The U.S., Iran, and the rise of drone warfare

Make Me Smart

Marketplace

Business, News

4.6 • 5.5K Ratings

🗓️ 3 March 2026

⏱️ 16 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

As war in the Middle East widens, it’s become clear that drones now play a fundamental role in global conflict. They’ve changed the way wars are fought—and how much they cost. On today’s show, Kimberly talks with Sarah Kreps, director of the Tech Policy Institute in the Cornell Brooks School of Public Policy, about how drone technology has evolved over the years, how the rise of drone warfare has changed the way global conflicts play out, and what that means for civilians.

Here’s everything we talked about today:

"Iran strike marks first time U.S. used new one-way attack drones in combat" from Task and Purpose
"Iran Fires Cheap Drones Into Arab Countries, Wreaking Havoc" from The New York Times
"How are Drones Changing War? The Future of the Battlefield" from the Center for European Policy Analysis
"America’s Eroding Airpower" from the Center for New American Security
Obama’s Final Drone Strike Data from the Council on Foreign Relations

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello, everyone, I'm Kimberly Adams. Welcome back to Make Me Smart, where none of us is as smart as all of us. And a lot of us have been feeling probably particularly unsmart in the last few days as we're all trying to figure out what is happening with the U.S. conflict in Iran and the broader implications in the Middle East.
0:24.5	So we're going to tackle just one slice of that today.
0:28.3	Today we're going to talk about how the war playing out throughout the Middle East is involving the use of drones.
0:34.8	Now, ostensibly, the war is between Iran, the United States, and Israel, but a lot of
0:40.3	other countries are involved, and drones are really playing a big role in all of this.
0:46.4	Dron technology has evolved quite a bit over the past few years, and it's reshaping the way
0:51.8	that wars are being fought and what they cost. So here to make
0:56.6	us smart about this is Sarah Kreps. She's director of the Tech Policy Institute in the Cornell
1:01.8	Brooks School of Public Policy, and author of the book, Drones What Everyone Needs to Know. Sarah,
1:08.7	welcome to the show. Thank you. It's great to be here. Thank you so much for
1:13.3	making time. So one headline that really caught my attention over the weekend was that for the first
1:18.4	time in combat, the United States is using low-cost unmanned combat attack system drones, also known as
1:27.0	Lucas drones in Iran. Can you walk us through
1:30.3	how these drones in particular work? Yeah. So these are new for the U.S. military. And for years,
1:38.1	the U.S. was using medium altitude, long endurance drones, the kind they would use in counterterrorism strikes.
1:45.4	So these Lucas drones are fairly new.
1:47.7	They're also called loitering munitions or kamikaze drones.
1:51.6	And ironically, they're reverse engineered from Iran's own Shahed 136 drones, which had been
2:00.2	used widely by Russia and by Iranian proxies.
2:05.1	So the U.S. saw these drones and then adapted the design to create an affordable and mass-producible
2:11.6	American version of that. So these are far cheaper than either missiles or precision guided munitions and certainly the
2:19.9	kind of drone that people might have seen for counterterrorism. I'm so glad that you mentioned
	...

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