That image stuck with me through my whole conversation with Malcolm Nance.
The story: an American F-15 pilot, shot down over Iran, had a long ride under his parachute to watch what hit him.
What he saw, per the intel debrief, was hundreds of Iranian drones holding a pattern in the sky.
Big ones up high, smaller ones below, staggered across a known flight corridor. An aerial minefield
Malcolm, who has actually run drone units in Ukraine, lit up at it.
He says the Iranians took the same cheap tech behind those choreographed drone light shows you see over the UAE, strapped explosives to each one, and turned a fireworks display into a wall of hovering shrapnel.
Fly through it and you "FOD" your engines, the same way a bird strike downed that jet over the Hudson.
His real warning is what it means next.
America has spent decades and billions chasing drone-swarm tech, and a teenager in the IRGC may have just fielded a working version for pennies.
There's no clean defense.
And the same trick that wrecked 40 Russian bombers in Ukraine's truck operation could, he argues, be smuggled into Gulf waters and turned loose.
@MalcolmNance
