Colin Demarest on the Iran Conflict and Drone Warfare

For years, the Pentagon talked about drone dominance as a strategy: hundreds of thousands of expendable drones, a military that could outpace and overwhelm any adversary, the factory as the weapon. Then Iran shot down an American fighter jet, and we stopped talking about strategy and started watching it get tested in real time—with results more complicated than any briefing slide suggested.

My guest this week has been covering the future of defense long enough to know the distance between what the Pentagon says and what's actually happening on the battlefield. Colin Demarest authors Axios's Future of Defense newsletter and has been deep inside the Iran conflict coverage since the first strike. He's watched brand-new weapon systems get their first real-world test, tracked the costs as they climb, and kept asking the harder question underneath all of it: whether the defense industrial base that built those weapons can sustain a long fight.

"Almost everything" has been a surprise

I opened by asking what has surprised him so far. "Almost everything," he said. "I think everyone is surprised about a lot, honestly." New weapons, new software, new hardware. Some people expected the conflict to be in-and-out—"dust your hands, we're good here"—and were surprised by its length. Others weren't surprised at all. The number that sticks with him came from Pew Research: roughly 54% of U.S. adults think the conflict will run another six months. "Maybe that number is what's surprising me so much," he said. "Like half of America thinks we're in this for a very long haul."

Drone reality versus the briefing slide

We got specific about the new systems. The PRSM—"Prism"—missile is, as he put it, "probably a very sensitive, controversial one" after outlets including the New York Times and the BBC reported it struck a school and a sports hall in Iran, a claim CENTCOM disputed and the BBC pushed back on. He was careful not to overstate what he doesn't know. The LUCAS drones he had more of a read on: "Admiral Brad Cooper has said they're indispensable." What makes them fascinating is their origin story—they are Iranian Shahed drones "basically taken back to America, re-engineered, maybe boosted, maybe improved a little bit, stamped with Made in America and then sent back overseas," and from a small company, not a Lockheed or a Northrop.

Then there's the phrase he wrote that stuck with me—"the factory is the weapon"—now colliding with the reality of a U.S. fighter jet going down. Colin pushed back gently on drawing too neat a line. Production is the hot conversation right now, from interceptor stockpiles to offensive and defensive missiles to drones, but "I don't know if you can put the drone and the F-15E Strike Eagle in the same category." He recalled Elon Musk tweeting that FPV quadcopters would replace the F-35: "And that's just nonsense. One can't do the other." The real work, he argued, is "finding the right balance, finding what you need to produce more of, less of, quicker, slower." And he offered a warning worth repeating: "If anyone tells you they know the exact algorithm and the exact quantities of everything that we need, they're lying or they're trying to sell you something."

What the New Jersey drone panic actually revealed

I couldn't have Colin on—both of us from New Jersey, along with my production company—without asking about the drones over the Garden State. He laughed; his mom still sends him photos of the sky. "I don't think it was aliens above New Jersey," he said. "They could go way cooler places than like Newark Airport." His read is that a lot of people suddenly became aware of something and "had never really maybe looked up at the sky before." But the serious point underneath the jokes is a real one. He wrote that the episode "exposed just how bad the plans are for suburban America," and he connected it to genuine vulnerability: "That has real implications for like the World Cup or the Super Bowl." Awareness, in other words, cuts both ways.

Can the industrial base sustain a long fight?

The number that keeps surfacing in Colin's reporting is the cost of the conflict—north of $16 billion and climbing. So I asked the question at the center of his beat: is the defense industrial base actually built to sustain a long fight, or have we been planning for a war we expected to win quickly? He laid out both sides. Those who want to re-industrialize America will tell you the base isn't built for a sustained conflict like Russia-Ukraine. But there's another argument: "We don't have a procurement issue, we have an appropriation issue." Sure, we could make more missiles, "but where's that money coming from? We can't even pass a budget." The Lockheeds and Northrops can build more factories, "but they need the money and the commitment from the Pentagon," and standing up a new bomb factory isn't casual—"that takes a lot of work and a lot of planning and just a lot of commitment all around."

How a guy from New Jersey got this beat

"By pure accident," Colin said when I asked how he landed here. He went to school in South Carolina for journalism and photography, wanted to do politics, and got his first paid byline covering Trump in the 2016 primaries—at a barn, with squash and broccoli as the backdrop. ("I have the photo. I'm not making this up.") Back in South Carolina, about twenty minutes from his newsroom sat the Savannah River Site, a Department of Energy/NNSA facility known for tritium production, aging radioactive-waste tanks, and eventually plutonium pits for warheads—and nobody was writing about it at length. His editors let him explore it, and he spent four and a half years on nuclear weapons policy, production, and cleanup. "That is my favorite beat," he said. "The consequences of that conversation are potentially world-ending, and that's what makes it so grave and exciting." From there he was scooped up by Defense News and Military Times and C4ISRNET—"I say I covered everything you couldn't see"—before Axios called and asked if he wanted to write about the future. "I was like, sure, let's do it."

He's clearly found his home. "The defense and Pentagon press corps is incredible," he told me, describing conferences and travel spent together. He has deep respect for local news as "the most important kind of bastion of newsmaking," even as he admits he doesn't want to go back to covering the planning commission. His pitch for the intensity of his beat is one of my favorite lines of the conversation: "If you think you've ever seen people worked up at a political rally, you've never been to a zoning board appeal."

Access, rhetoric, and where the information really lives

We talked about the Pentagon's recent moves to change media access. Colin, who used to be in the building once or twice a week, was measured. Turning in the badge and declining to sign the new paperwork "wasn't like the biggest blow to my reporting"—he does his job from home just fine. He acknowledged the larger concerns about press freedom, including a plan to shutter the correspondents' corridor and move reporters to some undisclosed annex. But his core prediction was firm: "I don't think locking out journalists or booting journalists from a building will keep them from reporting. If anything, I think it will backfire and have more people leak." As I put it, tell someone not to go in the room and they'll want to look in the room. "Absolutely," he said.

That led us to the gap he covers best: the space between what officials say and what happens. After the Defense Secretary claimed the U.S. had achieved dominance over Iranian skies—just before a jet went down—how does he read that? He was careful about the technical definitions of "superiority" versus "dominance," which he didn't want to botch, but the larger point was clear: "There is definitely a gap between rhetoric and what's happening on the ground or in the skies." His rule of thumb: "You only need one percent for something to go wrong," so "I would take anyone's comments about being bulletproof with a grain of salt." He also sees the center of gravity for information shifting. "Most inquiries made get referred to the White House," he said—even questions to the Navy about a Navy ship. "It's your ship. Why do I have to ask the White House about it? And you can read into that what you would like."

The "megadecade" and what he's chasing next

Colin has called this a "megadecade" for defense, and three months into the Iran conflict he stands by it: the Davidson window and Taiwan, the rise of China and its nuclear arsenal, an ongoing Russia-Ukraine war, and now Iran offering a read into what a modern U.S. war looks like. "Sure, it might be a little bit of marketing, but I think it's still a good read." He broke the story that the U.S. passed on Ukraine's offer to share battle-proven anti-drone technology before the conflict—crediting colleagues who led it—and he's genuinely curious about the willingness to actually learn lessons from Ukraine "versus just talking about them," knowing those lessons still have to get into budgets and doctrine. The larger Russia-Ukraine question, he expects, "will take a long time to digest."

As for what he's chasing right now, the honest answer is that it changes by the hour. On the day we talked, he was watching NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte come to Washington to mend fences with President Trump—who had just called NATO a "paper tiger" from the White House podium. "I'm fascinated by what's going to happen behind closed doors there." The pace, he admits, is addicting. As his colleague likes to say, "you have to be a little sick in the head to do this nonstop." It's a breakneck pace, "and you just got to keep your head on straight."

Key Takeaways

- Roughly 54% of U.S. adults expect the Iran conflict to continue for another six months, per Pew Research — longer than many initially assumed.

- The LUCAS drone program repurposes captured Iranian Shahed drones, re-engineered and redeployed by a small U.S. company, not a major defense contractor.

- Demarest frames the sustainability question as an appropriations problem, not a production problem: "we don't have a procurement issue, we have an appropriation issue."

- The conflict's cost has already topped $16 billion and continues climbing.

- He predicts restricting Pentagon press access will increase leaks rather than reduce reporting: "it will backfire and have more people leak."

Find Colin Demarest

Colin Demarest is a defense reporter at Axios, where he writes the Future of Defense newsletter—covering the Pentagon, the defense industrial base, drones, nuclear policy, and the technologies shaping national security. Before Axios, he reported for Defense News, Military Times, and C4ISRNET, and spent years covering nuclear weapons at the Savannah River Site. His newsletter goes out every Wednesday and you can subscribe on the Axios website; he also helps lead Axios's defense events, including the annual Future Defense Summit.

The Friday Reporter is hosted by Lisa Camooso Miller. Listen wherever you get your podcasts — and subscribe so you never miss a conversation.