The $3 million problem

In the first 72 hours of Iran’s indiscriminate aerial attacks across the Persian Gulf, coalition forces expended over 800 Patriot PAC-3 interceptors. That is more than Ukraine has received in four years of war against the same weapons. Each of those missiles costs upward of $3 million. The Iranian Shaheds they were chasing, which Tehran has increasingly substituted for ballistic missiles, cost roughly $35,000 apiece.

This is not a battlefield setback. It is the collapse of an entire air defense economic model. And until it is addressed doctrinally, not merely through procurement, every Abraham Accords partner from Abu Dhabi to Rabat remains trapped in a spending spiral that Iran can sustain indefinitely and they cannot.

Buying Ukrainian interceptor drones will not solve the problem. Drones alone are one component of a layered architecture that Ukraine spent four years building under fire. What the Gulf needs from Ukraine is not a transaction, but a transfer of doctrine, technology, and operational capability across four distinct and inseparable pillars.

Ukraine now has over 450 drone manufacturers. It produces approximately four million drones per year, more than every NATO country combined. Its interceptor drone program now fields over 1,500 units per day, destroying roughly one in three Russian aerial targets and accounting for over 70 percent of Shahed-type downings over the capital.

These capabilities were forged under the most sustained aerial bombardment since the Second World War. Russia launched over 54,000 Iranian-designed Shaheds against Ukraine in 2025, and every innovation in the Ukrainian drone arsenal was born on a battlefield where failure meant dead civilians.

The economics are stark: A Ukrainian interceptor drone costs between one and four thousand euros. A Patriot PAC-3 interceptor costs over three million dollars. That is the math Gulf states confronted last week.

Zelenskyy has already moved. In the days following Iran’s Gulf strikes, he offered interceptors and expertise to partners across the region, proposed a direct exchange of drone interceptors for PAC-3 missiles, and confirmed consultations with Qatar, the UAE, Bahrain, and Jordan. The Pentagon’s own counter-drone task force visited Kyiv the week before to study Ukrainian tactics.

The Shahed threat is engineered to exploit radar gaps. It flies low and slowly, with minimal cross-sections that defeat detection systems optimized for faster, larger targets. Ukraine has built a layered response combining military radar with acoustic sensors, civilian spotting networks, and AI-powered signal analysis.

The first investment must be in adapting existing radar infrastructure for low-altitude, low-speed drone threats, supplemented by acoustic and electro-optical systems Ukrainian companies have battle-tested. Israeli firms provide the technological backbone, including Elbit Systems’ DAiR AESA radar and IAI’s Green Lotus platform. But the doctrine for integrating these sensors into a coherent early-warning picture under mass saturation attacks is something only Ukraine can teach. 

Electronic warfare is the most underestimated dimension. Jamming navigation, disrupting control links, spoofing GPS: preventing drones from reaching their targets is far cheaper than shooting them down. But it requires electromagnetic warfare capability that most Gulf states have never needed to develop.

Ukraine is the world’s most advanced laboratory for drone electronic warfare, fielding jamming domes over critical infrastructure, networked detector walls spanning hundreds of kilometers, and modular platforms field-reconfigured for different frequency ranges and mounted on anything from a tripod to an armored vehicle.

What Gulf states need is not just this equipment but the doctrine behind it: how to suppress attacking drones while simultaneously operating your own, adapting in real time as the adversary shifts frequencies or deploys platforms that defeat conventional jamming altogether. This measure-countermeasure battle evolves weekly on the Ukrainian front. That institutional knowledge is the most valuable export Kyiv can offer.

A fleet of drones without trained operators is an inventory, not a capability. Ukraine has trained tens of thousands of drone pilots under combat conditions, flying interception missions against Shaheds at night, under electronic warfare, with lives depending on every decision. That cadre of expertise does not exist anywhere else on earth.

Ukrainian drone manufacturers maintain training schools led by combat veterans who have operated under exactly the conditions Gulf states now face. Their graduates understand not just how to fly a drone but how to fight a drone war. That is the difference between equipment and capability.

Zelenskyy has offered to send Ukraine’s best interceptor operators to the region. That offer should be expanded into a structured training partnership that builds sovereign capacity rather than permanent dependency. Israel’s Defense Ministry is already developing brain-computer interfaces that allow a single operator to control multiple drones through neural signals, addressing the operator bottleneck before it becomes a crisis under mass saturation attacks.

Only after the first three pillars are addressed does drone hardware deliver its full value, and even then the purchase must span the complete operational spectrum. Interceptors are the most urgent need, but a defense-only posture that relies solely on interception concedes the initiative to the attacker permanently. Reconnaissance platforms provide persistent early-warning; strike platforms hold the adversary’s launch infrastructure at risk.

The best Ukrainian manufacturers build unified ecosystems where bombers, reconnaissance quadcopters, and loitering munitions all operate on shared software platforms. That interoperability is what separates a collection of drones from a combat system.

Ukraine’s production model has already been proven exportable: manufacturers have opened factories in Britain, Slovakia, Germany, Denmark, and Finland. There is no industrial barrier to replicating this in the UAE, Bahrain, or Morocco. But the hardware must come with the first three pillars, or it will underperform dramatically. And it must be paired with Israeli AI: the sensor fusion and autonomous decision-making that make every element of the framework exponentially more effective are capabilities Ukraine does not have and does not need to replicate.

The Abraham Accords were designed as a peace framework. They now need to become something more: a regional defence alliance. Iran is not targeting individual states. It is targeting every American ally in the Gulf, and it will continue to do so regardless of who leads in Tehran. The Ayatollah is dead, but the regime stands, and there is no guarantee it falls on any predictable timeline.

What is required is not a bilateral arms deal but a collective deterrent, modelled on the logic that forced Europe to unite against Russia: shared threat, shared doctrine, shared infrastructure, and Iron Beam’s directed energy layer completing the kill chain at $3.50 per interception. The drone architecture described in these four pillars, networked across every Abraham Accords signatory and sustained by joint manufacturing and training capacity, would constitute exactly that, and Saudi Arabia’s accession to the Accords would give it the geography, resources, and political weight to make it decisive.

The Abraham Accords have already built the institutional architecture: CENTCOM integration, joint exercises, and billions in bilateral defense trade. What they have not yet produced is a unified air defense posture. That is the next step. Not a procurement contract, not a box of interceptors traded for a box of missiles, but a doctrine, a system, and a sovereign capability that each signatory can operate, maintain, and scale. The threat is not waiting for the politics to catch up.

Every week that Gulf states rely solely on multi-million-dollar missiles to counter $20,000 drones, Iran’s attrition strategy advances. Every PAC-3 missile fired at a Shahed is one fewer available for a ballistic missile, which remains the real strategic threat. The current approach is not just expensive. It is strategically self-defeating.

Ukraine and Israel have both paid for their expertise in blood: four years of aerial bombardment on one side, seven fronts on the other. The framework exists. The technology exists. The threat is not waiting. Every week without a decision is a week Iran banks.

David Zaikin is the Founder and CEO of Key Elements Group, a London-based strategic consultancy specializing in international affairs, crisis management, and defense sector. He has previously contributed to the Jerusalem Post, Barron’s, CNBC, BBC and Bloomberg. David advises public and private sector clients on strategic positioning, political risk analysis, and communications strategy, particularly for organizations operating in sensitive or rapidly evolving markets.