Last month's Iranian drone strike on Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia appears to have inflicted a costly toll on U.S. forces in the region. Theattack destroyeda U.S. Air Force E-3 Sentry Airborne Warning and Control System aircraft and damaged multiple KC-135 refueling tankers, highlighting a major gap in U.S. air defenses against cheap attack drones.
Nearly a month after the drone strike on Prince Sultan Air Base, and following multiple reports that Ukrainian drone forces had been shifted into the region,Reutersconfirmed Wednesday morning that the U.S. has deployed Ukrainian counter-drone technology to defend against Iranian-developed Shahed drones.
At the center of this new security effort to fortify the airspace above Prince Sultan Air Base against low-cost Iranian one-way attack drones is Sky Map, a Ukrainian command-and-control platform used to detect incoming drones. The coordinated response to Shaheds is the use of interceptor drones.
"There have been longstanding gaps in U.S. air and missile defense coverage around the world," said Timothy Walton, a senior fellow at the Washington-based Hudson Institute think tank. "This has been well understood. However, it hasn't been addressed."
Ukrainian drone experts reportedly traveled to the base in recent weeks to train U.S. personnel on Sky Map and the use of interceptor drones.
Sky Fortress, the Ukrainian company behind Sky Map, has been active extensively in the Eastern European theater, with more than10,000 acoustic sensorsdeployed to detect Russian drone attacks.
Thebigger story hereis that Ukraine is emerging as a major dealer of the latest low-cost weapon technology forged through four years of war with Russia:
Zelensky Goes Full "Lord Of War" As Ukraine Pitches Battle-Tested War Robots To Highest Bidder
Zelensky's Interceptor Drones Deployed Across Eurasia, Now Shooting Down Iranian Shaheds
Ukraine Becomes World's AI Weapons Laboratory
Source: ZeroHedge News
