These are lessons the US and other major actors should be taking to adapt to the shifting landscape. It's reminiscent of the Russian airforce refusing to build HAS or even hangars for aircraft for the past ~20 years, while everyone pointed out to the various problems, from quality of life issues, to maintenance difficulties, to OPSEC, to the physical protection of aircraft. It took losing aircraft on the ground to preventable strikes for ~2+ years for Russia to start. Now here's the US, who previously had a brief run-in with Iran earlier in this presidency, and is very likely to have another one, not adapting to these realities.
Have we seen anything resembling drone defense teams from US forces in the region? That can't be hard to organize. Some of the vehicles in the links above could play the role. They just have to not be parked in one place, empty. Sure there are some HMGs and optics available. On the other hand, the sad non-performance by the Iranian navy points to the exact same thing. All destroyed in port without even making an effort to do something. I guess it's really leaving me confused. The US was building up forces for quite some time before launching this war, and everyone was playing the guessing game about when the war would start in the run-up. Surely the US knew on some level that a war was a real possibility. And Iran had to know it was possible, if not imminent.
Most Shaheds aren't manually controlled even with Russia's improvements to the platform. In fact manually controlled Shaheds, to the best of my knowledge, are fairly rare. In point of fact Russia only started adapting some Shaheds for manual control by piggy-backing off of Ukraine's cellular towers, well into the current war. At the end of the day, against US facilities that don't appear to have anything remotely resembling drone defense teams, you don't need a sophisticated approach. You just need to throw 20 (or 200) Shaheds instead of 2, and you'll do real damage.
But again the same question, Iran had to know something like this was if not imminent, at least likely. If not against the US, then against Israel. I also have yet to see any reports of "drone port" facilities in Iran, anything like what Russia does with their Gerber and Shahed launching facilities. It really seems like Iran just hasn't done anything to prepare for mass-employment of Shaheds.
