kamikaze

The U.S. Marine Corps is testing the Low-Cost Uncrewed Combat Attack System (LUCAS) as a long-range one-way strike drone. Based on a design reverse-engineered from the Iranian-designed Shahed-136, these drones have already been deployed by U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) to the Middle East, which you can read more about in our deep dive here.

The Marines are sponsoring a test of the LUCAS drones at the U.S. Army’s Yuma Proving Ground (YPG), the Army stated. The move comes as the Corps is working to increase its own one-way attack drone capabilities and the Pentagon is pushing for more drone use across the military in the wake of their ubiquity in the Ukraine war. The Pentagon is hoping that the LUCAS drones can be quickly and cheaply built and delivered at scale.

“Harkening back to the Liberty Ship production model that rapidly produced thousands of cargo ships during World War II, testers hope that the LUCAS will eventually serve a similar function in the new era of warfare,” Col. Nicholas Law, Director of Experimentation in the Office of the Under Secretary of War for Research & Engineering, said in a release. “It’s not a single manufacturer: it’s designed to go to multiple manufacturers to be built in mass quantities.”

We laid out this exact concept months ago, along with our in-depth case for rushing mass production of American Shahed-136 copies, that you can read in full here.

Law envisions these drones as ultimately able to be used on dynamic targets, such as vehicles on the move or targets of interest that the drones find themselves with a degree of autonomy.

“Once we start weaponization and automated target recognition, we can have a target that is a representation of a real target,” he explained. Law didn’t provide any specifics, and we have reached out to the Army and Marines for more information.

You can read our deep dive on how artificial intelligence will revolutionize lower-end drones like LUCAS in exactly this way in our special feature linked here. But the fact that LUCAS can be equipped with a satellite datalink means that it could hunt for and find targets of interest over great distances all on its own, while still allowing a human operator to approve a strike.

In addition to strikes, LUCAS drones equipped with nose-mounted gimbal cameras can also be deployed to provide intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR). With an estimated price tag for the platform itself of about $35,000, these LUCAS variants could provide an affordable, attritable platform for ISR. The LUCAS drones we have seen also have swarming capabilities — the ability to work cooperatively as a team — which can make them especially effective at attack operations and acting as decoys to confuse enemy air defenses.

The one detail Law provided about the drones being tested at YPG is that they are not yet equipped with warheads.

“The warhead that will eventually be integrated into LUCAS isn’t constructed yet, but it will also be low-cost and mass produced by multiple manufacturers,” Law posited. “Evaluators are currently testing LUCAS with inert payloads.”

CENTCOM declined comment on whether its LUCAS drones currently deployed have kinetic payloads and referred us to statements previously made that they have been deployed as one-way attack drones. It’s possible that they feature more improvised, less powerful warheads at this time. They can also just fly into their targets to damage them — especially fragile ones like radar arrays.

As we noted in our original piece on the topic, CENTCOM stood up Task Force Scorpion Strike (TFSS), the military’s first one-way attack drone squadron, to operate the LUCAS drones. Roughly 10 feet long with a wingspan of eight feet, was developed by Arizona-based SpektreWorks in cooperation with the U.S. military primarily as a target drone to emulate a Shahed-136-like threat, but also as a weapon in its own right.

There are, however, other companies involved in providing LUCAS variants. For instance, Griffon Aerospace has been pitching a Shahed-like drone called the MQM-172 Arrowhead to America’s armed forces.

The company, which is building the air frames, has already provided them to the Pentagon for use as both strike weapons and targets, Griffon spokesman Dan Beck told us Wednesday. However, it is unclear whether they have been fitted with kinetic payloads or how widespread their testing and use is across the military. We have reached out to the Pentagon to learn more.

Beck said Kraken Kinetics is providing the payload for these LUCAS variants. We’ve reached out to them as well.

While Beck declined to provide many details of his company’s work with the Pentagon, he did offer us some insights about the Arrowhead’s specifications.

Considered a long-range LUCAS version, the Arrowhead can carry a payload of up to 100 pounds as far as 1,500 nautical miles, Beck told us. That’s akin to the Shahed-136 drones produced by Iran and modified by Russia for its use against Ukraine. The current LUCAS models deployed to the Middle East are smaller and have significantly less endurance and about half the payload capacity.

While the general concept has existed for decades, similar delta-winged one-way attack munitions are steadily emerging globally among allies and potential foes alike, including in China. Russia is also said to be assisting North Korea in establishing its own domestic capacity to produce Shahed-136s, or derivatives thereof, as part of an exchange for Pyongyang’s help in fighting Ukraine.

Beck also told us that Griffon has been “flying these airplanes very frequently” and have been launched pneumatically and from trucks. There are plans to use rocket-assisted takeoff (RATO), but that hasn’t been tested yet, he added. Asked about whether these have been tested with kinetic payloads, Beck declined comment.

Though these types of weapons have a long development history, Iranian officials mocked the U.S. for copying their design.

“There is no greater source of pride and honor than seeing the self-proclaimed technological superpowers kneel before the Iranian drone and clone it,” Brig. Gen. Abolfazl Shekarchi boasted to reporters on Tuesday.

The reality is that Iran didn’t really come up with this configuration, it dates back decades to a western design and Israel largely pioneered the operational use of the long-range one-way attack munition.

IAI’s MBT HARPY System

With LUCAS’s sudden deployment to the Middle East as a kinetic weapon and now the Marines testing the concept to see if it fits their needs, the future of America’s Shahed-136 knock-off looks remarkably bright. And we could be seeing just the budding of what will become a mass produced staple weapon that will be deployed en-masse across Europe and the Pacific.

Contact the author: howard@thewarzone.com

Dec. 3 (UPI) — The U.S. military announced that it has launched a new task force to deploy various drone forces, and the first squadron of one-way-attack drones already has been formed in the Middle East.

U.S. Central Command on Wednesday launched Task Force Scorpion Strike, which is charged with designing and delivering low-cost drone capabilities for its area of responsibility, and already has formed a squadron of Low-cost Unmanned Combat Attack System (LUCAS) drones designed for autonomous kamikaze strikes.

“This new task force sets the conditions for using innovation as a deterrent,” Admiral Brad Cooper said in a press release.

“Equipping our skilled warfighters faster with cutting-edge drone capabilities showcases U.S. military innovation and strength, which deters bad actors,” said Cooper, who is commander of U.S. Central Command.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has made it a priority for the military to improve and increase its use of technology, specifically calling for increased use of a wide array of drones — including cheaper ones that can be rapidly produced and deployed.

In September, Cooper announced the formation of a Rapid Employment Joint Task Force to help streamline the military’s benefits from emerging technologies to “rapidly equip our warriors,” he said at the time.

The new task force will build a one-way-attack squadron of LUCAS drones that Central Command said have extensive range, can be launched using catapults, rockets and mobile vehicle systems, and can carry several different weapons.

The LUCAS drone’s design is based on Iran’s Shahed-136 drone, which The War Zone reported the U.S. military “got a hold of” and reverse-engineered it to produce the 10-foot-long, eight-foot-wide wingspan aircraft that is now being fielded in the Middle East.

The drones cost about $35,000 each, making them a “low-cost, scalable system that provides cutting-edge capabilities at a fraction of the cost of traditional long-range U.S. systems that can deliver similar effects,” according to Navy Captain Tim Hawkins, a spokesperson for U.S. Central Command.

Although the drones have not been used in actual combat yet, they have been put through trials and tests, both in the Middle East, where they were already fielded, and at the U.S. Army’s Yuma Proving Ground in Arizona.

The tests at Yuma have specifically been to determine the ideal warheads to use for missions with the drones, which Army officials said are expected to be rapidly produced using a method like the Liberty Ship cargo ship model during World War II — which is in line with Hegseth’s stated goals for technological adoption and what they cost the military to acquire.

“There is a price point that we want to produce a lot of these in a rapid fashion,” Colonel Nicholas Law said in a press release.

Hegseth and DOD officials earlier this week outlined the overall drone program, which aims to buy hundreds of thousands of different types of drones over the course of four gauntlets to find vendors that can quickly produce drones at scale and at a cost the military can afford, Military.com reported.

“We need to outfit our combat units with unmanned systems at scale,” Hegseth said. “We cannot wait.”

The Pentagon has created a new program to spend $1 billion over the next two years to buy hundreds of thousands of one-way attack drones for the military. Dubbed the Drone Dominance Program (DDP), it is an implementation of War Secretary Pete Hegseth’s July memo authorizing major changes to how the department procures and uses these weapons. You can read more about the Pentagon vision for how lower-end drones will be procured and employed across even the smallest units under this new strategy in our initial story here.

As we have frequently reported, despite the lessons learned from Ukraine and many other battlegrounds, the U.S. military has continued to move extremely slowly to field lower-end drones on a widespread basis. This is the latest Pentagon move to change that, albeit with still relatively conservative goals compared to the millions of drones used by Ukraine and Russia. 

The Department of War (DoW) “expects to order 30,000 drones with deliveries to be fulfilled by July 2026,” according to the new DDP website. “By 2027, Drone Dominance intends to purchase over 200,000 drones that can produce lethal effects in the toughest battlefield environments.”

The plan calls for a total of more than 300,000 drones to be purchased by early 2028.

“Through the drone dominance program, $1 billion from the Big Beautiful Bill will fund the manufacture of approximately 340,000 small UASs for combat units over the course of two years,” according to the Pentagon announcement. We’ve reached out for additional details.

“The Drone Dominance Program (DDP) is designed to help industry organize around the need for low-cost, supply-chain secure sUAS manufacturing at scale, urgently,” according to a Request for Information (RFI) published Tuesday. “The DDP intends to place $1 billion in fixed-price orders utilizing 10 U.S.C. 4022 [existing federal procurement authorities] over four phases in the next two years.”  

Each phase “begins with a Gauntlet challenge event and ends with completed delivery of production-quality sUAS,” the RFI states. “Vendor systems will be flown by military operators and evaluated on the systems’ ability to complete various mission scenarios.”

The objective is that after each phase, the number of drones purchased will increase while the price per unit goes down, from $5,000 per unit to a projected $2,300 per unit. After Phase II, the number of vendors will decrease as well, with the list ultimately being winnowed down to five vendors selected in the fourth phase, scheduled to run between August 2027 and January 2028.

The RFI does not specify what types of drones DDP is seeking, but based on the anticipated cost per unit, it is most likely first-person view (FPV) drones and other small quadcopters now ubiquitous on the battlefields of Ukraine.

Hegseth’s July memo gives an indication of what the Pentagon is seeking.

From our initial story on that memo: “Most notably, certain types of smaller uncrewed aerial systems (UAS) will now be treated as ‘consumables,’ more akin to hand grenades and other kinds of ammunition, than aircraft, which has broad ramifications. Lower-level commanders will now also be able to procure smaller UASs directly, as well as authorize subordinates to operate them.”

The first competition under the new DDP program is scheduled to begin Feb. 16, 2026, among 25 invited vendors.

“Participants will be selected based on responses to a Request for Solutions (RFS) anticipated to post 17 December, with final selections and notifications during the week of 26 January,” the RFI notes.

The competition will be judged based on the “achievement of two missions, likely to include [a] 10 km strike across open territory and a 1 km strike in simulated urban territory,” the RFI explains. Both missions will be carried out with a minimum 2 kg dummy payload.

After the first phase, the competition “will substantially increase in difficulty and operational realism, including significant Counter UAS challenges,” per the RFI. “Vendors are expected to incorporate feedback and improve their designs across the phases while maintaining production capacity to be competitive.”

Unlike most previous procurement efforts, the results of the competition will be publicly posted on a “leader board.” The RFI does not explain how that will be accessed. We’ve reached out to the Pentagon for more details.

After the first phase of the competition is completed, up to 12 vendors will be issued fixed-price orders of at least 1,000 drones. Payment for the drones is made at each delivery.

“Vendors will bear development and manufacturing risk,” the RFI notes. “The government will pay a fixed price only for units that are delivered, inspected and accepted. There will be no progress payments or cost-reimbursement terms under this effort.”

Another unique aspect of the DDP plan is that there will be no down-select, or elimination of vendors, between phases. Vendors not selected in any phase “are strongly encouraged to participate in later phases,” the DDP document explains.

Given that the DDP will be issuing contracts that are relatively modest by most large defense acquisition program procurement standards, it will be interesting to see who steps forward to take part in this effort. Regardless, the stakes are far larger in the long term for those who succeed.

Overall this is an extremely important issue, one that has been festering without conclusive forward progress for years. The fact that the DoW is committing to building up the industrial base and its understanding of mass drone procurement and deployment is a positive step in the right direction.

Contact the author: howard@thewarzone.com