As US and Iran Trade Drone Swarms, Taiwan's Procurement Strategy Faces Scrutiny

As the United States and Iran trade mass drone strikes across the Strait of Hormuz, the logic of modern warfare is being rewritten in real time — and some analysts warn Taiwan has yet to fully absorb the lesson.

Both sides in the conflict have leaned heavily on low-cost, expendable drones. Iran has deployed its Shahed series, priced at roughly $20,000 per unit, while the U.S. has utilized the LUCAS (Low-Cost Uncrewed Combat Attack System), which costs around $35,000. These weapons are designed to be treated as ammunition — shot in volume, lost without regret — to exhaust far more expensive air defense systems.

Against that backdrop, Taiwan's recent purchase of four MQ-9B SeaGuardian surveillance drones for a total of $600 million, including ground stations and crew training, has drawn scrutiny over whether Taipei's procurement strategy is keeping pace with the battlefield's rapid evolution.

The concept of a drone-saturated maritime battlefield was first articulated publicly in June 2024 by Adm. Samuel Paparo, then commander of U.S. Indo-Pacific Command. Paparo argued that in the event of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan, the U.S. could flood the Taiwan Strait with unmanned systems — turning it into a "hellscape" — to slow a People's Liberation Army amphibious advance and buy time for additional forces to arrive. The idea drew directly on Ukraine's experience using low-cost drones against Russian forces.

That concept is now being stress-tested in the Middle East.

Shu Hsiao-huang(舒孝煌), an associate research fellow at the Institute for National Defense and Security Research, told Storm Media that the current U.S. campaign against Iran is effectively a live-fire trial of the hellscape model.

"Right now, the U.S. military in the Middle East is essentially testing the drone hellscape scenario — testing the effectiveness of low-cost drones," Shu said. "If it works, they can replicate it directly in the Indo-Pacific. Taiwan could then copy the American experience."

Iran's turn to low-cost drones was driven by decades of Western arms embargoes. Since the 1979 Islamic Revolution, Tehran has been cut off from modern military aircraft. While U.S. and Israeli air forces flew F-35 stealth fighters, Iran's front-line jets remained the same American-supplied aircraft purchased under the Shah in the 1970s. Unable to acquire modern warplanes, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps pivoted to drone development, sourcing civilian-grade components through Asian e-commerce platforms to circumvent export controls.

The Shahed drone — with a unit cost of around $20,000, an estimated range between 1,000 and 2,500 kilometers, and a roughly 40-kilogram warhead — proved more than sufficient to damage fuel depots, radar installations, and urban infrastructure.

Russia's adoption of the Shahed from 2022 onward demonstrated the weapon's strategic potential: swarm attacks on Ukrainian power grids and cities forced Kyiv to expend million-dollar Patriot interceptor missiles to shoot down drones costing a fraction of that, creating a profoundly asymmetric war of economic attrition.

The United States, which spent years and billions developing high-end platforms like the $30 million MQ-9 Reaper, has since recalibrated. Modeling the LUCAS on captured Shahed airframes, U.S. planners produced a delta-wing drone at $35,000 per unit, roughly 800 times cheaper than the Reaper. The Pentagon licensed production widely to drive costs down further and reclassified the platform conceptually: LUCAS is treated as an expendable munition.

In Operation Epic Fury, the joint U.S.-Israeli strike campaign against Iran, LUCAS drones were used in the opening phase to suppress Iranian air defenses — saturating the network with low-cost platforms to clear safe corridors for F-35 fighters and B-2 bombers.

Shu is careful to distinguish between platform types, arguing that Taiwan's MQ-9B purchase is not a like-for-like comparison with Shahed or LUCAS.

"The MQ-9B is entirely for maritime intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance," he said. Surface radar along Taiwan's coastline cannot see more than roughly 10 kilometers over the ocean's curvature, leaving significant blind spots. An airborne platform like the MQ-9B, which can remain aloft for up to 26 hours, fills that gap.

The more pointed question concerns Taiwan's domestically developed loitering munition. The Chien Hsiang (劍翔) anti-radiation drone is broadly analogous in concept to the LUCAS. But its unit cost — approximately NT$25 million (roughly $800,000) — dwarfs the LUCAS.

"The Chien Hsiang is still far too expensive," Shu said. "At a minimum, it should be benchmarked against the LUCAS at around NT$1 million per unit." He noted that the U.S. is already planning to drive LUCAS costs down further, to as low as $2,000 per drone.

The core of Shu's argument is about scale.

"The hellscape concept is a defensive option Taiwan can adopt," he said, "but the question is whether Taiwan is prepared to treat drones the way the U.S. treats ammunition — as something to be produced and expended in mass quantities." At the current Chien Hsiang pricing, that posture is unaffordable.

If Taiwan could bring Chien Hsiang's cost down to roughly NT$1 million and field a stockpile of 10,000 units, Shu argues the cross-strait military balance would shift materially. Trading 100 Chien Hsiang drones (at NT$100 million total) to neutralize the air defense capability of a single PLA destroyer would be a favorable exchange.

"If that happens, large PLA surface combatants would have to stay at least 200 kilometers from Taiwan — outside Chien Hsiang's strike range," Shu said. "At that point, large surface warships would no longer be something the PLA could boast about." （Related： SoftBank's PayPay Surges 13.5% in Nasdaq Debut as Japan's Cashless King Goes Global ｜ Latest ）