An Iranian Shahed-136 drone on display at Capitol Hill earlier this year. Photo / Getty Images
The last time American troops would have seen Iran’s kamikaze drones was when they were attacking United States military bases in the Middle East.
Now US soldiers are being armed with them. Or at least, with something almost identical to the Shahed drones.
The drones, reverse-engineered from scavenged Iranian models, will be at the forefront of America’s first drone attack unit, which was announced this past week. The unit will be stationed at an unspecified location in the Middle East.
The Pentagon knows only too well how deadly the drones, known as FLM 136 or Lucas (Low-cost Unmanned Combat Attack System), can be.
An Iranian Shahed-136 killed three US troops when it struck an American outpost in northeastern Jordan in January 2024.
Now the US is “flipping the script on Iran”, an official told CNN.
The move is part of the Pentagon’s quest for drone dominance after a series of conflicts – such as the war in Ukraine – have shown the devastating impact cheap, mass-produced units can have.
Some experts are sceptical of the development, characterising Lucas drones as crude weapons which are still relatively expensive and require overwhelming numbers to be effective.
According to specifications from SpektreWorks, a manufacturer based in Arizona, the drones have an 2.4m wingspan, are roughly 3m in length and can fly for around six hours.
Tehran’s Shahed, which means “martyr” in Arabic, is slightly longer than the US model, can carry a larger payload and has a range of about two to three times further, depending on estimates.
Both are designed as “suicide” or “kamikaze” drones that fly directly into their target and detonate.
Sumantra Maitra, a drone expert and senior fellow at the Centre for Renewing America, told the Telegraph they are essentially “dumb bombs”, or a “gigantic grenade”.
The Iranian-style drones will be at the forefront of the US’ first drone attack squadron, known as Task Force Scorpion Strike. The unit will be under the command of US Central Command (Centcom), the Pentagon announced last Thursday.
A US official told the Telegraph the unit would be made up of about two dozen personnel but declined to comment on how many drones they intend to field.
Admiral Brad Cooper, one of the Centcom commanders, said equipping troops with “cutting-edge drone capabilities” would showcase “military innovation and strength” while deterring “bad actors”.
The Pentagon has been wrong-footed by concentrating on sophisticated drones over smaller, cheap models.
When US President Donald Trump authorised the assassination of Qassim Soleimani, leader of Iran’s elite Quds force, in his first term, it was a US$30 million ($51.8m) MQ-9 Reaper whirring silently above Baghdad Airport that delivered the final strike.
Since then, Azerbaijan scored a decisive victory over Armenian tanks using cheap, mass-produced drones in 2020, while Hamas blinded Israel’s border defences with rudimentary drones on October 7 and hundreds of Pakistani drones slipped through Indian defences in May.
Ben Jensen, a senior fellow at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, said the Lucas drone would also need overwhelming numbers to be effective in a war.
“We’ve modelled this in military settings … essentially what you’re doing is you’re firing the drones in a way to distract enemy sensors,” he said.
“You have to be able to fire 10, 20, 30 of them, enough to create a kind of salvo that soaks up enemy munitions and attention, so that you open up an attack lane for something else … like a cruise missile,” he said.
And with relatively cheap drones, at least compared to Reaper models, the risk is limited while the upside is potentially massive.
Even if they are simply intercepted by enemy defences, this can be a form of strategic victory by degrading an adversary’s capabilities and war chest over time.
This is “a huge thing in modern war”, said Jensen. “If a US$100,000 vehicle absorbs a US$1m missile, that’s a good exchange.”
Ukraine proved this better than anyone in Operation Spiderweb, when after months of planning it launched an audacious drone attack on Russian President Vladimir Putin’s strategic bomber fleet. Drones costing as little as US$600 caused an estimated US$7 billion in damage.
Now, the Pentagon openly admits it is scrambling to catch up.
In a memorandum from July, Pete Hegseth, the US Defence Secretary, called drones “the biggest battlefield innovation in a generation” and noted that “our adversaries collectively produce millions of cheap drones a year”.
“While global military drone production skyrocketed over the last three years, the previous administration deployed red tape. US units are not outfitted with the lethal small drones the modern battlefield requires,” he said.
The effort has backing from the top levels of the Administration. Hegseth is dangling US$1 billion to the arms industry to order around 340,000 small drones, and Trump signed an executive order on “unleashing American drone dominance” in June.
Dan Driscoll, the Army Secretary touted as the next Pentagon chief and nicknamed “drone guy” by the President, has predicted a future where every American soldier is equipped with a drone.
At the same time, experts fear the department still doesn’t get it.
The Lucas drone costs significantly more than other models at US$35,000. And although the Pentagon has put out tenders for smaller units costing around US$2000, the US cannot compete with its main adversaries and their cheaper labour costs and looser regulations.
Hegseth, however, wants to loosen regulations, declaring the Pentagon’s “bureaucratic gloves are coming off” in his memorandum. But he stressed in his memo: “Our overt preference is to buy American”, where the US cannot compete on costs.
“I don’t think they’ve understood just where the game is being played,” said Maitra.
“I think they’re still trying to go toe to toe with it, with the Chinese, without understanding that the Chinese production capacity and labour cost is about a tenth of the US.” Nor can it compete with Russia or Iran, he added.
Precisely how important the drones will be in a conflict is questionable and will depend on the numbers the Pentagon decides to field.
But in stripping down an Iranian drone and fielding a unit in the Middle East with their own versions, the US has sent an unmistakable message to Tehran’s leadership.
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