Volume, not precision, now defines modern warfare. Russia’s Shahed swarm and Israel’s AI-enabled 900-strike campaign reveal that mass-produced munitions and algorithmic targeting, not legacy superiority, will shape US-India defense collaboration.
The Ukraine War, the India-Pakistan War, and the Iran War have all demonstrated the need for cheap and mass-produced drones, munitions, and air defense systems.
US and Israeli forces conducted nearly 900 strikes against Iranian targets in the first 12 hours of Operation Epic Fury. Russia, meanwhile, has begun launching over 4,000 Iranian-made Shahed drones per month against Ukraine, up from roughly 800 per month just a year earlier. In May 2025, Pakistan fired over 600 drones at India during the four-day conflict between the two countries last year. Within the three conflicts over three theaters, one pattern emerges: the importance of volume.
For 30 years, Western defense establishments operated on a particular logic: the future of warfare belonged to precision, stealth, and network dominance. Massed firepower was passé. Artillery was a relic of the past world wars. The “Revolution in Military Affairs,” validated by the Gulf War’s surgical air campaigns, had rendered volume irrelevant. Stealth and precision would rule the future.
However, the three recent conflicts have delivered a pointed challenge to that consensus. Especially as wars and conflicts in general become drawn out, and the battlefield assumes the characteristics of a war of attrition. In such a scenario, the force that can sustain the volume of cheap drones, munitions, and layered air defenses ultimately gains an edge in combat.
And threaded through all of this is a new variable: artificial intelligence (AI), which is rapidly democratizing precision and handing mid-tier powers capabilities that once required superpower budgets. Hence, the new grammar of winning is cheap, mass-produced, and focused on missile and drone attacks and air defense.
The Ukraine War and the Return of Mass
One of the defining weapons of the Ukraine War is the Shahed, an Iranian-designed unmanned combat aerial vehicle standoff loitering munition that costs an estimated $35,000 per unit, carries a 40-kilogram warhead, and hits its target less than 10 percent of the time. However, it does not need to be accurate. It only needs to exist in sufficient numbers to exhaust defenses, terrorize populations, and impose unsustainable cost-exchange ratios on defenders firing $3 million interceptor missiles to kill a $35,000 drone.
Russia understood this logic early. By mid-2025, it was launching over 4,000 Shaheds per month against Ukraine, producing them domestically at scale using Chinese components. The effect was devastating, not through the lethality of individual strikes, but through sustained attrition of Ukraine’s air defenses, infrastructure, and civilian morale.
The United States has also been paying attention. The Low-Cost Unmanned Combat Attack System (LUCAS) is Washington’s direct answer to the Shahed model: a cheap, expendable loitering munition. At the high end of the spectrum, the US Army’s new Precision Strike Missile (PrSM), which was used for the first time by the United States during the ongoing air strikes on Iran, validates the standoff weapons lesson. During Operation Sindoor, India’s air-launched BrahMos supersonic cruise missiles struck targets deep inside Pakistan.
The munitions lesson runs deeper than drones and highlights the continuing importance of what many would dismissively deem as “legacy” systems.
Ukraine’s war became, at its core, an artillery war, a type of combat thought to have been left in the dustbin of history, one that brutally exposed how critical stockpiles have become. When artillery ammunition ran scarce in early 2024, Ukrainian forces turned to FPV kamikaze drones as a cheap precision substitute for shells. Drones account for an estimated 70 percent of battlefield losses on both sides. The lesson here is that industrial capacity to produce munitions at wartime scale is as decisive as the weapons themselves. Countries need to sustain mass production to win the modern wars of attrition, even if they have the best-in-class weapons and weapon systems.
How AI Leveled the Battlefield
The Iran strikes marked the most consequential documented large-scale use of artificial intelligence for targeting and kill-chain compression in active conflict (Operation Lavender was the first). The operational tempo of 900 strikes in 12 hours was not achievable through conventional intelligence processing, which would have taken days or weeks.
Israeli forces integrated satellite imagery, signals intelligence, and drone feeds in real time, generating target packages at speeds no human analytical team could match. According to Israeli intelligence officers, AI was used to rapidly sift through data to identify Iranian generals, track their movements, and match targets to strike options. The result was strikes at unprecedented speeds: top IRGC commanders, nuclear scientists, and missile program leadership were eliminated within hours of the operation’s launch.
The deeper significance is not what AI enabled Israel to do, but what AI is beginning to enable everyone to do. Precision targeting has historically been a great-power monopoly, requiring decades of investment in intelligence infrastructure, analytical capacity, and cutting-edge precision-strike weapons. AI is blurring that barrier. A military with access to commercial satellite imagery, open-source intelligence tools, and modern AI processing, with cheap kamikaze drones, can now approximate targeting capabilities that once required a superpower’s budget.
This is the democratization of precision that many analysts are talking about. India’s Integrated Air Command and Control System (IACCS) during Operation Sindoor demonstrated real-time coordination among Army, Navy, and Air Force assets, enabling synchronized responses at a scale and speed rarely seen before in India.
The Iran conflict added a second dimension. Iranian actors used AI-generated deepfakes and algorithmic amplification to wage parallel narrative warfare, fabricating military successes, flooding Arabic and Persian social media, and exploiting open-source intelligence from Israeli reservists’ posts to monitor troop movements. This raises another concern and pattern: the AI battlefield is not only an analytic and targeting tool for kinetic responses, but also a tool for information warfare.