Iran’s Drone Advantage | Foreign Affairs

When the United States launched airstrikes on Iran on February 28, 2026, it marked the combat debut of the U.S. military’s newest drone, the Low-Cost Unmanned Combat Attack System. U.S. Central Command confirmed that the new LUCAS drones were used in the strikes and has said more of them “remain ready for employment” in Iran. The great irony, however, is that the LUCAS drone is based on Iran’s own low-cost one-way attack drone, the Shahed-136. In May 2025, U.S. President Donald Trump publicly praised the Iranian drones as cheap to produce, as well as “very good … and fast and deadly.” And when the Pentagon released the LUCAS in December, astute observers were quick to notice its similarities to the Shahed-136.

The idea that the United States, the world’s preeminent military power, would copy Iranian technology would have seemed fantastical just a few years ago. And yet, the Shahed-136, after being sold to Russia for use against Ukraine, was captured and studied by the U.S. military, improved on and produced by a small company in Arizona, and is now being used against Iranian targets. For its part, Tehran has unleashed a wave of Shahed-136 drones across the Middle East as part of its response to Washington’s Operation Epic Fury. The drones have struck buildings in Bahrain, Kuwait, and the United Arab Emirates, and even the U.S. embassy in Saudi Arabia. Although the size of Tehran’s remaining stockpile of drones is unclear, their sweeping deployment has become a critical element of the Iranian strategy for retaliation and proves that the character of war has changed.

Indeed, the United States’s adversaries have much to teach it in this new era. Although Washington still leads in the development and deployment of sophisticated capabilities, such as fighter jets, tanks, and cruise missiles, Iran, Russia, and Ukraine are ahead in the development and deployment of low-cost, increasingly autonomous drones for surveillance, as well as for short-range and long-range strikes. Washington now recognizes the need for these systems, but it has yet to take the steps necessary to manufacture them at scale. Moscow has a daily target of producing up to 1,000 Geran-2 drones this year. Washington could start churning out similar numbers of LUCAS drones in a matter of months, but only if it makes the necessary policy changes and investments. If the United States is to remain dominant in this new military reality, it will need to learn from its history and adapt. Otherwise—and this is especially the case in a conflict in the Indo-Pacific—sophisticated and expensive U.S. systems will be overwhelmed by cheaper munitions, with catastrophic consequences.

ATTACK OF THE DRONES

Washington’s interest in Iran’s Shahed-136 is unusual and, in some respects, unprecedented. Although U.S. scientists have long striven to acquire adversaries’ military technology—racing to recover the wrecks of Soviet aircraft, for instance, or purchasing Chinese technology from third parties—the purpose was not to copy it. Rather, Washington generally acquired an adversary’s technology to learn how to defeat them. Over the last 80 years, there have been only a handful of examples of the U.S. military constructing and fielding its own version of a foreign capability. A rare instance occurred in the early 1970s when the U.S. Army Mobility Equipment Research and Development Command used photographs and sketches of a Soviet folding float bridge—a temporary system designed to enable the rapid movement of troops, vehicles, and supplies across rivers—to develop a comparable capability. In the following half century, there were no comparable examples of Washington appropriating an adversary’s military capabilities. The United States was comfortable in its supremacy in methods and means of warfare, and did not feel the need to copy what others were doing.

That age of confidence has been ended by the comparative inferiority of U.S. long-range one-way attack weapons. The evidence of this has become impossible to ignore. The Pentagon’s Switchblade 600 drone, for example, was fast-tracked to Ukraine in 2022. It has a range of less than 60 miles and can cost as much as $120,000 per unit. Even putting cost aside, the Pentagon viewed one-way attack weapons as short-range weapons, complementing artillery. When Iran debuted the Shahed-136 in 2022, by contrast, it came with an estimated range of 940–1,240 miles, a payload of 110–330 pounds, and a cost per unit of around $35,000. Russia acquired the technology from Iran almost immediately for its war against Ukraine. Since then, Moscow has sent Shahed swarms to attack Ukrainian cities and civilian infrastructure with surprising frequency. By March 2024, Moscow was launching 130 drones a week; six months later, it was launching more than 1,100 Shahed-type drones per week.

In the age of precise mass—characterized by the widespread deployment of scalable, low-cost, precision weapons and sensors by state and nonstate actors, at both short and long ranges—the United States no longer has a monopoly on inventing useful military technology. Rather, warfare for small, technologically restricted actors is now achievable and repeatable as never before, as useful military capabilities can be easily and inexpensively produced. For decades, the United States developed innovative military technologies, including precision-strike capabilities, that cost billions of dollars and took many years to produce. There is still a role for these weapons. But now the U.S. military must also develop inexpensive weapons and produce them at scale—fast. The fact that a U.S. knockoff of an Iranian weapon is the exemplar of the Trump administration’s “drone dominance program,” promoted by the Pentagon on social media, shows how much the world has changed.

A BRAVE NEW WORLD

As Washington has slowly awoken to the importance of precise mass, it has also begun to recognize the dangers of the lengthy time frames required to field legacy military capabilities. After decades of neglect, the defense industrial base is starting to see new investments and market entrants as well as attempts at acquisition reform. LUCAS, for instance, moved from concept to operational readiness in roughly 18 months—a fraction of the sluggish average six-year acquisition cycle. But there is more that must be done. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has followed his predecessors in warning Congress that the defense industrial base is “strained, overly consolidated, and at risk of not keeping pace with modern and near-peer threats, especially in a protracted conflict.” Washington, he said, has “lost capacity and resilience in our defense supply chain.”

The Pentagon’s long-standing preference for exclusively relying on sophisticated, expensive, “exquisite” systems remains a problem since there is no short-term route to dramatically increasing their production. The timelines for these systems, including the Long-Range Anti-Ship Missile, the F-35, the Tomahawk, and the B-21 bomber, are necessarily lengthy, linked to the complexity of the platforms and workforce challenges, particularly the number of workers with security clearances. The F-35 program, for example, was begun in the mid-1990s and reached full production in 2021. These capabilities are indispensable—especially in a potential Indo-Pacific conflict—but they are also expensive, produced in limited numbers, and slow to replenish. In a sustained fight, an arsenal of multimillion-dollar missiles could be depleted in weeks and take years to restock. Precise mass is needed to plug the gap.

This challenge can be seen in the ongoing Iranian conflict. The Pentagon has reportedly fired some 400 Tomahawk missiles to intercept Iranian drones and projectiles. That is estimated to be about ten percent of the total U.S. inventory, at a cost of some $800 million. Washington initially ordered 350 Tomahawks for 2026, which it has since increased to 1,000, but it is unclear whether industry can deliver. Currently, only 100 missiles are delivered to the Pentagon annually. Moreover, $800 million would buy 23,000 LUCAS rounds. The Tomahawk is a far superior weapon to the drone in a head-to-head matchup, but it can be overwhelmed by a swarm of drones. The first week of fighting in Iran showed that 2,000 Shaheds are hard to intercept and can cause serious damage. Ukraine has shown that it can intercept about 80 percent of Shahed strikes. But at larger volumes, even the most capable current defenses can be overwhelmed, leaving thousands of munitions free to seek their targets.

Washington’s use of the expensive to neutralize the cheap is also unsustainable. In 2025, for example, Operation Rough Rider against the Houthis cost almost a billion dollars, with Tomahawk missiles and $1.5 million air-launched cruise missiles fired at cheap projectiles and drones. U.S. allies face the same challenge. When inexpensive Russian drones violated Polish airspace in September, the Netherlands fired AIM-9 Sidewinder missiles from F-35s, which was catastrophic from a cost perspective. Now, given Tehran’s volume of Shahed-136s, the United States and its partners are not only spending an immense amount of money, they also risk running out of air defenses.

LOOKING EAST

The need for precise mass is compounded by the threat that China poses to the United States. As Admiral Sam Paparo, the head of the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, warned in January, “We have to be ready now.” Washington has neither the time nor the resources to develop an arsenal of new, sophisticated, and costly capabilities, but LUCAS and other inexpensive systems could preserve exquisite munitions for the most demanding targets while assuming much of the burden of long-range strikes. This would expand the depth and resilience of U.S. munitions stockpiles while also being valuable for deterrence.

The United States must, then, accelerate the development of precise mass systems and immediately pursue the following three reforms: First, the Pentagon should prioritize spending the $7.7 billion it was allocated in the “One Big Beautiful Bill” on precise mass initiatives that accelerate procurement and integration of capabilities, including low-cost cruise missiles and mass-producible autonomous underwater systems.

Second, the Pentagon needs to ruthlessly search for the best precise mass systems that are ripe for scaling. This must include a willingness to look abroad, including at systems invented by friends such as Ukraine, as well as adversaries. Moving quickly naturally carries risks, which in the past have included the potential for unwarranted no-bid contracts to unproven vendors. In order to prevent corruption and underperformance, which would undermine the success of the whole effort, the Pentagon must conduct rigorous and rapid testing and evaluation to cull underperformers. Congress must also act swiftly to shift dollars to vendors that can deliver. There are many potential manufacturers of these nonexquisite systems, meaning Washington can unleash the power of free enterprise and competition to deliver results.

Third, the Pentagon must revive the World War II Liberty Ship model for LUCAS and other precise mass capabilities. As the United States prepared for war, President Franklin D. Roosevelt authorized 18 different shipyards across the country to produce the same cargo ship (known as “the Liberty Ship”). This distributed production model resulted in the construction of over 500 Liberty Ships, far more than any single supplier could have delivered. It would be simple to reintroduce the Liberty Ship model today since, principally, it requires common intellectual property, allowing multiple producers to manufacture an identical product. The Pentagon has already acknowledged that LUCAS was reverse-engineered from an Iranian design. Since no single company owns its relatively simple design, it is an ideal candidate for the Liberty Ship model. The Pentagon should pursue simultaneous contracts with multiple vendors and focus on the longest-range versions, which will be needed in the Indo-Pacific.

The U.S. military cannot afford to wait until the 2030s for its stockpiles to be restored and increased. And the United States cannot afford these expensive systems in this new age of war. Firing a multimillion-dollar missile at a projectile that costs $35,000 is as unwise as it is unsustainable. LUCAS shows that there is another way. Just as Roosevelt recognized that World War II required mass production, so, too, must policymakers recognize that, in the age of precise mass, the U.S. military requires more than just exquisite capabilities. It needs drones, it needs them in droves, and it needs them now.

Loading…