What will you do when an army of exquisitely designed, reusable aircraft, that uses expendable drones intentionally? The silence behind the U.S. military answering that inquiry is that a new one way attack drone, formally the Low cost Unmanned Combat Attack System (LUCAS) has been deployed in the Middle East by the U.S. Air Force and the U.S. Navy. It is not the airframe but the principle that is the attention-grabber: take limited sophistication, emphasize on volume, and cause a foe to outlay many times as much to defend as it would to attack.
LUCAS publicly identifies with the battlefield logic of the Iranian Shahed family, the identical design line that Russia has utilized on a large scale in Ukraine. The documentation and official statements of the United States outline a system that deliberately follows the Shahed-136 prototype: a delta/flying-wing design, that the rear-mounted piston engine and a one-use only mission format. Straight to the point, one of the U.S. officials explained the origin: The U.S. military had acquired an Iranian Shahed, and We took a gander and reverse-engineered it.
It is a significant lineage since the influence of the Shahed has not been about accuracy but rather economics in the form of constant salvos. The dilemma of the defender is manifested in Ukraine in hard words. Studies quoted by CSIS on the trend of war strikes in Ukraine report more than 14,700 one-way attack drones launched in slightly more than two years, most of them Shaheds, where the general features of typical characteristics have been cited as ranging around a 2,000-kilometer range and a warhead of 40 kilograms. Although various ones are caught, it is the pressure of repetition: radar time, crew fatigue, and the cost-exchange trap that occurs when interceptors are expensive, but the target is cheap and noisy.
LUCAS would provide that low-end lever, an attritable strike weapon, that is supposed to be expended, to U.S. commanders. The reference reporting also identifies a more structured step than an ad hoc fielding: U.S. Central Command stood up Task Force Scorpion Strike, which was a small unit whose purpose was to construct, base and deploy these drones in front. A CENTCOM spokesperson characterized LUCAS in the same reporting, of being of the order of 35,000 per platform, words that that, however much unit cost may vary, indicates the type the Pentagon is pursuing: affordable enough to deploy in large quantities, but expensive enough to count when it hits.
Technically, it seems that LUCAS is designed with the good enough band in mind: long-range navigation using a mix of GPS/inertial guidance, low cruise speeds, and payloads that are estimated to fall in the 3050 kilogram range optimized to blast and fragment against fixed infrastructure and weakly defended targets. The thing is to be there and target instead of being able to survive, helpful to overload air defenses, complicate air picture control, and provide higher-end weapons opportunities.
The bet includes operational flexibility. Navy-associated information comprises the ability to operate with shipboard launch systems and other ground launch systems, and this is in line with the wider push to decentralize strike capability into systems that would not traditionally have possessed a long-range offensive capability. In the reference material, a U.S. official stated, we can fire them out at different locations, further pointing out that it is not the only place to launch them out.
The engineering also has a strategic signal about it. A system that was previously regarded as crude is now being approached as a planned design, industrial, scalable and repeatable. The awkward irony is that the main strength of the Shahed cheap mass has proved to be a model that can be imitated, improved and institutionalized even by the United States.
