By Arman Shariati

A grainy thermal feed. Bright targeting lines lock onto a slowly moving object. Then, a flash, a rapidly expanding trail of debris, and the screen cuts to black.

Repeated across dozens of engagements, these seconds-long electro-optical clips, circulated through official Iranian military channels and broadcast by national media, have become one of the defining visual signatures of the 40-day war and the exchanges of fire that followed.

But these engagements weren't driven by a sophisticated ground-based radar network or a long-range integrated air defense battery.

In most cases, it was the Majid, Iran’s domestically developed, purpose-built short-range air defense system, using passive sensors to acquire and track targets before engaging them.

The system has been credited with bringing down some of the most advanced medium-altitude, long-endurance (MALE) unmanned aerial vehicles in Israeli and American inventories.

The significance lies not in any single interception, but in the apparent scale and consistency of the engagements. Taken together, the footage points to a stark strategic reality: Iran may have found a relatively low-cost, survivable way to challenge one of the aerial assets its adversaries have relied on most heavily for persistent surveillance and precision targeting.

The strategic objective that failed twice

In both the 12-day war of June 2025 and the subsequent 40-day war of 2026, a central operational objective was to neutralize Iran’s primary instrument of retaliation and offensive power: its ballistic missile force. The priority was to destroy the mobile transporter-erector-launchers (TELs) that make this arsenal particularly dangerous.

Unlike fixed missile silos, TELs can move, conceal themselves, and launch from dispersed locations, making them far harder to locate and destroy.

Iran’s launchers are housed in hardened underground complexes, locally known as “missile cities,” designed to withstand airstrikes. From these facilities, launchers emerge, fire their missiles, and retreat underground.

That creates a fundamental challenge for any attacking force: destroying the launchers means catching them above ground, and catching them above ground means knowing precisely when and where they will emerge.

To understand why the Majid matters, it is necessary to understand what Israel and the United States were trying to achieve. Satellites follow predictable orbital paths and cannot provide the persistent, real-time surveillance required to hunt mobile missile launchers.

Fighter aircraft can locate and destroy targets, but their time on station is limited. Only medium-altitude, long-endurance (MALE) unmanned aerial vehicles can loiter over launcher activity sites for hours, continuously observing, recording, and identifying targets.

This capability formed the backbone of Israel’s strategy during the 12-day imposed war. Israeli Air Force platforms, including the Hermes 900, the Heron family, and the Eitan (Heron TP), were tasked with maintaining persistent surveillance over known and suspected exit routes from underground missile bases, as well as the dispersal corridors used by launchers once they emerged.

The intelligence these UAVs collected – and their ability to provide direct laser designation for precision strikes – was critical to any serious effort to locate and destroy Iranian transporter-erector-launchers (TELs).

American MQ-9 Reapers, along with any remaining MQ-1 Predators in service, performed a similar role within the US Central Command (CENTCOM) targeting architecture.

The strategy was not inherently flawed. It drew on experience from earlier conflicts and on a doctrine shaped by two decades of operations in which MALE UAVs had operated with near-total impunity. The vulnerability lay in the assumption that this freedom of operation would continue. Iran had studied its adversaries’ dependence on persistent aerial surveillance and developed a system specifically designed to challenge it.

The decimation of the MALE fleet

The 12-day imposed war ended in a ceasefire requested by the US side, but the aerial campaign left behind a troubling picture for Israeli and American war planners. Persistent surveillance of Iran’s ballistic missile infrastructure failed to deliver the level of transporter-erector-launcher (TEL) attrition that the two militaries had anticipated and publicly claimed.

Iranian launchers survived, fired, and survived again. More concerning still, the MALE UAV fleet tasked with maintaining surveillance suffered losses that, while not necessarily decisive in isolation, pointed to a potentially systemic vulnerability.

By the time the 40-day war was launched on Iran, that vulnerability appeared even more pronounced. Despite the deployment of substantial additional American firepower, including EA-18G Growlers for electronic warfare and F-16CJ aircraft configured for the suppression of air defenses (SEAD), the attrition of MALE UAVs did not abate. According to the account presented here, it accelerated.

Press TV reported that losses had degraded the MQ-9 Reaper fleet sufficiently to prompt CENTCOM to bring older MQ-1 Predator drones out of storage to help sustain minimum sortie rates. This development pointed to a widening strain on the surveillance campaign.

The pattern described in the available footage is consistent with a threat to relatively slow-moving, high-endurance UAVs operating within range of Iran’s short-range air defenses. As Israeli surveillance capacity contracted, American platforms assumed more of the burden and suffered staggering losses of their own.

The strategic implications extend beyond the destruction of individual aircraft. Persistent aerial surveillance was central to the campaign to locate and strike Iran’s mobile missile launchers. Iranian air defenses could repeatedly force these surveillance platforms out of airspace, degrade their availability, and make sustained operations prohibitively costly.

The Majid may be an important part of that equation. Its significance lies not simply in the targets it has engaged, but in the fact that a relatively compact, short-range system can impose substantial costs on the sophisticated surveillance architecture.

Why Majid? The System That Answered the Threat

Iran operates various short-range air defense systems that include, among others, the Qaem-118 and the 358 loitering munition family, both of which have attracted significant analytical attention.

But it is the Majid, also marketed internationally as the AD-08, that is the most numerous short-range system in the Iranian arsenal, deployed across both the Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC) and the Iranian Army. Its numerical weight makes it the defining element of Iran’s low-altitude air defense.

The Majid was purpose-built for exactly the threat profile that MALE UAVs represent. Its engagement envelope extends to roughly 10 kilometers, and its target set is precisely the one that fills the threat picture: UAVs, helicopters, cruise missiles, and other relatively low-maneuvering platforms operating at low-to-medium altitudes.

It carries four ready-to-fire missiles with infrared homing seekers and proximity fuzes, a configuration that requires no continuous track illumination from the launch system and therefore limits the electronic signature the system radiates during an engagement.

The feature that makes it operationally decisive in this war, however, is its passive operating mode. The Majid can link with Iran’s broader integrated air defense network and receive data from ground-based radars, but it does not require that network to function. Its electro-optical sensor suite, thermal imagers and daylight cameras, is sufficient for target acquisition, tracking, and engagement.

The system can operate in complete electromagnetic silence. It emits nothing that an anti-radiation missile can home in on.

Why passive mode changes everything

The Israeli and American SEAD plan was coherent against a conventional threat. EA-18G Growlers would degrade and disrupt Iranian radar networks, providing electronic corridors through which MALE UAVs could penetrate and maintain persistent overwatch.

Dedicated F-16CJ aircraft carrying AGM-88 HARM missiles would hunt ground-based radar that dared illuminate, turning on a radar in this environment into a near-suicidal act.

Against an active radar-guided short-range system, this approach is effective. The radar emits, the HARM homes on it, and the launcher is destroyed. The window of safety for the MALE UAV expands.

Against the Majid in passive mode, this logic collapses entirely. There is nothing to home on. The HARM needs an emitter. The Growler’s jamming targets radar signals. A system that uses only thermal and optical sensors to find and kill a target cannot be jammed by a system designed to jam radar, and it cannot be engaged by a missile designed to ride a radar emission to its source.

Simplicity as a strategic weapon

The Majid’s utility is not limited to its passive operating mode. Its design philosophy of simplicity, low infrastructure requirements, and fast deployment transforms it from a point defense asset into a tool for offensive counter-air ambush.

The system can be transported to and sheltered in any hardened structure adequate to protect the crew and equipment. It requires no dedicated power infrastructure; a standard commercial generator is sufficient. Setup and deployment time is short.

These properties mean the system can be pre-positioned around known or anticipated UAV flight paths, the corridors that persistent surveillance platforms must use to reach and maintain station over missile base exit routes, and remain dormant, invisible, and silent until a target enters its engagement envelope.

Iranian forces exploiteded this capability. Rather than concentrating Majid systems in fixed defensive clusters around high-value sites, where their general location would eventually be characterized by Israeli and American intelligence, units were dispersed along the approach routes themselves.

A MALE UAV transiting toward its overwatch target area could, without warning, enter the engagement envelope of a system it had no electronic indication was present.

The combination of numerical density, Majid is the most numerous short-range system in the Iranian arsenal, with this distributed ambush employment meant that the threat was genuinely everywhere along the relevant corridors, not merely around the highest-priority nodes.

Export recognition and the AD-08 program

The Majid, first publicly unveiled in 2021 as a product of the Iranian Ministry of Defense, has been marketed around the world, with the system rebranded as AD-08 and displayed at multiple international defense expositions.

Deliveries to Armenia established the system’s first foreign operator and gave the export program a credible reference customer. The timing matters: Armenia’s procurement predates the war period, meaning the system’s operational validation in combat against MALE UAV fleets operated by technologically advanced militaries now provides a marketing proposition that no brochure can match.

The AD-08’s design lends itself to export precisely because of the characteristics that made it effective against Israeli and American UAV campaigns.

It requires no deep integration with an existing air defense network; it runs on readily available power; it is relatively simple to operate and maintain; and it addresses a threat that a large number of smaller militaries face: the MALE UAVs operated by a technologically superior adversary.

The system’s conflict record will not go unnoticed in defense procurement offices around the world.

The larger pattern

What the Majid story illustrates is a pattern that has recurred across every era of modern warfare.

The most sophisticated offensive system can be defeated not by an equally sophisticated defensive system, but by a purpose-built, asymmetric response that targets the one dependency the offensive system cannot eliminate.

The MALE UAV’s operational value rests on a single assumption: that it can loiter with impunity. It is slow, relatively large in thermal signature, and predictable in its flight patterns because those patterns are determined by mission requirements.

Every hour it remains on station over a target is an hour in which it presents a persistent, trackable heat source to any passive sensor system within range. The Majid only needs to be in the right place, silent, and patient.

Against the Zionist regime’s advanced military-industrial base and the powerful American air force in the world operating alongside it, Iran’s answer to the strategic problem of protecting its missile force was not starting a technological contest.

It was a clear-eyed analysis of where the adversary’s campaign was most vulnerable, persistent aerial surveillance, and an investment in the cheapest, quietest, most numerous way to deny it. The footage keeps coming. Another thermal feed, another slow-moving dot, another flash. The system and the strategy behind it work.

The doctrine of deliberate answers

The Majid story is ultimately about what happens when a military with limited but effiecient resources refuses to accept the terms of engagement its adversary prefers.

Iran’s missile force survived two imposed wars against opponents who had every conventional advantage, stealth aircraft, satellite networks, precision munitions, electronic warfare platforms, and the accumulated ISR infrastructure of the entire NATO military alliance.

It survived because it had done the harder work of identifying precisely how the weak points must be exploited, and constructed, quietly, a system designed for a single purpose.

The Majid is not a wonder weapon or long-range, it is not networked in ways that impress defense analysts, and it will not feature in magazine covers about the future of air combat.

It is an effective, inexpensive, passive system that does one job with exceptional effectiveness. In that simplicity lies the fact that strategic resilience is rarely about matching an adversary’s capability for capability. It is about finding the one thread that, if pulled, unravels their entire operational concept, and building something specifically designed to pull it.

Iran found that thread. The aerial footage of falling UAVs is its signature.