An Iranian Shahed drone apparently struck and downed a US Army AH-64 Apache helicopter near the Strait of Hormuz on June 8 - and investigators are not sure the hit was intentional.
US officials speaking anonymously to Axios confirmed the drone strike, and The New York Times later verified the account through its own sources. One official told the Times that military investigators are still assessing whether the Shahed was deliberately aimed at the Apache or whether it was an accidental collision. Iran has been firing Shahed drones into the Gulf region at scale since late February 2026, when the United States and Israel jointly struck Iran to open the current conflict. The vast majority of those drones have hit stationary or slow-moving targets: Amazon data centers, energy infrastructure, and commercial vessels transiting the Strait of Hormuz.
The Apache costs around $25 million and carries a crew. The Shahed costs a small fraction of that and requires no pilot to lose. If the hit was accidental, that may be the worse finding: cheap, mass-produced one-way drones do not need to be smart or precisely guided to be dangerous. Fire enough of them and probability does the targeting for you.
The US military has been wrestling with this asymmetry since watching Ukraine burn through expensive interceptors to shoot down cheap Iranian drones. The economics have not improved.