Evolution of the Shahed-136

The evolution that led to this Shahed-136 class of loiter munition is worth a case study in understanding the very definition of technology itself. Many might find it hard to differentiate science from technology, but the shortest definition of technology can be stated thus: The use of scientific knowledge to solve a real-world problem or challenge is called technology. Thus, many technologies are never built till there is not a pressing real-world demand for the same.

An Indian example can be found in the light combat helicopter (LCH). Though the American Apache (AH-64) attack helicopter is well revered as one of the world’s best attack helicopters, it is made for fighting American wars. Unfortunately, their use cases did not include fighting at the highest battle station in the world — Siachen. Thus, only two nations really need to address this specific demand — a combat helicopter that can be deployed in the Siachen war theatre. Consequently, India developed LCH Prachand with one of the highest service ceilings in the world, displaying the country’s technological sovereignty. Service ceiling is the term used to denote the highest altitude serviceable by the aircraft.

In the case of Iran, it meant creating a lethal loiter munition while the country was under technology and supply chain embargoes. Along with studying the captured drone’s capabilities and the landscape of contemporary warfare tactics, Iran found a technological sweet spot in the Shahed-136. A kamikaze drone designed with accessible commercial grade components and by enhancing open-source technologies to carry an explosive payload that crashes into its target.

Cost and impact

Shahed-136 and its various variants are thus at least an order of magnitude cheaper than the interceptors that their adversaries use to neutralise them. And as the recent wars have shown, when used en-masse, they not only overwhelm the air defence systems and are harder to neutralise but also acutely skew the economics of warfare in their favour. 

Historically, military funding and budgets for weapon research only expanded to create more exclusive technologies that are costlier, faster and more precise, minimising collateral damage. Meanwhile, civilian technology developed exponentially and surpassed some military technologies. Only in the past decade nations took note and programmes like the US Defense Innovation Unit (DIU) and the Indian Innovations for Defence Excellence (iDEX) put in place policy incentives to incorporate civilian technology and entrepreneurship into their arsenals. But Iran leads, showing signs of success in this regard, past the technology and supply chain embargoes it endures, with many of its low-budget successes. The fact that the US acknowledged capturing, reverse engineering and deploying Shahed-136’s clone is a very commendable validation.

The Shahed-136 has identified such a sweet spot in recent international conflicts that all its adversaries have reverse engineered and deployed clones of their own. The world’s most funded military, the US forces, thus developed the clone, Low-cost Uncrewed Combat Attack System (LUCAS) drone. But as LUCAS leverages the original western chipsets, components, etc., and is made in higher labour cost regions, the Shahed-136 continues to be more cost competitive. Further, as discussed 

later, in future, if the western supply chains are restricted and more Chinese components populate the Shahed-136, its prices will get even more competitive.

The Ukrainians called the Russian Geran-2s the “flying mopeds” due to the characteristic sound of a moped it created because of its use of a moped engine. For a drone, the primary components are the airframe, the propulsion engine, and the avionics, including primarily the flight controller and the navigation system. 

Multiple publications mention the tear-down details of the Shahed-136 and its variants. These moped engines were developed through reverse engineering from the German 550cc Limbach L550E engine. A little more variety is observed in the avionics, but with a specific consistency. A report by the Institute of Science and International Security on Shahid-136’s electronics stated that of all the electronics components on board, “about 80 per cent originate in the US”, with Texas Instruments providing the most parts. The US continues to strive to restrict Russia and China from using these components, but they continue being leveraged with impunity in conflicts against the US, ranging from Ukraine to Iran.

The true efficacy of these drones is just as much in their economics as in their capabilities. The largest skew between the few thousand US-dollar drones and its multi-million-dollar interceptor is found in the decoy variant of the Shahed-136: The Gerbera (Russian name). It is priced around $10,000 per drone and also provides a good specimen for comparisons with other models.

Decoy drones today play a critical role, as also observed in Operation Sindoor. According to news reports, India deployed “dummy pilotless aircraft” to draw out the adversary’s air defence systems successfully. The above decoy deployment was validated as a “genius move” by Ryan Bodenheimer, a former US F-15E fighter pilot and aviation expert. India though used fighter jets mimicking decoy drones, which convinced Pakistan, through electronic signatures, that they were shooting down Rafales and other piloted Indian fighter jets. Pakistan was so convinced that it took this cognitive warfare as a proof enough and all the way to Europe and the US.

Chinese clones

Ukraine’s Main Intelligence Directorate of the Ministry of Defence reported the extensive utilisation of Chinese components in the Gerbera and other drones. Many of these are clones of the original products. For example, almost every serious drone hobbyist in India is conversant with the Pixhawk or CubePilot flight controllers and the long-range telemetry module named RFD900x. The above report mentions a Chinese flight controller from CUAV Technology Co Ltd Guangzhou City, China and Chinese copies of Australian RFDesign’s RFD900x module, among other Chinese clones.

Even though in 2022, CUAV reported restricting exports of its products to the Russian military, reports as late as 2025 continue to observe CUAV components in Russian drones. It is not known whether these are from older inventories or compromised supply chains. Both these examples do not classify as standard reverse engineered clones as they are based on open-source solutions available on the internet.

Open-source hardware designs and software source codes are openly accessible on public repositories like GitHub, under specific open-source licences, like the GNU General Public License, which enables the proliferation of the Intellectual Property (IP) instead of restricting it. Open-source transparency enables the user to analyse the whole design or source code and not only gain confidence in its functionality, but also to modify it.

If further torn down, both the open source CubePilot flight controller and its enhanced Chinese CUAV implementation are observed to utilise the STM32 microcontrollers from STMicroelectronics, Switzerland. Though both these solutions utilise the exact same European chip, Chinese and some Taiwanese companies are online selling pin-to-pin compatible chips with almost the very same functionality. “Almost” because some key functionality is either enhanced to one-up the original product or to evade legal challenges. There are at least nine Chinese mainland manufacturers offering compatible and cheaper clone options, including GigaDevice: GD32F103CBT6 and FlashChip Microelectronics: FCM32F103CBT6. These clones can be swapped with the original STM32 chip (STM32F103CBT6) on the original circuit board. Even though the US completely restricts China’s access to the high-end Extreme UltraViolet (EUV) based semiconductor technologies, these chips, fabricated with older mature semiconductor technologies, are abundantly available in China.

Moreover, even though Chinese pin-to-pin compatible chipsets exist today, the clone components found in the captured drones still utilise the original western chipsets. This implies a lack of confidence in the Chinese chipsets by their customers. But if tomorrow the US is successful in completely restricting the access to the originals and these Iranian, Russian and Chinese drone components are forced to utilise the Chinese compatible chips, the cost of these Gerbera and other drones will fall further.

This fall will further skew the cost asymmetry in their neutralisation with the present interceptors, thus creating an antifragile scenario, which the US might not prefer to do. The optimal solution the West can play to counter this antifragile scenario is by secretly introducing a kill switch in the original chips. By introducing a kill switch through a hardware trojan, the West can wean China off its chips. But would that be a viable solution? Such hardware trojans are not unheard of, but they are usually not utilised as they could spoil the market sentiment for the product. Rumours of similar controls on the F-35 stealth fighter are already creating bad press.

Historically, adversaries have reverse engineered captured weapons and equipment. Over the years, Iran has shown significant expertise in reverse engineering critical technologies. In the recent conflict with the US and Israel, Iran has downed multiple critical and high-end technology-based weapons. Iran has downed multiple MQ-9 reaper drones, at least one MQ-4C surveillance unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), Hermes 900 drones, F-15E fighter jets, C-130 transport planes, among other state-of-the-art weapons. Thus going forward, it is natural to expect the above shall be reverse-engineered, studied and leveraged in more potent tools of warfare by Iran.

Contrary to the popular belief, reverse-engineering can be legally accomplished in more ways than one. That starts with the very definition of reverse engineering itself. The US Supreme Court in its landmark judgement in the case of Kewanee Oil Co vs Bicron Corp (1974), stated “reverse engineering, that is, by starting with the known product and working backward to divine the process which aided in its development or manufacture.” Some might misread “divine” as “define” in that judgement order. That would be incorrect. Cambridge online dictionary provides the appropriate connotation of divine in this context to mean “to guess something.”

Another US Supreme Court judgement provides legitimacy towards the usage of reverse engineering. In the judgement on Bonito Boats, Inc vs Thunder Craft Boats Inc (1989), reverse engineering has been adjudged as “the very lifeblood of a competitive economy.” Similarly, Indian laws are favourably inclined towards reverse engineering and have helped the 

Indian pharmaceutical industry build a formidable international presence through legitimately reverse engineered drugs.

Jet engines are one of the critical technologies that are frequently developed through reverse or re-engineering. General Electric today makes some of the finest jet engines in the world. Their website has a full page dedicated to the Hush Hush Boys who helped develop the first jet engine in the US.

The Indian context

The Shahed-136 components also have an Indian connection. In August 2025, Hindustan Times reported that Ukraine had voiced its displeasure with the Ministry of External Affairs, when it spotted Indian components in the Shahed-136 drones. Two specific companies were highlighted — the Aura Semiconductor and the Vishay Intertechnology. Though Vishay sounds Indian, it is an S&P 600, Pennsylvania-headquartered company in the US. Aura Semiconductor is an Indian startup that was acquired by Wang Chengdong, founder of Shuangcheng Pharmaceutical Co Ltd in 2018 and established its new corporate identity as Ningbo Aura Semiconductor Co Ltd headquartered in Ningbo, China. Prima facie, the Aura Semiconductor website does not reveal its Chinese ownership. But their section on “Statement of Compliance with Export Control Regulations” provides further insights.

Few Indian drone manufacturers have also announced Shahed-136 equivalents like Sheshnaag-150 from NRT, Ltd  and KAL from IG Defence Ltd. 

As the Indian government continues to incentivise and nurture the Indian semiconductor ecosystem, it would benefit from creating Indian equivalents of these high-demand semiconductors. These equivalents can expedite the indigenous ecosystem creation and also boost exports. One of the first examples of leveraging this methodology can be found at the Indian Space Research Organisation (Isro). 

For years, Isro deployed a microprocessor from the European Space Agency (ESA) —developed family of processors, the LEON family, also called LEON3-FT. This allowed ISRO to mitigate a lot of risk associated with deploying a completely new chip in space. Along with LEON3-FT, its ecosystem of supporting hardware and software was also space-proven. Last year, Isro showcased Kalpana-3201, a microprocessor fabricated at the Semi-Conductor Laboratory (SCL) in Mohali, Punjab, with the same architecture. Excellent seamless progression. Kalpana seemingly competes with its international competitors from the likes of Cobham, US.

India has successfully developed several indigenous microprocessors primarily at academic institutes. But a clone of a high-volume selling microprocessor would go a long way. Even though such a clone might not accrue much academic interest, the process utilised for reverse engineering surely would, as shown in the Iranian research papers mentioned above. 

The Indian drone industry provides another example where Indian pin-to- pin compatible chips can help indigenise the Indian drone industry. The availability would allow manufacturers to just swap imported chips with Indian clones with least disruption. Even their price could be made competitive through import duties and incentives in government contracts.

Though STM32 series is taken as an example to elucidate the methodology, many such high-volume selling chips can be identified, including those that can even be fabricated at the SCL, Mohali, like the STM32 F0 series class. This methodology dovetails well with the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology’s plans of expanding support for chip designs in India Semiconductor Mission 2.0 (ISM2.0), as shared by the government in February. 

Countries with formidable indigenous drone technologies have utilised this divide and conquer methodology. Countries like Türkiye, Iran, Russia and China have matured their drone industries with similar strategies along with research. In the Indian context, deploying Indian designed and Indian manufactured NavIC chipsets for navigation provides another such starting point. Isro successfully showcased NavIC solutions produced by the SCL in its early NavIC deployments. This effort can be further strengthened to leverage SCL-made NavIC chipsets in commercial and recreational drones, paving the way for subsequent military use. 

The Aura Semiconductors also shows that India needs routine policy checks on foreign acquisitions of Indian grown companies to safeguard its national interests. Many developed countries have such policies in place like The Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States.

India has a lot of room to catch-up to countries like Iran, China, and the developed nations on reverse engineering. Large sector and technology specific reverse engineering technologies and companies are yet to take root in India, though ad-hoc and superficial reverse engineering efforts are common. For starters, reverse engineering needs to be taught in engineering colleges as an approved stream by the All India Council for Technical Education, like mechanical, electrical and civil. Research shows that reverse engineering can speed up new product development time by about 60 per cent in simpler products and by about 80 per cent in complex products.

India has come a long way since the first big national level drone ecosystem starter programme was conducted by the Indian Air Force. The Mehar Baba Swarm Drone competition started in 2018 and showcased its first winners in 2021. It set a benchmark for the Indian industry to achieve not just with individual drones but with drone swarms, such as teams of intercommunicating drones. As most of the technologies were open sourced, accessible online and well documented in social media, the programme was an instant success nationwide. But three years later, the Indian Ministry of Defence issued a memo directing industry associations to guide companies towards zero use of Chinese components in the drones for military procurements. Later in 2024, the Indian Army put on hold a multi-crore drone procurement and later in 2025 cancelled it completely. The change was primarily from the government’s side, its procurement processes matured, officials learnt to better appreciate drone internals, and procurement processes refined to be more robust to known vulnerabilities. In short, the government procurement policies hit an inflexion point, and transitioned from incentivising only the idea to incentivising the execution as well.  

To realise the ambition of Viksit Bharat by 2047, the next 21 years shall see many such policy inflections, especially because developing technological sovereignty is an imperative in today’s zeitgeist. Thus, the technology procurement strategies highlighted above from reverse engineering of captured products, enhancing open sourced solutions, cloning and plugging into international supply chains, creating antifragile supply chain scenarios, restricting predatory acquisitions, and other similar strategies, shall need to be leveraged.