US UAV ‘copied from Iran’ makes its mark in the Middle East conflict

Central Command (CENTCOM), the agency in charge of the US military’s operations in the Middle East, announced on February 28 that a low-cost unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) “designed based on the Shahed series” had actually fought for the first time in the campaign to attack Iran.

This agency did not specify the specific name, but the attached photo shows that it is the Lucas line, with an estimated price of 35,000 USD each. This is also the first suicide UAV model that the US deployed in the conflict with Iran.

Information about its actual combat effectiveness is still limited. However, Wall Street Journal Citing unnamed senior US defense officials, the Lucas UAV has been used in successful raids against a series of locations of the Iranian army and Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).

Lucas’ attacks contributed to an 83% decrease in Iranian UAV strikes in the early days of the conflict, according to the group of officials.

“From the early stages of hostilities, UAV FLM 136, also known as Lucas, has wiped out many Iranian military targets, while heavily invested UAV systems from start-ups in the defense sector have participated very little,” the US newspaper said.

Lucas does not come from any of the more than 400 venture capital-funded UAV startups in the US, nor is he a product of famous Silicon Valley. Instead, this aircraft model was developed by the US military by copying the technology and design of Iran’s Shahed-136 suicide UAV.

Although it first fought in the Middle East conflict, UAV Lucas was actually built by the US to prepare for conflict with peer opponents.

In exercises simulating large-scale war scenarios, experts discovered that the US military would run out of essential ammunition in just 2-3 weeks. Therefore, the Pentagon wants to own a UAV model that can be produced quickly in large quantities, achieve long range and is cheap enough to not put great pressure on the budget.

Under former President Joe Biden’s administration, a small group of Pentagon officials pursued the idea of ​​creating a version of the Shahed UAV for the US military, similar to many countries and non-state armed groups around the world.

The capabilities of the Shahed UAV have been demonstrated in the Ukraine conflict. Russia is said to use thousands of Geran-2 UAVs, a self-produced version based on the Shahed-136 series, to attack Ukraine every month, including peak battles that mobilize more than 1,000 aircraft in just one night.

A small team from the US Army’s engineering and research office then developed a plan to disassemble and analyze the Geran-2 UAV obtained from Ukraine. This is the first time the US has applied reverse engineering to copy another country’s military technology to develop domestic products in 50 years.

A former defense official described Lucas, short for “cheap unmanned combat system”, as not having all the features of many expensive UAV models and not using the highest-end components, but having low manufacturing costs and being able to produce in large quantities.

Michael Horowitz, a former senior Pentagon official and one of the leaders of the Lucas development team, said that countries’ militaries have the ability to develop high-precision long-range weapons at low prices. “The problem is that the US does not spend a single penny on this type of weaponry,” he said.

UAV Lucas in 2024 was selected to participate in an initiative to help deploy thousands of autonomous weapons before August 2025. This move caused a lot of controversy, because this UAV model only existed as a model at that time, but it defeated many completed systems.

Because Lucas is the intellectual property of the government, the US is using the method used to build warships during World War II, which is to mobilize secondary contractors to mass produce UAVs according to wartime needs.

Little-known companies SpektreWorks and Integration Innovation were tasked with building the Lucas UAV. A total of five manufacturers will be selected, with each company expected to ship about 300 units per month, according to a former US defense official familiar with the plans.

The US Marine Corps is the first force to use the Lucas UAV and has ordered about 6,000 units to deploy in the Indo-Pacific region. The above number of UAVs was transferred to CENTCOM before the Middle East conflict broke out.

President Donald Trump’s administration has instituted sweeping reforms in defense procurement, making it quicker and easier for the military to buy weapons, as well as increasing the use of civilian technology to modernize equipment.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth in August 2025 decided to abolish long-standing processes and barriers, helping the US military quickly deploy the Lucas UAV.

However, some experts still warn that Lucas’s success in the Middle East conflict, when confronting Iran’s weakened air defense network, does not mean it will be effective in wars with military powers on par with the United States.

“US UAVs do not face any significant jamming measures in the Middle East. The situation will be different in a conflict scenario between the US and Russia or China. Every technology will be defeated at some point,” Jack De Santis, an electronic warfare expert, told the Wall Street Journal.

Another concern for the US military is the lack of cheap anti-drone technology. This situation is helping pro-Iranian militia groups continue to use small drones to attack US bases in the Middle East.

The shortage of cheap modern weapons in the conflict with Iran is said to be a wake-up call to the US military. “We’re not ready. The government doesn’t have what it needs at the scale it needs,” said Julie Bush, co-founder of defense technology company Valinor Enterprises.