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The 21st-century AK-47 takes flight: How Iran’s kamikaze drone franchise works

While the West boasts of its technology, Iran manufactures cheap swarms in Russian mega-factories and clandestine workshops in Yemen and Lebanon. The result: a model impossible to sanction and difficult to stop.

NurPhoto

Mariano Tovar Greg Heilman

Update: Apr 5th, 2026 08:00 EDT

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Imagine you want to open a fast-food franchise. You do not need to be a Michelin-starred chef. You just need a storefront, an operations manual, a couple of hamburger molds, and someone to ship you the frozen ingredients. You provide the labor, follow the instruction book, and within a few weeks you are serving the same meals as a location in Chicago or Berlin.

That is essentially what Iran has done, except with killing machines. It has built the McDonald’s of kamikaze drones and started handing out licenses around the world.

Iran doesn’t make the best drones, but the most “democratic”

The first thing to understand is that if you look at any ranking of military technology, Iran is not in the top tier. It does not compete with American Reapers, Israeli precision sensors, or Turkey’s modular sophistication. China, of course, remains the undisputed king of volume, with a vast civilian and military industrial base. According to StatRanker’s industrial index, Iran does not even crack the top ten drone producers in the world.

But that leaves out one decisive point: Iran has won in a category no one else really knows how to play, the survival drone.

Tehran does not build the best drone in the world. It builds the most “democratic” one: cheap, loud, assembled from components bought on the gray market, easy to repair, and, above all, so simple to put together that any ally with a screwdriver, a generator, and a hangar can become a manufacturer in a matter of weeks. That is its strength.

The 21st-century AK-47 takes flight: How Iran’s kamikaze drone franchise works — Tehran’s “toy” in the spotlight in Westminster. Ministers Tom Tugendhat and Radek Sikorski examine the wreckage of a Shahed-136 shot down in Ukraine before the press. The image is devastating: a device that looks like papier-mâché has forced the major powers to hold an emergency meeting to understand how something so rudimentary is depleting their arsenals of high-precision missiles.Stefan Rousseau - PA Images

Tehran has designed its production network like a hydra

Iran has done with drones what the Soviet Union did with the Kalashnikov: it has turned a weapon into an appliance. It is a machine capable of challenging systems that cost a hundred times more. It is the AK-47 of the sky.

While the West struggles to produce advanced drones that cost millions, Iran floods the air with Shahed swarms priced roughly like a used car. And it does so through a system that is almost impossible to bomb into submission.

That invulnerability comes from an industrial solution that is almost artistic. Tehran has designed its production network like a hydra: not as one giant central factory that a missile could wipe off the map, but as an archipelago of small workshops, hangars, industrial parks, and technical basements.

Independent reports place one of the brains of the program at the Tehran Aerospace Complex and another in the industrial zone of Malard, while in Isfahan, at Revolutionary Guard facilities, some of the Shaheds later seen over the Red Sea or exploding in Ukraine are assembled. That site was struck in January 2023, which only confirmed its importance.

If one node goes down, another appears. If one burns, two more start operating 62 miles away. But the masterstroke in evading international sanctions has been moving production beyond Iran’s borders.

Iran’s drone production franchise

In May 2022, Iran opened its first drone plant abroad in Tajikistan, dedicated to the Ababil-2. On March 19 of this year, a convoy of 110 trucks departed from Tajikistan, officially carrying humanitarian aid to Iran. The convoy released no verifiable cargo manifest. According to specialized media, that “humanitarian aid” may have concealed components or even fully assembled drones.

The most ambitious project emerged in Yelabuga, a town in the Russian autonomous republic of Tatarstan. There, Russia has become Tehran’s largest franchisee.

Since July 2023, a megafactory made up of nearly 120 buildings has been producing more than 5,500 drones a month, including a newer version of the Shahed-136 that is faster, tougher, and longer-ranged. It uses Iranian technology with Chinese and North Korean technical support. Iran also provides engineers, molds, processes, and know-how, allowing Russia to produce its own version, the Geran-2, without relying on vulnerable imports.

The same pattern is being replicated in Belarus, where old Soviet facilities are being converted into Iranian-style assembly lines intended directly to supply Russia.

Then there are the shadow factories. In Yemen’s tunnels, the Houthis assemble Shahed clones using Iranian parts. In southern Lebanon, Hezbollah does the same in underground workshops that The New Arab identifies as the largest Iranian-operated facilities outside Iran in the hands of allied militias.

Iran is not exporting drones. It is exporting industrial capacity. It is exporting the method. It is exporting the franchise.

Iranian drone are redefining modern warfare

The drones themselves are flying scrap metal, destroyed the moment they fulfill their purpose. But the industry that produces them multiplies. It survives. It adapts. It changes continents. It disguises itself as civilian manufacturing. It pushes through sanctions as if they were spider webs.

And all of this is driving a paradigm shift in the modern arms market. The winner is no longer the side with the best drone. The winner is the side that can build cheap swarms in any corner of the planet while everyone else is forced to spend vastly more expensive weapons trying to stop them.

Iran has not just built a weapon. It has reinvented the model. It manufactures Kalashnikovs of the sky through its McDonald’s-style kamikaze drone franchises, and in doing so, it is redefining how wars in this century are fought, how they are endured, and how people die in them.