the U.S. and its allies provided to Ukraine in small batches. Patriots cost several million dollars per shot, and Ukraine needed to conserve them for bigger threats, such as Russian ballistic missiles. It could not afford to use them against drones that cost Russia roughly $35,000 each.

For the engineers at Skyfall, the challenge came down to velocity. None of its drones could fly fast enough to catch Shaheds and ram them from behind. “We’ll get there,” the founder told me, scrolling through a series of grainy videos of his drones chasing Shaheds through the sky. “It’s definitely solvable.”Within a few months, several Ukrainian companies, including Skyfall, cracked the problem, developing a range of interceptors to take down Shaheds.

They went by different names—Octopus, Sting, Bullet—but they had similar designs. Each one looked like a big thermos with rotors attached to its base and cost a few thousand dollars (much less than a Shahed, let alone a Patriot missile). They could be launched from an empty field or the back of a truck.

To detect the interceptors’ targets, Ukraine also set up a network of acoustic sensors that listened for the noise of incoming Shaheds. The sensors did not require much engineering. Some were just smartphones affixed to long poles. When their mics picked up the sound of a Shahed, Ukraine’s air-defense forces sent up an interceptor to knock it down. The Ukrainian military purchased and deployed thousands of them last year. Before long, the interceptors had all but neutralized the threat, downing Shaheds at a rate of more than 90 percent, according to official estimates.

Ukraine’s allies took notice and started to spread the word. Last fall and winter, Skyfall gave frequent tours of its interceptor factory to Western officials. Some of the first visitors came from a command within the U.S. Army called Security Assistance Group Ukraine, or SAG-U. Headquartered in Wiesbaden, its officers work out of the recreation center at the base. Computer cables snake across the floor of their gym, beneath desks that stand on disused bowling lanes.

Under a Pentagon order dating to the Biden administration, American generals rarely got permission to visit Ukraine; President Biden feared the Kremlin could view their presence as provocative. (It did not help that the first commander of SAG-U, General Antonio Aguto, resigned in 2024 after drinking too much at an official dinner in Kyiv. The Defense Department’s inspector general later found that he fell down drunk and injured his head.) But the Pentagon allowed other SAG-U officers to cycle through Ukraine on a regular basis. Aguto’s successor, General Curtis Buzzard, who had graduated from West Point in the same class as Donahue, made more than 30 trips to Ukraine.

Of all Ukraine’s innovations, few if any looked as valuable and easy to replicate as the Shahed interceptors. By the time they appeared on the battlefield last summer, U.S. tensions with Iran had tipped into open warfare. The U.S. and Israel conducted a series of strikes in June 2025 against Iranian nuclear facilities. The response from Tehran did not leave the U.S. much reason to worry: Iran launched missiles at Israel and at a U.S. base in Qatar. American and allied air defenses, relying on the Patriot system, shot down the missiles heading for the base. At the White House and the Pentagon, the exchange fueled confidence that U.S. air power could defeat the Iranian regime with ease.

Some inside the U.S. military, however, still saw it as prudent to prepare for Iran to escalate. Apart from its missile arsenal, Tehran had an enormous stockpile of Shaheds, many of them hidden underground beyond the reach of U.S. air strikes. They were cheap and plentiful enough for Iran to overwhelm the U.S. supply of Patriots and other sophisticated air defenses. Their range of potential targets included every U.S. base in the Middle East, and they could threaten any ship passing through the Strait of Hormuz, the aorta of the global oil supply.

Deploying cheap interceptors to help defeat these weapons seemed like an obvious move. By the end of last year, Donahue had already integrated them into the forces under his command in Europe. The U.S. Army officers in Wiesbaden urged their colleagues in the Middle East to do the same. “It’s just common sense,” a person familiar with their deployment told me.

None of the officers in Wiesbaden ever received a clear explanation of why the Trump administration ignored this advice. But the officers sensed two reasons behind the resistance in Washington: arrogance and politics.

During their clash in the Oval Office in February 2025, Trump told Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky that Ukraine did not have any cards to play. The encounter set a new tone for their relationship, and it sent a signal within the Trump administration that Ukraine should be treated as a supplicant, not an ally. At the Pentagon, “Hegseth did not want to hear the word Ukraine,” a senior Ukrainian official told me of that period.

U.S. Army officers in Europe sensed a similar toxicity. If you brought up Ukraine at the Pentagon, “if you were lucky, you were met with a sneer,” one of them told me. Under the Biden administration, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin received weekly updates from SAG-U about the war. Once Hegseth took over, those briefings stopped. So did nearly all U.S. military aid to Ukraine.

Ukraine’s most vocal advocate at the top of the Trump administration turned out to be Dan Driscoll, the U.S. Army secretary. During a visit to Wiesbaden in the spring of 2025, Driscoll got a detailed briefing from Donahue about Ukrainian weapons systems. “A light bulb went off,” he later said of that experience. Driscoll, a former Army officer, was particularly impressed with the command-and-control software known as Delta, which Ukraine developed to process data from the war zone, including the acoustic sensors that pick up the sound of incoming Shaheds. The system provides an interactive map that soldiers could use to monitor the battlefield and react in real time.

Nine months after his visit to Wiesbaden, Driscoll joined forces with Donahue and others to establish the U.S. Army’s first experimental drone unit, the Unmanned Assault Battalion. Composed of roughly 600 soldiers stationed in Italy, the unit had orders to work with Ukrainian advisers in developing advanced drones and the means to counter them.

Around that time, Zelensky and Trump began negotiating a deal for the U.S. to purchase Ukraine’s most advanced military equipment. “The people of America need this technology, and you need to have it in your arsenal,” Zelensky told the New York Post. But after a few rounds of talks, the U.S. shelved the deal last fall. That decision came down to American hubris, one of the Ukrainian officials involved in the negotiations told me at the time. The message from the White House amounted to this, he said: “Know your place. We have the greatest military in the world. We don’t need anything from you.”

That attitude changed when the war with Iran started. In the first days of March, Zelensky received a flood of calls from U.S. allies in the Middle East. They wanted to know about Ukrainian interceptors, and how many of them Zelensky could sell in a hurry.

The previous week, U.S. and Israeli air strikes managed to kill much of Iran’s leadership. But Iran’s arsenal of missiles and drones allowed it to stay in the fight far longer than Trump expected. Its response featured a barrage of Shahed drones, by some estimates more than 2,000, aimed at targets across the Middle East: military bases, airports, and logistics hubs used by the Americans, as well as civilian targets and infrastructure in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, and elsewhere in the region.

In trying to shoot down the drones, the U.S. and its allies quickly burned through most of their supply of Patriot missiles. In some cases, such as with the Shahed strike on the base in Kuwait, U.S. air defenses failed—with deadly consequences.

One of the survivors of that strike, Lieutenant Colonel Tim Halbur, recalled waking up in the wreckage of his office, his uniform covered in blood, and the bones of his right elbow falling away. One of his comrades, Major Stephen Ramsbottom, later told the Associated Press that the base should have been better defended. “This type of fight has been going on for five years in Ukraine, and our excuse is we didn’t expect it to happen to us,” he said. “That’s preposterous in my mind.”

When the team in Wiesbaden heard about the attack, they did their best to prevent another one. Donahue gathered a few hundred of the Ukrainian interceptors deployed under his command in Europe, and he sent them to U.S. bases in the Persian Gulf. The general also drafted and signed a series of confidential requests to the leadership in Kyiv, including to Zelensky’s office, asking for more interceptors, according to three people familiar with the documents.

Without a clear signal from Trump, the team in Wiesbaden sensed, the Pentagon did not want to accept Ukrainian assistance. “It’s the politics,” one of them told me. “If I’m Hegseth, I don’t know where Trump sits with Ukraine day to day. So I don’t necessarily want to go all in.”Only Driscoll seemed willing to stick his neck out. In early March, the Army secretary placed a call to Eric Schmidt, a former CEO of Google who has invested in Ukraine’s defense industry.

Schmidt’s drone company had worked with Skyfall to produce an interceptor called the Merops, which had been effective against Shaheds in Ukraine. Within days, Schmidt and Driscoll managed to ship 13,000 of them on chartered flights to the Middle East. They believed the interceptors would be useful in reopening the Strait of Hormuz, where Iran had begun attacking ships with drones and missiles.

The mission was an almost total failure. According to two people familiar with its outcome, the Merops shot down only one Iranian Shahed. The reason for the flop came down to poor planning, these people told me. Host countries in the Middle East had never operated these weapons, and they were slow to approve their deployment. Schmidt fumed over the bureaucratic delays, his associates told me. He knew they would likely translate into more lives lost to Shahed strikes and further disruption to trade through the Strait of Hormuz.

The Merops deployment also faced a technical problem that could not be solved in a matter of days. Without the network of sensors that Ukraine uses to identify incoming drones, the interceptors could not find and follow their targets. “We screwed it up,” a senior Ukrainian official involved in that operation told me.

Some of the officers in Wiesbaden wondered whether they could have made their arguments more forcefully to the Pentagon or to their counterparts in the Middle East. Looking back on the deaths at the base in Kuwait, “you want to know you did everything you could,” one of them told me. Then again, the officer added, “I pushed and pushed and pushed, but nobody was really pulling.”Instead, the Pentagon continued its cull of the upper ranks, and it gutted the team in Wiesbaden. Donahue relinquished his command in early July, about a year after his boss, Cavoli, had done the same.

The general Hegseth promoted to lead the Army, Christopher LaNeve, announced in August that the specialized drone unit Donahue helped create, the Unmanned Assault Battalion, would be dismantled. LaNeve described the decision as part of a “back to basics” approach. Other generals seethed over the move in private, while both Democrats and Republicans on Capitol Hill denounced it publicly.

“It hurts our ability to acquire the critical knowledge and skills that can be gained from working with and learning from Ukrainian soldiers,” a group of four lawmakers wrote in a letter to Driscoll and LaNeve on September 1. The next day, Driscoll stepped down after 18 months as Army secretary. Buzzard, the SAG-U commander, had announced his retirement about a month before.

In early September, I paid a visit to the base in Wiesbaden, hoping to see what was left of the teams created to learn from the war in Ukraine. They seemed to be in a state of mourning. At the entrance to their base, seven portraits of the base commanders hung on the wall. In the frame on the left, Donahue’s portrait had been replaced with a black square.

From their desks in the recreation center, the officers of SAG-U continued to gather intelligence and put out their reports. Their new commander, who took over in early August, did not grant them permission to speak with me. But several officers agreed to sit down in Wiesbaden and discuss the war in Ukraine.

Their main concern at the time related to a new type of drone that Russia began using this spring, a souped-up version of the Shahed equipped with a jet engine, which allows it to fly much faster than Ukraine’s interceptors. Hundreds of these new drones had been hammering Kyiv and other cities for weeks, killing scores of civilians and devastating the infrastructure needed to keep the lights on and the economy running.

The team in Wiesbaden described the new Shaheds as a fiendish challenge, requiring an entirely new interceptor. Some of them doubted whether Ukrainian engineers could produce one by winter. But soon after, two of Ukraine’s leading drone manufacturers, including Skyfall, said they had found a solution. Zelensky announced in late September that Ukraine had deployed an interceptor capable of defeating jet-powered Shaheds.

In the Middle East, Iran has already used this weapon against U.S. forces, which have relied on Patriot missiles, fighter jets, and other sophisticated hardware to shoot them down. Ukraine appears close to a much more efficient solution. But the U.S. has no deal to buy this new generation of interceptors. For the officers in Wiesbaden, it looked like a sign that the Pentagon could make the same mistake twice: ignoring the latest innovations and, in the process, putting the lives of its troops in danger.

Eight months after the deadly strike in Kuwait, the U.S military has still not deployed the sort of network of sensors and interceptors Ukraine uses against Shaheds. According to the latest estimates, the U.S. has used up nearly three-quarters of its Patriot missiles since the start of the war in Iran. Replenishing that stockpile will take years. In the meantime, U.S. soldiers in the Middle East are staying close to their air-raid shelters, keeping their ears pricked for the whine of inbound drones.