'Designed to wreak havoc': Cheap drones are shaping war with Iran

By Paul Mozur & Adam Satariano

 

Long before Iranian drones rained down across the Persian Gulf this past week, the United States military was busy trying to find cheap ways to shoot them down. In 2024, the US military reverse-engineered the Shahed drone to use for target practice, aiming to develop new defences against it. Then came an idea. If the Iranian drone was so cheap and effective, why not just copy it?

 

Thus was born the United States low-cost unmanned combat system, or LUCAS. Over the past week, American forces used the drone for the first time in combat to hit infrastructure and overwhelm Iranian air defence systems.“These low-cost drones, modelled after Iran’s Shahed drones, are now delivering American-made retribution,” the US Central Command said.

 

 

The duelling drones have become a defining feature of the war with Iran. It is a glimpse of a future in which the ability to use new technologies, rapidly copy adversaries and mass-produce cheap weapons matters as much as the ability to build the most advanced ones. The fast-innovation style is more familiar to Silicon Valley than to the Pentagon. The lower-cost drones reaching the battlefield range in size, cost and abilities. The Shahed and LUCAS, which each cost about $35,000, are roughly 10 feet long with an eight-foot wingspan, and carry an explosive payload in their nose that detonates on impact.

 

Bombardments that once required salvos of expensive missiles can now be carried out for the cost of a bunch of Honda Accords. Places that once seemed insulated from conflict, like the Gulf’s glitzy cities, are easily within range. Software advances for autonomous systems, speedier manufacturing and the spread of precision guidance targeting will make low-cost drones a reality of warfare.

 

The LUCAS was produced by SpektreWorks, a small start-up in Arizona, and defence analysts believe it is using a military version of Starlink in Iran called Starshield to navigate, or another satellite communication system. It is a sign of how advances in commercial technology can yield simple new weapons as useful as the complicated systems that defence contractors have spent decades building.

 

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