Amid a recent avalanche of media headlines warning of significantly depleted US weapons stockpiles, The Washington Post is out with another fresh report Thursday which sounds the alarm, this time over advanced drones.
The US military lost at least 45 MQ-9 Reaper drones during the Iran war, American defense officials were quoted as saying. The same officials estimate that this constitutes roughly 25% of the Pentagon’s fleet.
If these were the type of small, cheap drones which have been prevalent in the Russia-Ukraine war, no one would see this as much of a problem, but Reapers are highly advanced surveillance systems and also hunter-killer aircraft, capable of flying for 27+ hours straight, and with some variants able to push past 40 hours.
Made by General Atomics, each drone costs between $30 million to $50 million. With 45 drones wiped out, this means that well over one billion dollars in hardware was either shot out of the sky or crashed in the context of Iran war operations.
The US has also at times lost parked aircraft at bases that came under Iranian attack in the Gulf. This was especially true of even pricier large aerial refueling tankers.
The Washington Post explains why the Reaper has been vulnerable to shootdown by Iranian forces over the past several months in the following:
The aircraft have seen heavy use around the Strait of Hormuz, the vital shipping route that has become a major flash point in the conflict — and a key obstacle to negotiating a lasting peace deal. But the drones fly slowly and often at low altitudes, making them relatively easy targets for Iran’s military and its regional proxies in Yemen and Iraq.
A fourth U.S. official, who like the others spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss Pentagon data, said that not all of the lost Reapers were shot down. An unspecified number crashed after their operators’ communications link to the drones failed, the official said.
That latter scenario constitutes quite a costly communications error scenario. It’s unclear whether there may have been some instances that the comms were intercepted or hacked.
As we featured earlier in the US-Iran conflict, the MQ-9 Reaper drone is being gradually phased out by the US military, although General Atomics continues to produce it for foreign customers.
Prior rare battle footage of Reaper in action over Middle East skies:
Footage of a US Air Force MQ-9 Reaper UAV engaging an Iranian missile launcher with an AGM-114 Hellfire via @hey_itsmyturn. pic.twitter.com/vwjePW6ivU
— OSINTtechnical (@Osinttechnical) March 1, 2026
Iran’s proven ability to shoot down MQ-9 Reaper Drones is another demonstration of how it has managed to deploy some air defense, despite prior long-running claims from President Trump that the country’s defenses had been “obliterated”.