Senior Trump administration officials told members of Congress during a closed-door briefing on Tuesday that Iran’s Shahed attack drones are a major threat to the US military and that not all of them will be intercepted by US air defenses, CNN has reported.
The report said that Secretary of War Pete Hegseth and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Dan Caine acknowledged that the Iranian drones are more difficult to deal with than anticipated. Sen. Christ Murphy (D-CT) said after the briefing that he was told more American troops will die.
“They told us in that room that there are more Americans that are going to die, that they are not going to be able to stop these Iranian drones that are going to continue to fly into the Middle East,” Murphy told reporters.
Since the US and Israel launched the war against Iran on Saturday, US Central Command has confirmed the deaths of six American soldiers, who were killed by an Iranian drone that hit a makeshift operations center in Kuwait. According to media reports, they had no notice or warning to evacuate before the drone struck.
The CNN report said that the Shahed drones are difficult to intercept because they fly low and slow, making them better able to evade air defenses than ballistic missiles. The US has deployed its own version of Iran’s Shahed -136 drone in the Middle East and has been using them in the attacks on Iran.
