HESA Shahed-136 / Geran-2

An Iran-designed single-use loitering munition or kamikaze drone. It measures about 11 ft long with an 8.2 ft wingspan and a 440 lb gross weight, costs roughly $20-50K per unit, and uses a Mado MD-550 piston engine of about 50 hp. Guidance is GPS / GLONASS satellite navigation with no terminal-phase seeker — it flies to programmed coordinates and impacts. The warhead is an 88 lb high-explosive fragmentation charge, range is 1,500-2,500 km and cruise speed is around 110 mph. Launches come from truck-mounted racks of typically 5-6 tubes, and the airframe destroys itself on impact. Operators include Tehran, Russia (where it is designated Geran-2), Houthi forces, Hezbollah and other Iran-aligned groups.

More than 10,000 Shahed-136 / Geran-2 launches against Ukraine since September 2022, with monthly totals fluctuating with Russian launch rates and Ukrainian intercept performance. Around 60-70% of launches are intercepted by Ukrainian air defences — Patriot, NASAMS, IRIS-T, Stinger MANPADS, electronic-warfare jamming and mobile machine-gun air-defence platoons — while the remaining 30-40% reach their targets. Cumulative damage to Ukrainian infrastructure runs into tens of billions of dollars, with heavy civilian and military casualties. The campaign is one of the largest sustained drone-attack operations in the history of warfare.

They sit in different size and use classes. Switchblade 300 / 600 is man-portable at 6-33 lb total weight, with 10-40 km range, a 1-10 lb explosive charge and an operator-in-the-loop, used at squad and platoon level. Shahed-136 is vehicle-launched at 440 lb, with 1,500-2,500 km range and an 88 lb warhead, flown autonomously on GPS guidance against fixed targets. The Shahed-136 is far larger, longer-ranged and more destructive but cannot be used at the small-unit level; the Switchblade is far more flexible there. Both have seen heavy use in the 2022-2025 Russo-Ukrainian War — Switchblade by Ukraine, Shahed-136 by Russia — but for very different missions.

Under licence at the Alabuga Special Economic Zone facility in Tatarstan, set up in 2023 with technical assistance from Tehran to enable Russian indigenous Geran-2 production. Reporting suggests output reached 50-100 airframes per day in 2024 / 2025, sharply reducing Russian dependence on deliveries from Iran. Russian-modified components include improved electronic-warfare resistance, added fuel capacity for longer reach and other battlefield refinements. Cooperation between Tehran, Moscow and Pyongyang on unmanned systems has expanded sharply over 2022-2025.

It combines a low unit cost of $20-50K with low altitude (1,000-3,000 ft AGL), a small composite-structure radar signature, slow 110 mph cruise and high attack volume. Most modern air-defence systems are optimised for fast aircraft and missiles, so a slow, low-flying Shahed presents a different problem set. Each Shahed costs about $30K to launch, while intercepting it can require firing $1-3M Patriot or comparable interceptors — an extreme asymmetric cost ratio. Effective defence demands a layered mix of machine guns, MANPADS, medium- and long-range SAMs and electronic-warfare jamming, which Ukraine has built up progressively but at heavy expense. The Shahed has driven major U.S. and NATO investment in low-cost air-defence solutions.

Similar mission, very different cost and technology tiers. BGM-109 Tomahawk is a subsonic cruise missile costing about $1.4M per round, with 1,500-mile range, 5-10 m CEP, TERCOM / DSMAC / GPS guidance and a 1,000 lb warhead. Shahed-136 is a subsonic loitering munition at $20-50K per unit, with 1,500-2,500 km range, GPS-only guidance of limited precision and an 88 lb warhead. The Tomahawk is 30-50× more expensive but far more accurate, much harder to defeat and carries a much larger warhead. The Shahed-136 is far cheaper and used in volume for cumulative effect, but each individual round is easier to shoot down. Together they bracket the high and low ends of the modern long-range strike spectrum.