U.S. Hits Iran With Iran's Own Drone Design, and I Can't Stop Laughing

In light of recent news out of the Middle East, we have to rewrite the old dictum — provenance disputed — that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery that mediocrity can pay to greatness. Because you know those Iranian-made Shahed drones Russia keeps smacking Ukraine with? Yeah, we hit Iran last weekend with a copycat version of the very same drone.

In July of 2025, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth headed up a Pentagon event showing off 18 American-made drone prototypes, that had gone from drawing board to development in just an average of 18 months. By comparison, the Navy's F/A-XX to replace the aging F/A-18 multirole jets with a modern platform started in 2012, and they haven't even chosen a design.

One of the prototypes shown off by Hegseth looked more than a little familiar to anyone following the Russo-Ukraine War drone campaign, because it was a virtual copy of Iran's infamous Shahed drone, now made in Russia, too, and manufactured in the thousands. Only this one is made in Arizona by a startup called SpektreWorks.

They cost roughly $35,000 apiece and have an attack range of roughly 450 miles.

Iran calls it Shahed, or Witness. The Russians call their domestically produced version Geran-2, or Geranium. We call ours the Low-Cost Unmanned Combat Attack System, or LUCAS, because of course we do.

Anyway.

At the time, Undersecretary of Defense for Research and Engineering Emil Michael told reporters, "It’s an extraordinary achievement. This kind of thing was going to take five, six years."

This was all in response to an executive order by President Donald Trump, directing the Pentagon to "procure, integrate, and train using low-cost, high-performing drones manufactured in the United States."

Trump called it "unleashing American drone dominance," and not even a year later, here we are.

On Saturday, U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) confirmed that LUCAS flew in combat for the first time during Operation Epic Fury, not much longer than two years after SpektreWorks began developing them: "Task Force Scorpion Strike, for the first time in history, is using one-way attack drones in combat during Operation Epic Fury. These low-cost drones, modeled after Iran’s Shahed drones, are now delivering American-made retribution."

"For the price of a single Tomahawk, you can launch 57 LUCAS drones," analyst Shanaka Anslem Perera posted over the weekend. What's even more remarkable is the cost savings — even over the Russian model. "A Shahed-136 in Russian production costs approximately $80,000 per unit at the Alabuga facility. The American reverse-engineered version costs less than half the Russian licensed copy of the Iranian original.

"SpektreWorks received a $30 million initial production contract. That buys 857 kamikaze drones for what the Navy spends maintaining a handful of Tomahawks."

LUCAS also has some nifty electronics under the hood. The Shahed/Geran is a fairly simple creature, capable of flying to a pre-programmed location and blowing up. Each LUCAS is integrated into the Pentagon's MUSIC mesh network — some even with built-in SpaceX Starshield terminals! — allowing operators to reprogram it in real-time, and making it into a communications node, expanding every local commander's view of the battlespace.

All for the price of a nicely appointed Chevrolet Equinox.

Granted, with its short range and comparatively tiny warhead, even in large numbers, there are jobs LUCAS simply can't do that Tomahawk can. The Tomahawk can also carry some... interesting... payloads that LUCAS can't.

But having large numbers of cheap drones broadens the range of decisions available to any commander lucky enough to have LUCAS — and their low price means they'll eventually be integrated anywhere we can make them fit.

It's been maybe three years since the Russo-Ukraine War had even doubters admitting that drone warfare changes everything — and, frankly, we've been behind. While Western air forces (particularly the American and Israeli) dominate the skies above 3,000 feet, drone operators own, or at least can contest the lower altitudes. I wish I could remember who to credit that observation, but it dates back to probably 2023.

So perhaps instead of some closed-minded insistence about imitation being the sincerest form of flatter that mediocrity can pay to greatness, how about we just ask, "How about a taste of your own medicine?"

Delivered on the cheap.

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