(0458)(0525)
Sidelights on Persia
Shanaka Anslem Perera, author of The Ascent Begins. Independent Analyst. Money, geopolitics, AI, science, and sovereignty. Mapping the collapse and the reconstruction of order. (Seems Indian, lives in Australia.)
On July 16, 2025, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth held up a drone at a Pentagon event. It had a delta wing, a pusher propeller, and a silhouette that anyone who had watched the war in Ukraine would recognize immediately.
It was a copy of the Iranian Shahed-136, the kamikaze drone that Russia had fired (by the thousands into Ukrainian cities)*, the weapon Iran distributed to Houthi proxies in Yemen, the airframe that humiliated Western air defense systems through sheer volume and cheapness.
*(JH: This is not so … by his own admission, they had coordinates, they flew there, they took out targetted infrastructure. The Russians retaliated after 2014 after NATO, CIA, US pollies, plus Britain and others, had no intention of a peace process, were trafficking, using biolabs and Russian speakers were being targetted. This Perera is being disingenuous … see text in my brackets.)
Except this one was American. Built by an Arizona startup called SpektreWorks from a captured Iranian airframe. Seven months later, on February 28, 2026, CENTCOM confirmed that the Low-cost Unmanned Combat Attack System flew in combat for the first time during Operation Epic Fury. Against Iran.
The country that designed the original. CENTCOM’s statement was direct: “Task Force Scorpion Strike, for the first time in history, is using one-way attack drones in combat during Operation Epic Fury. These low-cost drones, modeled after Iran’s Shahed drones, are now delivering American-made retribution.”
Task Force Scorpion Strike was established in December 2025 with an explicit mandate. A US official told The War Zone the unit was created “to flip the script on Iran.” On December 16, a LUCAS drone was test-launched from the Littoral Combat Ship USS Santa Barbara in the Persian Gulf. Ten weeks later, the script was flipped.
Here is the economics. A Tomahawk cruise missile costs approximately $2 million. LUCAS costs $35,000. For the price of a single Tomahawk, you can launch 57 LUCAS drones. A Shahed-136 in Russian production costs approximately $80,000 per unit at the Alabuga facility. The American reverse-engineered version costs less than half the Russian licensed copy of the Iranian original.
SpektreWorks received a $30 million initial production contract. That buys 857 kamikaze drones for what the Navy spends maintaining a handful of Tomahawks.
But cost is not the (real) story. The original Shahed-136 navigates by pre-programmed GPS and inertial guidance. It flies to a fixed coordinate and detonates. It cannot be retargeted in flight. It cannot communicate with other drones. It cannot adapt. LUCAS integrates with the MUSIC mesh network, a multi-domain unmanned systems communications architecture that allows each drone to function simultaneously as a strike weapon and a communications relay node.
Some units carry Starlink terminals, specifically the military Starshield variant, enabling beyond-line-of-sight satellite communications, real-time human oversight, and autonomous swarm coordination in GPS-denied and electronically jammed environments.
The original Shahed is a flying bomb with a coordinate. The American version is a networked intelligence node that happens to explode. Russian military commentators are already sounding alarms. The integration of Starlink with a mass-producible airframe represents a threat class that existing electronic warfare cannot reliably counter.
You cannot jam a mesh network the same way you jam a GPS receiver. The drone that does not reach its target still relays targeting data for the drone behind it. Every unit the enemy shoots down costs the defender more in interceptor ammunition than the attacker spent building it.
That is the Shahed math, the logic Iran invented and Russia perfected in (the) Ukraine. The United States just applied it to the country that wrote the equation. Seven months from Pentagon debut to combat deployment.
For context, a traditional major defense acquisition program takes seven years to reach Milestone B. Iran spent a decade refining the Shahed-136. The United States reverse-engineered it, improved it, networked it, and sent it home in under a year.
