Why Iran’s reverse engineering prowess is giving jitters to American war hawks

By Robert Maillard

In Beirut, an unprecedented event occurred recently. A GBU-39 bomb, one of the most sophisticated precision munitions in the US military arsenal, failed to explode after an Israeli strike on a civilian target.

This is no ordinary munition. Under normal circumstances, such a weapon strikes its target and leaves nothing behind – not even a trace. This time, however, it fell to the ground perfectly intact, as though it had refused to complete its cycle of destruction.

The American reaction was swift and unusual. The United States abruptly and urgently demanded that Lebanon return the bomb immediately. The reason for this panic is clear: Washington fears the device could be recovered, dismantled, analyzed, and then replicated.

If there is one country in the world that has mastered the art of turning seized equipment into new weapons of war, it is the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Entering the world of Iranian reverse engineering is to step into a system shaped by relentless ingenuity. For decades, Tehran has endured a strict technological embargo, making the purchase of modern weapons impossible. In response, the country adapts – it dismantles, studies, and rebuilds.

What it cannot import, it clones and clones to perfection. This approach is no secret. Iran has become the world’s foremost expert at dissecting Western systems – especially those of the US. Over the course of multiple wars, countless American pieces of equipment have found their way onto the autopsy tables of Iranian laboratories. Between 2010 and 2025, this collection grew exponentially.

The dynamic is such that today we are witnessing a historic reversal. Even Russia now entrusts Iran with certain sophisticated Western equipment that is used by Ukraine so that it can be analyzed and copied.

Yet a seized weapon is not a war trophy to be displayed in a museum. It is a raw material – the starting point of a new military capability.

The real turning point for Iran’s military industry came in 2011. That year, the unthinkable happened: an ultra-secret stealth drone, the Lockheed Martin RQ-170 Sentinel, crashed almost intact in Iran’s Chaharmahal and Bakhtiari province.

Washington, panicked, immediately demanded its return. Tehran’s response was negative. Five years later, Iran kept its word and unveiled the Saeqeh-2, better known as the Shahed-191.

The resemblance was striking: the same flying-wing silhouette, the same stealth profile, the same V-shaped tail. The aircraft was more compact, but it retained a similar endurance of about five hours. Above all, Iran did not settle for mere mimicry.

Whereas the American RQ-170 was a pure reconnaissance drone, the Iranian Shahed-191 was transformed into a combat platform capable of carrying missiles.

It was seen in operations as early as 2018 over the Israeli-occupied territories, infiltrated via Hezbollah. The copy had become a formidable offensive system, fully integrated into modern warfare.

Just one year after the stealth-drone affair, Tehran unveiled another system: the Shahed-129. From the very first images, the silhouette was familiar. It immediately evoked the famous American MQ-1 Predator. The fuselage, wing configuration, and engine placement all echoed the architecture of the drone that defined the war on terror

For intelligence analysts, this resemblance was no coincidence. Several American Predators had been shot down or recovered after crashes in areas where Iran and its allies operated, notably in Iraq and Afghanistan. These wrecks served as organ donors and templates for Iranian engineers.

But the Shahed-129 was not merely a civilian copy. It even surpassed its model in several critical aspects. It boasted an endurance of more than 24 hours and the ability to carry a full arsenal for ground strikes. The irony of history was complete: it became one of the pillars of Iran’s strategy, omnipresent in the skies over Syria and Iraq.

Iran’s talent for reverse engineering no longer stops in the air. It now extends into the depths of the sea. Even the most advanced underwater systems of the US Navy have been scrutinized.

In October 2024, the Yemeni military unveiled a new weapon: a drone torpedo named Al-Karia. Its appearance immediately intrigued naval specialists, who saw a resemblance to the REMUS-600, an underwater drone used by the US Navy for mine detection.

Designing an autonomous underwater vehicle (UUV) is immensely complex. Yet an authentic REMUS-600 had reportedly been captured in 2018 by combat divers. This was definitive proof that, for Tehran, every recovered component – even from the seabed – can become a source of military innovation.

And that is not all. After aerial drones and torpedoes, Iran has now moved into an even more complex domain: supersonic interceptors. In February 2025, Tehran unveiled the GM-118, a new air-defense missile developed by its armed forces.

Comparisons quickly emerged and unsettled Western experts. Its characteristics were almost identical to those of the American Coyote Block 2: a range of 25 kilometers, hybrid guidance combining radar and optical sensors, and a specific ability to shoot down fast, highly maneuverable targets.

Yet one detail did not add up. Neither Iran nor its allies in the West Asia region had ever captured a Coyote Block 2 on a battlefield. So where did the plans come from? This is where attention turned to Europe.

Several intelligence reports indicated that Russia had transferred certain advanced Western systems captured on the Ukrainian front to Iran so they could be reproduced. Thus was born an Iranian missile inspired by a weapon Iran had apparently never faced directly.

Iran has thus succeeded in transforming one of its adversaries’ most effective weapons into a strategic tool perfectly suited to its own asymmetric warfare.

In December 2012, Iran scored another coup by announcing the capture of a ScanEagle surveillance drone, a light yet sophisticated model developed by Boeing for the US Navy.

The cloning process began immediately. A few years later, Tehran unveiled the result: the Yassir drone, which quickly entered mass production. It soon appeared across the entire region.

The story took an even more extraordinary turn in October 2013, when, during an official visit, Iran went so far as to offer one of these drones to a senior commander of the Russian Air Force. The message was powerful: Iran no longer merely endures Western technology; it masters it well enough to present it as a gift to superpowers

A simple captured device thus became a major instrument of diplomatic influence.

But Iranian reverse engineering does not stop with large surveillance drones. It has now turned to smaller weapons: loitering munitions. In recent years, Tehran reportedly obtained an American Switchblade-300 kamikaze drone and dissected it to create its own local version, the Sna.

The system appeared publicly for the first time during the “Eghtedar-1402” military exercise in October 2023. The device looked almost identical to its American model: the same folding wings, the same compact launch tubes, the same ejection mechanism.

Like the Switchblade, it was designed to fly at low altitude, guide itself toward its target, and explode on impact. It is an infantry weapon, easy to carry in a backpack and deployable within seconds from a vehicle or even a small fast boat.

For Iran, this reproduction was not merely a technical clone. It became a cornerstone of the new drone warfare, reshaping West Asia, allowing surgical precision strikes at minimal cost and, above all, the saturation of enemy defenses through sheer numbers.

Nothing in this meteoric rise is the result of chance. If Tehran can today reconstitute, in just three years of military support to Russia, technologies that took the West decades to develop, it is thanks to a perfectly oiled machine.

This machine involves a close alliance between Iran’s military engineers, the country’s top universities, and a fully mature industrial network. The goal is not elegance or pure innovation, but efficiency.

This method is perfectly suited to asymmetric warfare, and above all, the machine never runs out of fuel. Constant access to captured equipment seized by Hezbollah in Lebanon, resistance forces in Iraq, or the military in Yemen continuously feeds this astonishing reverse-engineering chain. Every piece captured on the battlefield becomes a potential prototype.

From now on, losing an advanced weapon on the battlefield no longer represents merely a financial loss for Americans or Israelis. It carries the risk of seeing a copy quickly emerge, mass-produced and distributed to sworn enemies of American hegemony.

The Pentagon must now contend with a terrifying new equation in a world where every capture can spawn an army of clones.

How do you wage war without inadvertently arming your own enemy? One thing is now certain: a system lost in combat will eventually return in another form to strike its former owner.

The remaining question is whether the Americans, who have just admitted defeat by cloning the Iranian Shahed-136, can prove as ingenious as the Iranians in the art of disarming an enemy with his own weapon.

Robert Maillard is a Paris-based writer and military analyst. The article was originally published in French on Press TV's French website.

(The views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of Press TV

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