Since at least 2022, a small group of senior Houthi intelligence and smuggling officials in Sana’a have built a web of relationships across the African coasts of the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden. Houthi smuggling networks are now present in Somalia, Djibouti, Eritrea, and Sudan. The group is recruiting smugglers, intelligence agents, and fighters from marginalized cross-border communities around the region. In one case, the Houthis trained, between 2016 and 2024, around 150 men from the Afar community that straddles the borders of Eritrea, Ethiopia, and Djibouti, eventually deploying some of them to the front lines of the Yemen war…Since the turn of the millennium, Tehran has been notable not only for developing UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles) for its own use but also for pursuing two tracks of UAV proliferation. Iran has sold finished systems and manufacturing blueprints to allied states like Russia, Sudan, and Venezuela. And it has transferred both complete systems and the knowledge needed to build them to nonstate partners like Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Houthis.
Source: Century Foundation
Overview: Hubs, Spokes, and Worldwide Webs
[Full Report below]
In February 2026, the United States and Israel launched a war on Iran that they hoped would once and for all break the back of the Islamic Republic and its so-called Axis of Resistance. Operation Epic Fury took long-standing policy assumptions to an extreme: that by hitting the right leaders, weapons facilities, and supply lines, an outside actor could induce catastrophic failure across the Iranian regime and its web of Middle Eastern allies.
But the two powers were using tactics from the age of the telephone exchange against an adversary built for the internet era. Over the past quarter century, two parallel transformations—one in how Iran and its allies build military capability, the other in how the global economy moves goods, money, and information—have rewired both the Axis and international commerce from hub-and-spoke networks with identifiable choke points into complex, adaptive ecosystems with no clear points of failure.
This report uses a unique research strategy, combining historical survey, deep field research, open-source investigations, and data analysis, to describe and explain these twin transformations in unprecedented detail. Its findings help explain why Iran and the Axis have proven so resilient in the face of U.S. and Israeli attempts to crush them: the Axis represents a new kind of dispersed, self-reproducing power—which this report calls an ecosystem—that is a distinct feature of a highly globalized, interconnected world in the midst of a messy power transition to multipolarity. The Axis of Resistance is likely not a one-off but rather a new type of challenge that will shape conflict and politics in the second quarter of the twenty-first century.
The through line is drones, or unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). One of the 2026 war’s defining images was of Iran’s screeching Shahed-136 drones plowing into luxury Gulf real estate, critical infrastructure, and American military bases, with billion-dollar U.S. missile defense systems struggling to keep up with an onslaught of these UAVs, which cost a few tens of thousands of dollars to make. The Shahed-136 and earlier Iranian-made one-way attack drones like it tell an important story of how the two transformations have changed the face of modern warfare and blunted the military tactics and policy tools of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Since the early 2000s, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) and Hezbollah have developed a model for cultivating and building the capabilities of nonstate allies. Groups are courted, trained, armed, and eventually taught to build their own weapons from commercially available components—most notably, one-way attack drones. Each rung of this “capability ladder” that a group climbs both builds them up and binds them to Iran and one another through shared training, battlefield experience, and knowledge.
At a certain stage—what this report calls a capability tipping point—a small number of these groups cross a threshold. Internal knowledge, networks, and supply-chain access fuse into systems that produce capabilities far beyond those of their insurgent antecedents and make the groups in question much harder to uproot. As more groups have crossed this threshold, the Axis itself has been transformed, from a centrally managed network running through a hub in Tehran, into something more like a self-perpetuating ecosystem.
Power within the ecosystem is unevenly distributed and is constantly shifting. Iran is still its most powerful and consequential node, but the relationship between Tehran and the Axis is one of mutual interdependence. Capabilities, data, and strategic needs flow in multiple directions. As the wars of 2023–26 have shown, the ecosystem can sustain damage to individual nodes and supply routes without collapsing. Even as the Axis came under unprecedented stress, its supply chains rerouted to account for the collapse of the regime of Bashar al-Assad in Syria, and Yemen’s Houthis even expanded into Africa through outreach to a portfolio of different regional actors, enticing potential partners with training on how to use and build UAVs.
The Axis’s transformation would not have been possible without tectonic shifts in the inner workings of the global economy. In the past, state and nonstate groups relied on either powerful state patrons or arms dealers to source Western technology in limited volumes. Now, they can buy almost unlimited amounts of engines for the Shahed-136, for example, directly from Chinese manufacturers. “Smuggling” no longer adequately captures the process by which these goods are transported to their end-users. Illicit and dual-use items intermingle with licit global trade and move through commercial channels too dense and fast-moving to meaningfully police. When one route is disrupted, the supply chain reroutes to another, more or less automatically.
At the same time, new technologies and surging global trade volumes have made it easier to evade Western scrutiny and sanctions. Most of the goods Iran and the Axis need can now be sourced in Asia rather than the United States or Europe and can be transported to their end-users while avoiding Western regulatory reach. Iran and its allies have become proficient at masking the contents and locations of ships and containers, and at setting up, shutting down, and re-forming shell companies faster than Western law enforcement agencies can identify them. The outgrowth of transshipment hubs whose economic models prioritize ease of doing business over sanctions enforcement has helped, too.
The report unpacks these transformations in four parts. It begins with a short introduction to the Axis and Iran’s drone program, then details the capability ladder that Axis groups climb, the global supply-chain shifts that make the model durable, and the expansion of the ecosystem beyond the Axis’s assumed ideological and geographic bounds.
The report argues that policy responses to the proliferation of UAV technology, and to the densely interconnected groups of actors like the Axis who are among its most avid adopters, must be rewired for an age of ecosystems. This means moving away from the critical-node domino theory that defined Operation Epic Fury and toward an approach that maps ecosystems rather than their constituent parts, matches responses to group capabilities, and uses multilateral action to make it harder for armed actors everywhere to build weapons from off-the-shelf components.
Such adaptations will necessitate an honest debate about the limits of what policy can do and the price that states are willing to pay to achieve their objectives. It may be possible to prevent some groups from moving too far up the capability ladder and to constrain some Axis groups. But doing so may involve providing political space for politically unsavory groups; building armed counter-networks that are likely to take on lives of their own; or finding ways to pressure repressive states to improve political and economic conditions in marginalized areas.
The report is the capstone for “Beyond the Axis,” a Century International project supported by the Cross-Border Conflict Evidence, Policy and Trends (XCEPT) research program, funded by UK International Development. Its claims are substantiated by two years of fieldwork, open-source investigations, and data analysis by a multidisciplinary research team. It draws on more than 250 key-informant interviews with officials, Axis group members, businesspeople, and analysts across the Middle East and the Horn of Africa. The report also makes use of purpose-built databases of arms interdictions, drone proliferation, sanctions, and training events; vessel-tracking using automatic identification system (AIS) data and satellite imagery; and hundreds of documentary sources in English, Arabic, Farsi, and Hebrew. This approach allows the researchers to overcome the limits to access that are an inherent challenge to the study of closed regimes and clandestine groups, and to triangulate evidence for key claims. Unless explicitly stated, all data and visualizations in the report were produced for this project.
Martin Plaut 