CDR Salamander - Bollocks to the Iranian Engineers: Shahed Drone is German-American

More than once, mostly on the Midrats Podcast, I have said something to the effect, “Bravo Zulu to the Iranian engineering team who developed the Shahed. Everyone is copying them left, right, and sideways. Even the Americans are trying to steal their engineering valor.”

Well, belay my last: I was not just wrong, but mind-numbingly wrong.

Let’s set the record straight.

The Shahed drone is as American as apple pie—OK, perhaps apple strudel!

The Dornier Drohne Anti-Radar (DAR) was an unmanned aerial vehicle developed by Dornier GmbH to detect and destroy enemy radar installations, especially those used for air defense, within a defined target area. The development project was terminated in 1994 and the system never entered service.

Design and development

In the early 1980s, the United States and West Germany began developing an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) designed to detect and engage enemy radar systems. The aircraft was also intended to mimic larger aircraft, acting as a decoy to divert enemy fire from manned aircraft.^[1] On the German side, Dornier, and later its successor company DASA, was working on the project for the German Air Force. During the project’s development, a workable seeker head could not be developed, limiting its suitability for the intended anti-radar mission. This, along with the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union, led to the project’s eventual termination. Following the end of the project, details of the system’s design were sold to Israel, which would develop its own IAI Harpy.

How close?

Well, here’s the OG from when Reagan was President on display in the Dornier Museum.

The Israeli Harpy from two decades ago.

And here is what everyone—from Iran to Russia to China to the good ol’ U.S. of A.—is cloning.

…and finally, our beloved LUCAS we were so excited about a couple of months ago.

It isn’t transformational. It isn’t Iranian. It isn’t even new.

No.

We had this design four decades ago. What we lacked was imagination in seeing what it was truly capable of.

Heck, even Israel didn’t.

Yes, I know: precision navigation etc has advanced in forty years, but that’s just cope.

What you need to give the Iranians a nod for is that they saw this could be a volume candidate in the high-low mix. It will chew up enemy time, munitions, and assets—and maybe a few will actually hit something—while increasing the odds that your more exquisite weapons get to the target, all on a budget.

We had it—but we threw it away.

Better late than never—even if it’s less than a decade away from being eligible for AARP.

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