Iran's Global Game of Drones (& How To Stockpile While Sanctioned) (feat. Kerri Bitsoff)
About this episode
The episode discusses Iran's drone and missile programs, their resilience under sanctions, and the implications for U.S. foreign policy.
For years, Washington has leaned on sanctions to contain Iran’s most dangerous capabilities. Tehran’s drone and missile programs didn’t just survive under pressure, they adapted, scaled, and in many ways thrived, fueled in part by Western-made components slipping through global supply chains. The result: a procurement network that’s harder to disrupt, more resilient, and still very much intact. Now, Tehran isn’t just building for itself. It’s exporting the model — arming Russia in Ukraine, supplying proxies across the Middle East, and even laying the groundwork for drone production in places like Venezuela, putting parts of the United States within range. So the question isn’t whether sanctions work — it’s whether we’re hitting the right targets. To break all of this down, host Mark Dubowitz is joined by Kerri Bitsoff — a former senior official at the U.S. Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) who has been called a ‘secret weapon’ in the fight against Iran's weapons procurement.
People in this episode
Host: Mark Dubowitz
Guest: Kerri Bitsoff
Topics covered
- sanctions
- drone programs
- weapons procurement
- global supply chains
- military exports
- Middle East
- U.S. foreign policy
Keywords
- Iran
- drones
- sanctions
- weapons procurement
- Kerri Bitsoff
- Mark Dubowitz
- military exports
- global supply chains
- U.S. Treasury
Mentioned in this episode
Organizations: U.S. Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control
Places: Iran, Russia, Ukraine, Venezuela, United States
More episodes of The Iran Breakdown with Mark Dubowitz
- No March on Tehran: The Military Logic of the Iran War (feat. John Spencer)
- Operation Economic Fury (feat. Miad Maleki and Rich Goldberg)
- Regime Revisionism: Tehran's War Before the Iran War (feat. Jay Solomon & Negar Mojtahedi)
- War of the Words in Iran (feat. Ali Ansari)
- From Tehran to Taipei: How the Iran War Reshapes China’s Taiwan Calculus (feat. Matt Pottinger)
- Breaking Down The Islamic Republic (Cliff May feat. Mark Dubowitz)
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