LUCAS Attack Drone Sees First Combat in Operation Epic Fury, Turning Iran’s Own Shahed Design Against Tehran

Seven months after Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth held up a reverse-engineered Iranian drone at a Pentagon event and called it America’s answer to the Shahed-136, that drone flew in combat. In the early hours of February 28, 2026, the U.S. military confirmed the first combat use of the Low-Cost Unmanned Combat Attack System (LUCAS) as part of Operation Epic Fury, a joint U.S.-Israel strike campaign targeting Iran. CENTCOM’s public statement confirmed strikes on Iranian military infrastructure. The weapon doing part of the striking was built by an Arizona startup from a captured Iranian airframe.

• The Development: LUCAS, a reverse-engineered clone of Iran’s Shahed-136 built by Arizona-based SpektreWorks, was used in combat for the first time during coordinated strikes on Iranian military infrastructure on February 28, 2026.
• The “So What?”: At $35,000 per unit with autonomous AI flight controls and swarm coordination, LUCAS changes the cost math of precision strike operations against hardened targets.
• The Operator: Task Force Scorpion Strike, a CENTCOM unit stood up in late 2025 under Hegseth’s directive, managed the deployment.
• The Irony: The drone used to strike Iranian targets was built by copying an Iranian drone the U.S. captured and rebuilt with American technology.

LUCAS Combat Debut: What CENTCOM Targeted

CENTCOM confirmed that Operation Epic Fury struck IRGC command and control facilities, Iranian air defense nodes, missile and drone launch sites, and military airfields. LUCAS drones were among the weapons used in those strikes. This is the first confirmed combat use of a U.S. one-way attack drone, a milestone the Pentagon had been building toward since mid-2025 when Hegseth publicly debuted the program.

Iran’s IRGC responded with a broad wave of missile and drone counterstrikes directed at Israel and at U.S. military installations across the region. The scale of Iran’s counterstrike forced airspace restrictions across multiple countries hosting U.S. forces.

SpektreWorks Built the Shahed’s American Twin

LUCAS is a direct reverse-engineering of Iran’s Shahed-136 kamikaze drone. SpektreWorks, based in Arizona, captured a damaged Shahed airframe, rebuilt it around American electronics and guidance systems, and produced a platform that outperforms the original in several key areas. The result is a Group 3 UAS with autonomous AI flight controls, GPS-denied inertial navigation, and swarm coordination capability.

Specs confirmed in our December 2025 coverage show a platform roughly three meters long with a 2.4-meter wingspan, 718-kilometer range, six hours of endurance, and an 18-kilogram payload capacity. It launches from trucks or rocket-assisted rails, no runway required. At $35,000 a copy, it costs a fraction of an MQ-9 Reaper, which runs into the tens of millions per airframe depending on configuration.

The drone also integrates with the Multi-Domain Unmanned Systems Communications (MUSIC) mesh network, which lets it act as a communications relay node in GPS-jammed or signal-degraded environments. That dual-role capability — strike asset and comms node — is what separates LUCAS from a simple kamikaze design.

We first reported on SpektreWorks and the LUCAS concept back in July 2025, when Hegseth unveiled it at a Pentagon event. The design philosophy was clear even then: match the Shahed’s price point, exceed its capabilities, and build it fast enough to field in numbers.

Task Force Scorpion Strike Was Built for This Moment

Task Force Scorpion Strike was created in late 2025 under Hegseth’s directive to accelerate drone integration across all military branches. It operates under U.S. Special Operations Command Central and is specifically structured around managing low-cost, high-volume drone operations in contested environments. When CENTCOM formally deployed the task force to the Middle East in December 2025, analysts noted it was entering the field at the right moment — Iranian Shaheds were already reshaping threat calculus across the region.

The task force conducted validation exercises in the Persian Gulf region in the weeks before the operation. That work gave LUCAS its final real-world shakedown before the combat call came.

The Broader Drone War Context

Operation Epic Fury didn’t happen in a vacuum. The F-35C shootdown of an Iranian Shahed-139 approaching the USS Abraham Lincoln in early February 2026 showed how close Iran was pushing its drone harassment of U.S. naval assets. The IRGC had been testing boundaries for months.

As we detailed one day before the operation launched, the math of drone warfare now favors the attacker. When defenders spend hundreds of thousands of dollars per intercept against drones that cost tens of thousands, the economics eventually break. LUCAS is an attempt to flip that equation on offense: put enough $35,000 drones into a coordinated barrage and you can saturate defenses built for cruise missiles, not swarms. At $35,000 per unit, even a modest swarm run costs a fraction of a single interceptor missile.

Iran itself helped write this playbook. The global race to copy the Shahed design that we tracked in September 2025 included multiple nations studying the airframe. The U.S. went a step further and fielded it. Iran’s drone blueprint already gave Russia a mass-production weapon it couldn’t build alone — now that same blueprint is being used against Tehran.

The Pentagon has been accelerating this trajectory on multiple fronts. The $150 million “Gauntlet” competition selected 25 drone vendors earlier this month. The Defense Innovation Unit’s push for containerized drone launchers that can store and launch swarms on command fits directly with how LUCAS was deployed during Operation Epic Fury.

DroneXL’s Take

I’ve been covering LUCAS since before most outlets took it seriously. When Hegseth held up that Shahed-derived airframe at the Pentagon in July 2025, the reaction in some circles was skeptical: a reverse-engineered Iranian drone, built by an Arizona startup, operated by a task force that didn’t exist six months prior? It looked like a talking point, not a weapons program.

February 28, 2026 ended that conversation.

What makes this genuinely significant isn’t just the combat confirmation. It’s the speed. SpektreWorks went from public debut to combat deployment in seven months. That’s a procurement timeline that would have been unthinkable for any legacy defense contractor. The modular FLM 131 frame, the open architecture payload system, the MUSIC network integration — none of this was designed to win a 10-year acquisition competition. It was designed to get into the fight fast. It did.

The swarm economics deserve attention too. At $35,000 per unit, even a relatively small coordinated barrage costs a fraction of the air defense systems built to stop it. The Iranians figured out this math years ago with the Shahed. The U.S. just turned it around on them.

My prediction: by September 2026, LUCAS production orders will exceed 5,000 units and SpektreWorks will announce at least one allied nation purchase, most likely a Gulf state that watched Operation Epic Fury from the inside. The $35,000 price point is the product. Everything else is the brochure.

Editorial Note: AI tools were used to assist with research and archive retrieval for this article. All reporting, analysis, and editorial perspectives are by Haye Kesteloo.