‘Designed to wreak havoc’: The cheap drones shaping the war with Iran

Long before Iranian drones rained down on airports, skyscrapers and embassies across the Persian Gulf this past week, the US military was busy trying to find cheap ways to shoot them down.

In 2024, the military’s research and development effort reverse-engineered the Shahed drone to use for target practice, aiming to develop new defenses against a weapon that Iran had been sharing with allies including Russia, Venezuela and Hezbollah.

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, US forces used the drone for the first time in combat to hit infrastructure and overwhelm Iranian air defense systems.

“These low-cost drones, modeled after Iran’s Shahed drones, are now delivering American-made retribution,” US Central Command said in a social media post.

The dueling 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’s procurement bureaucracy.

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 8-foot wingspan, and carry an explosive payload in their nose that detonates on impact. After a target’s coordinates are entered, the drones can travel hundreds of miles autonomously.

Looking something like a miniature fighter jet, they occupy a middle ground between the tiny hobbyist quadcopters retooled as human-guided bombs in Ukraine and the multimillion-dollar US Predator and Reaper drones, which can loiter in the sky for a day and carry missiles.

Bombardments that once required salvos of expensive missiles can now be carried out for the cost of a car lot full of Honda Accords. Places that once seemed insulated from conflict, like the Gulf’s glitzy cities, are easily within range.

Those abilities are proliferating quickly, said Michael C. Horowitz, a Pentagon official during the Biden administration. Software advances for autonomous systems, speedier manufacturing and the spread of precision guidance targeting will make low-cost drones a lasting reality of warfare, he said.

“You get the increasing ability for any country or militant group around the world to now do sensing, short-range strikes and even long-range strikes,” said Horowitz, who worked on the LUCAS program. “This is really changing the character of war.”

The LUCAS was produced by SpektreWorks, a small startup in Arizona, and defense 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 defense contractors have spent decades building.

“This is the first case in a long time, really since the early days of the Cold War, where the US has seen a capability produced by an adversary and decided that it fills a gap we have and produced it,” said Lauren Kahn, a former Pentagon policy adviser who is now a senior research analyst at Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology.

SpektreWorks and SpaceX, the Elon Musk-owned company that operates Starshield, did not respond to requests for comment. Musk said in a social media post that Starshield was operated by the US government and “not under SpaceX control.”

The tit-for-tat innovation echoes the war in Ukraine, where a nonstop weapons innovation race has come to define front-line combat.

US officials say LUCAS’ real achievement is not the technology itself but the speed of its development. The military reverse-engineered a competitor’s weapon and fielded its own version in roughly 18 months. The $35,000 price tag, compared with a $2.5 million Tomahawk cruise missile, makes the economics hard to argue with.

The low-cost drones come with downsides. They are slow and buzz loudly, making an attack easy to detect. At such a small size, they can carry only a modest ammunition load, limiting the damage they can produce. And electronic warfare can be used to jam their navigation capabilities.

Even so, more drone designs are coming. Featuring a modular setup and malleable software, the LUCAS can be tweaked and upgraded as new technologies, like artificial intelligence, grow in capability. President Donald Trump’s tax and domestic policy bill last year included $1.1 billion for a “drone dominance program” to build thousands of low-cost one-way attack drones.

The US military has signed contracts with private military technology companies, including Anduril and Skydio, for more sophisticated drones designed to work alongside the cheap ones. The goal is an arsenal with both precision and mass. Some plans call for fighter pilots to fly along their own squadron of drones, according to Kahn.

“Right now, these systems tend to be remotely piloted, or fire-and-forget systems,” said Horowitz, now the director of the Perry World House, a think tank for global affairs at the University of Pennsylvania. “It’s easy to see how continuing advances in artificial intelligence, if it proves reliable, will be a very attractive option to make these systems even more effective.”

Over the past week, Iranian drones have produced some of the most terrifying images of the conflict.

Videos have spread online showing Shaheds slamming into a high-rise in Bahrain and Fairmont the Palm, a hotel in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. Others showed a smoke-filled Dubai airport and an expensive radar facility in Bahrain collapsing under an explosion. Iranian drones also hit the US Embassy in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, and Amazon data centers in the UAE, though it was not immediately verifiable that those attacks were with Shaheds. Air traffic across the region has been paralyzed, with tourists and business travelers stranded.

“They’re designed to wreak havoc,” said Anna Miskelley, a defense analyst at Forecast International. “It plays really well in the media, too, when you have these videos of explosions.”

The ability to rain terror on populations, destabilize economies and upend everyday life is a core part of Iran’s drone strategy, said Farzin Nadimi, an Iran security expert and senior fellow at the Washington Institute. Inside Iran, he added, the attacks serve as needed propaganda for the government to show “success stories.”

Iran has stored thousands of the drones in caves and other hideaways, Nadimi said. He believes the Iranians have enough to continue to fly swarms of hundreds of the drones in daily attacks for at least several weeks. The drones are easy and fast to fire, often requiring just a truck-mounted container to launch. US and Israeli forces have targeted Shahed manufacturing hubs and launching zones.

One of the first believed uses of the Shahed design was a 2019 attack on Saudi oil installations. The new weapon featured a design stitched together from existing technology, including a reverse-engineered simple German engine designed for light aircraft.

So crude are the drones that their slow speed and low altitude make them difficult for modern air defense systems to detect. Radar software often filters out such slow objects. If it is adjusted, it can pick up false positives like birds and civilian Cessnas. Defending against the Shahed attacks is also expensive, costing as much as $3 million per shot.

“It’s small enough to hide from radar, cheap enough to be launched en masse and lethal enough to force us to use more expensive tech to stop it,” Miskelley said.

In Ukraine, swarm attacks of Shaheds are so common that the drone has become a household term. In online channels warning about air attacks, it even has its own emoji.

In many ways, the Iranian conflict is an evolution of what has been happening in Ukraine since 2022. Russia, which now has its own Shahed production facilities, has made a number of modifications that have flowed back to Iran, like better sensors, automated navigation and targeting abilities, said Bryan Clark, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute.

Ukrainian forces have also developed detection systems that use cameras and acoustic devices to listen for the whizzing lawn mower sound of the drone. Experiments in intercepting the drones have ranged from machine guns and electronic weaponry to nets and even other drones.

Some of Ukraine’s defense techniques are making their way back to those involved in the Iranian conflict. In comments Wednesday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said he had spoken with U.S. officials and leaders in the UAE and Qatar about providing technology to protect against the drones, as supplies of other costly defense systems fall.

“Ukraine’s expertise in countering ‘Shahed’ drones is currently the most advanced in the world,” he wrote, adding, “It is clear why so many requests are directed to Ukraine.”

As American and Israeli strikes increasingly obliterate Iran’s drone production facilities, many are watching to see if Russia provides Iran with reinforcements of Shaheds, potentially escalating the war further.

“Russia right now has the larger manufacturing facilities,” Clark said. “After Iran offered production support during the Ukraine war, is Russia going to return the favor?”