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By Ellie Cook
Senior Defense Reporter
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The U.S. has deployed a new, cheap attack drone for the first time in combat—and it's a copy of the weapon Iran has used to menace American allies in the Gulf for more than a month.
The U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) chief, Admiral Brad Cooper, has hailed the Low-Cost Uncrewed Combat Attack System—often referred to by the snappy acronym LUCAS—as "indispensable" to U.S. forces in the Middle East.
Western militaries, including the U.S., have watched on as both Ukrainian and Russian forces in Eastern Europe deploy lots of inexpensive unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), fundamentally changing how modern wars are fought.
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Indeed, Ukraine has dispatched experts to the Middle East to help the U.S. and its allies take down Shaheds, which Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said on Wednesday was already showing results.
It's very difficult for traditional air defenses, which are designed to take out sophisticated threats like fast-traveling missiles with interceptors costing millions of dollars, to knock overwhelming swarms of throwaway drones from the sky.
Russia is infamous for using Iranian-designed Shahed drones, while footage of the triangle-shaped weapons zooming into Ukrainian high-rises has become a familiar sight online. Ukraine's residents quickly came to dread the low buzzing sound that heralds an approaching Shahed drone.
But until now, using lots of disposable drones has been mostly theoretical for U.S. troops. The first combat use of LUCAS, however, is a marked shift to using these new tactics in real-life missions.
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What Is LUCAS?
LUCAS, made by Arizona-based SpektreWorks, is a one-way attack drone, sometimes called a loitering munition or "kamikaze" UAV.
CENTCOM has described the drone as having an "extensive range," thought to be about 650 kilometers (400 miles).
It costs in the region of $35,000, a fraction of the cost of precision missiles in the U.S.'s arsenal, such as the Tomahawk cruise missiles. Those come with an eyewatering price tag upward of $2 million apiece.
LUCAS is filled with up to 18 kilograms of explosives that detonate when the drone hits its target. It packs a lighter punch than missiles, and it is more effective against targets like power grids or government buildings, rather than heavily defended military targets. More sophisticated, costly missiles would still be needed to hit these difficult, fortified areas.
Physically, it looks very similar to the various versions Iran has produced of its Shahed drone. Its manufacturer explicitly said the drone was reverse-engineered with a wingspan matching Iran's Shahed-136.
"There are plenty of differences though, but as so often happens in drones, they are hidden under the skin, reflecting the very different environments where they are built and used," U.K.-based drone expert Steve Wright told Newsweek.
While the U.S. has a vast network of defense companies sustained by lots of funding, Iran has mastered working in isolation, cherry-picking technologies it can grab from elsewhere across the world, Wright said.
"Because of this, the LUCAS drone is constructed using mass production techniques similar to building cars and manned aircraft," and it is linked up to the rest of the U.S. military's catalog of systems and equipment, Wright said.
Initial Performance in Iran
In a nod to their performance so far in the Middle East, Emil Michael, the Pentagon's top official for defense research and engineering, said the LUCAS had worked "very well so far."
"It's proven out to be a useful tool in the arsenal," he said in March. When approached about additional information on U.S. technology that debuted in Iran, the Pentagon referred queries to CENTCOM, which declined to comment.
The U.S. military announced a squadron dedicated to LUCAS in early December, as part of a new drone-focused task force dubbed Scorpion Strike looking at how best to use cheap unmanned systems.
A little over two weeks later, the U.S. Navy said it had successfully launched a LUCAS one-way attack drone from a ship for the first time.
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