LUCAS: Rapid Warfighting Acquisition in Action
How the DoW Used Iran’s Own Playbook to Strike Iran
On February 28, 2026, CENTCOM confirmed what acquisition reformers have been arguing for years: speed, cost-discipline, and industrial creativity can beat bureaucracy.
During Operation Epic Fury — the coordinated U.S.-Israeli strikes targeting IRGC C2 facilities, air defense nodes, and missile launch sites across Iran — a new weapon system saw its combat debut. Low-cost Unmanned Combat Attack System (LUCAS).
The irony is almost too rich to write without smiling.
LUCAS is a reverse-engineered copy of Iran’s own Shahed-136 kamikaze drone — the same platform Russia has fired by the thousands into Ukrainian cities, the same design Iran has distributed to Houthi proxies in Yemen, the same weapon that has humiliated Western air defense systems by sheer volume and cheapness. The DoW captured a damaged Shahed airframe, handed it to an Arizona startup SpektreWorks, and said: build us a better version of this, fast.
They did. And now it’s been used in combat — against Iran.
From Ukraine’s Skies to the Pentagon’s Courtyard
The intellectual lineage of LUCAS runs directly through Ukraine. By late 2024, the lessons were impossible to ignore: inexpensive, mass-producible one-way attack drones were reshaping ground warfare faster than any acquisition program could respond. Russia was firing roughly 180 Shaheds per day. Ukraine was fielding FPV drones costing $400 that were destroying $3M armored vehicles. The math of precision munitions — where U.S. inventories of high-end missiles were estimated to last only 7-10 days in a high-intensity conflict — had become a strategic liability.
SECWAR Pete Hegseth responded to this fact with the Unleashing U.S. Military Drone Dominance initiative. Supported by Executive Order 14307, the memo directed the services to accelerate acquisition and fielding of affordable autonomous systems and explicitly challenged the military’s “instinctive risk-aversion on everything from budgeting to weaponizing and training.” Small Group 1 and Group 2 drones were reclassified as expendables, now treated more like grenades than aircraft. Unit commanders were even granted direct procurement authority for some purchases. Drone Dominance added more structure and built on the acquisition success of the LUCAS.
The Acquisition Story: Seven Months, Zero Legacy
SpektreWorks publicly debuted LUCAS at a Pentagon event on July 16, 2025 — 43 weeks before it was deployed over Iran. That timeline is worth emphasizing: Seven months from public unveiling to combat employment. For context, a traditional Major Defense Acquisition Program can take seven years just to reach Milestone B.
The mechanism that made this possible was the Accelerate the Procurement and Fielding of Innovative Technologies (APFIT) which was designed to enable rapid award of production contracts with novel vendors. SpektreWorks received a $30M contract for initial LUCAS production, with per-unit costs running between $35,000 and $40,000 — roughly 1.7% the cost of a Tomahawk cruise missile. SpektreWorks attributes their journey to APFIT was significantly boosted by participating in OSW(R&E)’s Technology Readiness Experimentation TREX 2025,
In September 2025, CENTCOM stood up the Rapid Employment Joint Task Force (REJTF) to fast-track the delivery of emerging capabilities to deployed forces. REJTF operates across three lanes: capability, software, and technology diplomacy. Within weeks, it had set the conditions for what came next.
In December 2025 — just four months after Hegseth’s directive — CENTCOM activated Task Force Scorpion Strike (TFSS), a first-of-its-kind one-way attack drone squadron led by Special Operations Command Central personnel and embedded in the CENTCOM AOR. On December 16, 2025, a LUCAS drone was launched from the flight deck of the Independence-class littoral combat ship USS Santa Barbara in the Arabian Gulf — the first ship-based launch of the platform. Task Force 59, the Navy’s drone integration unit, supported the operation.
By February 28, 2026, LUCAS was in combat.
What This Actually Means for Acquisition Reform
The LUCAS program is not just a weapons story. It is a proof of concept for DoW’s Acquisition Transformation Strategy goals— and a direct refutation of arguments that rapid acquisition cannot produce militarily relevant, combat-ready capability.
Several elements of the LUCAS acquisition model deserve emphasis:
Multi-vendor Scalability from Day One. Col. Nicholas Law, Deputy Director of Experimentation in the Office of the USW(R&E), was explicit: SpektreWorks is not the sole manufacturer. The design was architected for mass production across multiple vendors. Griffon Aerospace is already pitching a competing Shahed-derivative, the MQM-172 Arrowhead. The Pentagon deliberately avoided the single-supplier dependency that has plagued so many high-end programs.
Competition Baked into the Model. Secretary Hegseth announced a $1B multiyear drone buy requiring manufacturers to compete in gauntlet challenges — head-to-head operational evaluations — rather than traditional source selection processes. The first challenge was published as a Request for Solutions in early 2026. This is acquisition as sport, not bureaucracy.
Adaptable Design from the Start. The FLM 136 target drone — SpektreWorks’ counter-drone training platform that simulates the Shahed threat — and LUCAS share a common airframe. The company was building threat emulation systems for U.S. air defense training before it was weaponizing them. That repurposing helped compress development and integration cycles and kept production costs low by maximizing component commonality.
Open Architecture Enabling Rapid Capability Growth. LUCAS integrates with the Multi-Domain Unmanned Systems Communications (MUSIC) mesh network, enabling the drone to serve as both a strike asset and a communications relay node in GPS-denied environments. That is not a feature you add to a legacy system. It is a feature you design in when your acquisition model demands future adaptability over near-term optimization.
Inherent Cost Effectiveness
A key attribute of any future system like LUCAS has to be cost effectiveness…and the initial cost has to represent a starting point where both additional capability and production scale can be progressed at increasingly lower cost points.
At $35,000 a copy, LUCAS costs less than a used car dealership’s inventory. Iran’s IRGC senior spokesperson sneered that “there is no greater honor than seeing self-proclaimed superpowers kneel before an Iranian drone and copy it.” He is not wrong that we copied it. He is deeply wrong about what that means.
The U.S. looked at a weapon being used to devastate allies, recognized its strategic logic, and built a better version of it in under a year — at a price point that changes the economics of precision strike entirely. That is not kneeling. That is learning.
The acquisition community has spent two decades defending complexity as a proxy for capability. LUCAS is the counter-argument, now with a combat record.
The next question is not whether this model works. Operation Epic Fury answered that. The question is whether the defense acquisition enterprise can internalize the lessons fast enough to matter in the next conflict.
Next Steps
The good news is that we have efforts underway that can continue and build on the success of the LUCAS acquisition if they are aligned appropriately.
The new Joint Interagency Task Force 401 (JIATF-401) is fully stood up and executing - with the powers of a Direct Reporting Program Manager to senior Department leadership.
The Drone Dominance program is already well underway having recently selected 25 companies for Gauntlet 1 demonstrations and committed $1B to “outfit our combat units with cheap and effective U.S.-made UAS” with the goal of producing 200,000 small Class 1 UAS systems by 2027.
DIU has initiated the Artemis project and selected 4 companies for additional long-range, one-way platforms utilizing designs other than the Iranian Shaheed. This includes integrating capabilities to enable operations in relevant EW and Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) denied environments.
DoW leadership would do well to take advantage of the success of the LUCAS effort and establish an accompanying “Mass and Reach” Drone Dominance effort that focuses on building equally robust supply chains and production capacity for Group 3 drones (the Shaheed is roughly equivalent to that class) that can achieve lethal one-way effects beyond the infantry unit - while staying well below the threshold of a costly missile.
Russia and Ukraine have demonstrated the effectiveness for years - now we have too. It’s time to seize the momentum and commit $5-10B over the next 3 years to produce 150,000 Group 3 drones that can contribute meaningfully to multiple operations.
Join over 14,000 defense and industry subscribers to get our weekly recaps and thought pieces. Paid subscribers also get budget and legislative analysis and are valued supporters of our work.
I would offer that a potentially overlooked aspect is the non-materiel, non-programmatic piece, but the change in culture. Reading the article it is clear that not only did higher level organizations like DOD and CENTCOM establish new organizations, but those organizations worked horizontally to accelerate mission accomplishment. This cultural change is positive in so many ways; that's how stovepipes get broken down.
Spot on and well laid out.