Every once in a while, human beings invent a machine that changes everything and more often than anyone would like to admit, that change seems to be for the worse. For every vibrator there seems to be at least 16 smart bombs and even the vibrators are made in the same factories that produce the bombs, often with child labor and toxic run-off.
Some of these machines are worse than bad. Some of them are downright monstrous. Technological Frankenstein monsters that seem to advance mercilessly while their proud human parents devolve in their wake. The steam engine that powered Manifest Destiny. The atom bomb that erased entire cities. That government tracking device that keeps going off in your pocket.
In the 21rst century, the modern world has become a Frankenstein empire with a thousand terrible new machines produced per minute as resources dwindle and the emotional wellbeing of entire generations crashes with the bombs. We call this progress, but what it really amounts to is slavery in exchange for convenience. The problem isn't even really the devices themselves, but rather the fact that human beings seem to take less and less moral inventory with every new device produced. Nobody stops to ask the simple question of 'Is this good for me? Do I need this? Does anyone really need this?' before pressing 'except' on their computer screen.
The end result is a brave new world where life is cheap and oppression is downright affordable. Prisons pop up like mushrooms. Surveillance cameras are everywhere. And there are more drones in the sky than monarch butterflies. But hey, now I can buy chicken nuggets with my phone!
The only bright side to this strangely convenient dystopia is that with the mass production of quite literally everything, resistance becomes as cheap as oppression. A 13-year-old autistic kid in Bishkek can shut down the factory giving her asthma with one of those phones it produces. A widowed mother of six in the African Sahel can evade sanctions with crypto currency and buy insulin on the dark web. In the best-case scenarios, entire populations find the opportunity to play the monster on the cheap and get even with the Frankenstein Empire, at least for a minute.
And so, once upon a time, there was a starving Siberian hick named Mikhail Kalashnikov who grew up tinkering with rusty tractors and ancient hunting rifles. After serving in the Red Army during the Second World War as a tank commander and getting wounded in the Battle of Bryansk, Mikhail used his largely self-taught engineering skills to design a combat rifle based on the Sturmgewehr 44 brought over by the Nazis who turned the Soviet Union into a colossal graveyard of scorched villages and ruined cities.
This machine would become what is now known as the AK-47. It was reliable even under the harshest conditions, so easy to operate that even a novice dirt farmer could wield it with deadly efficiency, but above all else, it was cheap and easy to produce. So much so that soon every communist country under contract with Stalin was producing their own version and soon so were many of the people that they oppressed.
The AK-47 has a fearsome reputation in the west and for good reason but across the Third World it has become a symbol of resistance. If the Winchester is the gun that won the west, then the Kalashnikov is the gun that liberated Africa and Southeast Asia. It was this Soviet Frankenstein machine that allowed many peasants to even the playing field with their conquistadors and this included Pashtun farmers and Chechnyan militiamen going toe to toe with the remnants of Mikhail's Red Army.
Now, long after the collapse of the Soviet Union, in countries like the Congo and Somalia, you can buy Kalashnikov's monster from a back-alley counterfeiter for as low as six dollars or the price of a chicken or a sack of grain, meanwhile Hezbollah fights genocide beneath a flag marked by the silhouette of the rifle they fight it with.
Of course, there are still plenty of evil people who wield this machine as well. Hell, the IDF still carries the IMI Galil, an assault rifle largely based on the Kalashnikov model. But there is no denying that the AK-47 changed the way that wars are fought and helped give rise to the specter of the Third World guerrilla as a force to be reckoned with. Today we are seeing a similar revolution in technological mutation transpiring across the Middle East with Iran's Shahed drone.
Much like the AK-47, this was a device produced by a nation under siege using the guts of their enemies' devices as a model. Iran's drone program goes back to the American financed Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s that brought another revolutionary government in its infancy to the brink of extinction, but most of the biggest breakthroughs in Iran's drone program came after 2011 when an IRGC cyber warfare unit managed to hack a Lockheed Martin RQ-170 being operated in Iranian airspace by the CIA, using GPS signals and communication jamming technology to force the multi-million dollar machine to land largely intact.
Even then, smug western analysts doubted the Islamic Republic could duplicate such advanced first world technology, but Iran pretty easily reverse engineered their enemies' toy and made it the basis for a machine that now threatens American dominance across the Middle East and beyond.
Most Shahed drones are what is known as loitering munitions, which are essentially remote-control Kamikaze planes. They are cheap and relatively simple to produce in mass by necessity. They were developed under heavy sanctions from largely commercially available parts smuggled in piecemeal from Poland, Japan, Turkey, India, Vietnam and dozens of other countries, then put together in small factories built underground, just beneath the reach of IDF bombs.
It is precisely the poverty of the Shahed's production however that has allowed it to haunt the skies over the American Empire in the Persian Gulf.
Your average American air-to-air missile or ground-based interceptor used to defend American bases in the region generally runs somewhere between $400,000 and $1.2 million dollars to produce. Your average Shahed drone costs about $20,000 bucks. The result of this equation is a massive munitions gap. After hurling heaps of cheap American knockoffs at our bases and the quisling emirates that cloister them for just a few months, Washington has run dangerously low on the weapons we use to hold the world hostage while Iran just keeps producing more and more drones from the ruins.
This is how a nation with virtually no navy or air force left standing sent American forces packing, abandoning many of their bases across the Gulf with their tails between their legs. A recent Pentagon Inspector General Report puts the total cost of Trump's war for Israel in Iran at about $38 billion dollars and warns of near unprecedented strategic munitions shortfalls and resupply bottlenecks.
And just like the Kalashnikov, the Shahed is spreading. Yemen's Houthi rebels are currently holding their own against the heavily armed and US backed Saudis in a conflict that Donald Trump appears to be afraid to enter openly. It is widely reported with little evidence that the Houthis entire drone fleet is essentially a gift for the IRGC, but all actually available evidence cries bullshit on this claim.
It is undeniable that the Houthis are certainly using the Shahed blueprint and they appear to have been supplied with some Iranian guidance systems but everything else appears to be the kind of cheap commercial swag from the Chinese market available to any low-rent Austin hobby shop, split up and smuggled across multiple shipping containers to evade imperial embargos.
The Houthis have also smuggled in earthmoving machinery and ventilation equipment necessary for underground manufacturing and why not? This is how Iran built a drone industry from the ruins of their own American proxy war. Why buy fish when fishing rods are twice as cheap? The Houthis have expanded their industry to largely indigenous designs and other Shia militias appear to be following in their footsteps, but the Axis of Resistance would be wise not to get cocky. After all, those who kill by the drone die by the drone.
While Iran licenses Russia to build their own Shaheds to kill civilians in Ukraine, Ukraine has torn a page from Iran's playbook and has used the wreckage to make their own knockoffs, now being used to kill civilians in Russia, and the US is too; reverse engineering the reverse engineered and improved Shahed and declaring the resulting Frankenclone the LUCAS drone, and round and round we go.
This is the law of Frankenstein. The fruit of progress. Every new monster creates a template for the next new monster and once the monster is out of the grave, there is no putting it back in, especially when you can download the blueprint to build your own on 4chan. Thomas Sankara and Muammar Gadafi would tell you if they could, they were both buried with half a mag of Soviet ammo weighing down their caskets.
It is likely inevitable now that lonely teenage lunatics in Akron, Ohio will build a Shahed of their own in their stepdad's basement. I can only urge them to consider the data center two towns over as a target instead of the children's hospital down the street and pray to Kali that the grid goes down before it can take us all down with it.
Peace, Love & Empathy- Nicky/CH
Soundtrack: Songs That Influenced this Post
* Supernaut by Black Sabbath
* Gimme Gimme Gimme by Black Flag
* Paranoid Android by Radiohead
* Raw Power by the Stooges
* Cars by Gary Numan
* Animal Nitrate by Suede
* Iron Man by Black Sabbath
* Beauty and the Beast by David Bowie
* Frankenstein by New York Dolls
* Search & Destroy by the Stooges
