Iran Teases New Drone Visually Similar to Russia’s Lancet

Kicking off its foray into drone design and manufacturing in the 1980s during the Iran-Iraq War, Iran has gone on to create more than 50 different kinds of unmanned aerial vehicles, from reconnaissance and strike drones to loitering munitions.

Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps has teased a new drone design apparently taking cues from Russia’s distinct X-winged Lancet series of loitering munitions.

Footage of the new UAV, which has yet to be formally unveiled or named, was published by Iran’s Tasnim News Agency, with a one-second clip showing the drone taking off from an undisclosed location with the help of a rear-mounted rocket engine.

The news agency says the UAV is expected to “considerably boost the combat capabilities” of Iran’s ground forces, and to be used for “counter-ambush operations.”

“Assuming that the new loitering munition manufactured by the IRGC is inspired by the Russian-made Lancet, the drone must have a flight endurance of 30 to 60 minutes and carry a payload of 3 to 6 kilograms within a range of 40 kilometers,” Tasnim indicated.

The Russian loitering munitions going under the name «Lancet» actually constitute an entire lineup of kamikaze drones, all of them featuring a distinctive single or dual X-wing design. The newest among them, the Z-53 (aka Izdeliye-53, literally «Product-53») has foldout wings and a 5 kg weapons payload. The Lancet-3 and Lancet-1, meanwhile, have fixed wings, and a 3 and 1 kg payload, respectively.

Developers say the newest Lancet – the Z-53, includes the ability to engage in network-centric warfare, which allows for a swarm of drones united into a single neural network to operate in coordination with one another to maneuver and select targets – an idea first experimented with by Soviet anti-ship cruise missile designers in the 1980s.

Russia's Lancet drone. File photo - Sputnik International, 1920, 19.11.2023

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The first Lancets were previewed at a Russian military expo in 2019, and began appearing on the battlefield en masse in the Russia-NATO proxy war in Ukraine in the spring of 2023.

A simplified, budget-minded analogue of the Lancet known as the Scalpel was unveiled in late 2023. In February, Ukraine announced that it would begin the production of its own Lancet-style drone, signaling a begrudging recognition of the Russian UAV design’s potential.

Iran’s drone manufacturers have created over 50 different drone designs, from short-range tactical UAVs and loitering munitions to rocket and propeller-powered long-range reconnaissance, attack and electronic warfare drones.

The origins of Iran’s new X-winged, Lancet-style drone remain unknown, and no information about any possible cooperation with Russian UAV designers has been made available. However, the Iranians are known masters of stretching comparably modest resources dedicated to defense as far as possible to create capabilities on par with both friends and adversaries. With over three decades of experience making drones, Iran has prided itself on the creation of both entirely homegrown UAV designs and projects reverse-engineered from American and Israeli UAVs which made the mistake of flying into the Islamic Republic’s airspace.