MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:
Today, Iran's new supreme leader issued what we think is his first official statement as supreme leader. In it, Mojtaba Khamenei vowed to keep the Strait of Hormuz closed and vowed to continue attacks on U.S. interests in the Middle East. Khamenei did not read the statement himself. Another person was heard reading it while a photo of the supreme leader posted on the TV screen. The message comes on this - the 13th day of war with Iran, a war that seems to be ushering in a new phase of combat, one that is both high tech and low cost. I discussed this earlier today on NPR's national security podcast, Sources & Methods, along with NPR international correspondent Daniel Estrin and Pentagon correspondent Tom Bowman.
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KELLY: Tom, you and I have spent a fair bit of time recently on this podcast talking drones - how they are changing warfare. Iran is using them very effectively in this war.
TOM BOWMAN: No. They are indeed. And Iran has many, many thousands of Shahed drones, and they're using them - as you say - effectively. They killed six American soldiers at a facility in Kuwait. Just today, one of these drones hit the presidential palace in Kuwait. The U.S. is rushing air defenses, anti-drone technology and attack drones to the region.
But the bottom line is this. There are so many drones - Shahed drones. They're small. They're fast. You can swarm them. It's hard to hit every single one, so some of them are getting through.
KELLY: Well, and it's been fascinating to watch. It's almost like an arms race unfolding between this war, between the ongoing war in Ukraine, with Iran and Russia and the U.S. and Ukraine and all these players trying to just stay one step ahead of each other with drones.
BOWMAN: No. There's no question about that, especially in Ukraine. This is really the first drone war in Ukraine. And I'm told every day 6,000 drones go back and forth between Russia and Ukraine and Ukraine into Russia. And every several days, Ukrainians are changing their software in their drones. They are the masters of drones as we speak. But it is changing warfare.
KELLY: And the U.S. is tapping them, saying, hey...
BOWMAN: Right.
KELLY: Help us.
BOWMAN: Yeah.
KELLY: Share your expertise.
BOWMAN: Right.
KELLY: How do you do what you do so we can apply it...
BOWMAN: The Ukrainians...
KELLY: ...In this Iran war?
BOWMAN: The Ukrainians are coming to the United States, helping the Americans with drone technology, with tactics. You know, what's really amazing is the Americans got ahold of one of these Shahed drones in Ukraine. The Ukrainians turned it over to the Americans, and they actually reengineered the Shahed drone at this company in Arizona. Now they're cranking out basically reengineered Shaheds, and they're calling them LUCAS. And again, this is a game changer for warfare. This is much like the machine gun in World War I and the dawn of aircraft in World War I, as well. This is, again, changing warfare forever.
KELLY: Daniel, Israel is a player with drones, but I want to ask you about a different technology that Israel is using to target Iran. Walk us through the cyber war that Israel is waging.
DANIEL ESTRIN: Yeah. It's Israel. It's the U.S. It's also Iran. They're all fighting, maybe even more than ever before, out in the open and on this kind of hybrid battlefield, a battlefield that combines the physical and the digital worlds. So this involves, for instance, Israel is believed to have used AI to synthesize billions of data points to - well, data that they collected - Israeli intelligence agencies collected in Iran in order to synthesize all that and to build a bank of targets in Iran. It's also combining the cyber world with this very ancient art form in warfare of deceiving your enemies, and Israel's done a lot of that.
KELLY: Talk me - like, what does that actually look like? Give me an example.
ESTRIN: I spoke to a senior military official in Israel's Planning and Operations Directorate in the military headquarters, who gave me a few details. He called this white noise tactics that Israel deployed at the start of the war to maintain the element of surprise, so Iran wouldn't know that Israel was about to launch this opening blitz and kill the supreme leader and many more of its top leadership.
For instance, this official told me that Israel assumed that Iran had access to Chinese satellite imagery spying on Israel. And so the U.S. amassed their warplanes in southern Israel in the days before the strike, trying to distract Iran from what was really going on, which was Israel planning that surprise blitz from a base in northern Israel. Another tactic he said they used was making sure that Israel's military generals didn't have their cars parked in their normal parking spots at military headquarters the night of the strike in case any Iranians were watching.
So there's that, and then there's psychological warfare that Israel has been employing. In last year's Israeli war in Iran, Israel bombed the notorious Evin Prison in Tehran. And this official told me that after they did that, they actually sent videos of the bombing to Iranian officials - basically the message being, you're not as strong as you think, so intimidating them.
KELLY: That was NPR international correspondent Daniel Estrin in Tel Aviv and Pentagon correspondent Tom Bowman. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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