US air defenses may not be able to intercept many of Iran’s one-way drones

By Natasha Bertrand, Kylie Atwood, Sarah Ferris, Piper Hudspeth Blackburn, CNN

(CNN) — Trump administration officials told lawmakers during a closed-door briefing on Capitol Hill Tuesday that Iran’s Shahed attack drones represent a major challenge and US air defenses will not be able to intercept them all, according to a source in the briefing.

The drones, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Dan Caine acknowledged, are posing a bigger problem than anticipated, two sources in the briefing told CNN. They are known to fly low and slow – a feature that makes them more able to evade air defenses than ballistic missiles. Another source familiar with the briefing said the officials made an attempt to downplay concerns about the drones and noted that Gulf state partners had been stockpiling interceptors.

The officials were on the Hill briefing lawmakers as the war with Iran escalates, threatening to spark a global energy crisis and destabilize the Middle East. President Donald Trump said on Tuesday that most of Iran’s military installations have been “knocked out” and that new strikes have targeted Iranian leadership.

The officials, a source familiar with the briefing told CNN, were dismissive of questions about how the US would prevent Iran from becoming a failed state, and they said that regime change was an ancillary goal. In their presentation to lawmakers, they reiterated Trump’s recently laid out goals: to destroy Iran’s missile capabilities, its navy, end its nuclear weapon ambitions and stop the country from arming militant groups.

The officials also did not indicate who they thought the next supreme leader would be, according to a source familiar with the briefing. The former supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, was killed by the United States and Israel last week, and Trump has said that many of the potential successors have been killed in the operation. The complex process of finding a successor is underway.

Lawmakers emerged from the meeting with vastly different expectations on how long the conflict could drag on. Republican Sen. Tommy Tuberville of Alabama said the briefers, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio, presented a timeline for US involvement in the conflict to be wrapped up in three to five weeks — echoing some of the president’s own public comments. But GOP Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri, said he believed the officials did not communicate a possible end date. “It sounded very open-ended to me,” he said.

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries also said the briefers indicated that the war could drag on for weeks.

“There’s no explanation as to what actually prompted the decision to pursue this war of choice, in the absence of any evidence that there was an imminent threat to the United States of America or American interests in the region,” he said.

Jeffries, a Democrat, sidestepped a question about if he’d back a request from the administration for supplemental defense funding, telling CNN, “Right now, what’s in front of us is the resolution to reassert congressional authority because of the failure of the administration to seek support from Congress for this endless war.”

Jeffries’ comments come as Democrats grow increasingly uneasy about the amount of munitions that have been used in the conflict and what it could mean for US defenses in the region and beyond.

Sen. Mark Kelly, a Democrat from Arizona who sits on the Senate Armed Services Committee, warned that “we do not have an unlimited supply.”

“The Iranians do have the ability to make a lot of Shahed drones, ballistic missiles, medium range, short range and they’ve got a huge stockpile. So at some point … this becomes a math problem and how can we resupply air defense munitions. Where are they going to come from?” Kelly said.

Meanwhile, pressed on whether he would call the US military action a war despite Congress’ lack of role in authorizing force there, House Speaker Mike Johnson called it “an operation.”

“It’s a dangerous operation and an important one. We had to act because there was an imminent threat, but there’s not a declaration of war,” he said.

Congress hasn’t voted to authorize war with Iran, prompting sharp criticism from Democrats and some Republicans who compare the conflict to the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, which lawmakers voted to authorize. Republican defenders of Trump’s action say the Iran campaign is like President Barack Obama’s intervention into Libya where he did not seek congressional approval.

Measures in both the House and the Senate that would require Trump to get congressional approval to continue the military campaign are both expected to fail this week.

The-CNN-Wire
™ & © 2026 Cable News Network, Inc., a Warner Bros. Discovery Company. All rights reserved.

CNN’s Lauren Fox, Alison Main, Manu Raju and Morgan Rimmer contributed to this report.