From PBS NewsHour.

The United States has officially entered the one-way, low cost drone war with the debut of the LUCAS drone, which has been deployed against Iran. Developed in just 18-months and costing around $35,000 per unit, the LUCAS, or Low-cost Unmanned Combat Attack System, was reverse-engineered from the Shahed-136, one of Iran’s most commonly used drones.

The relatively inexpensive system comes as a proliferation of cheap offensive and defensive drones have reshaped the modern battlefield, most expansively in Russia’s war with Ukraine and Israel’s conflicts with Hamas and Hezbollah.

But as the U.S. launches LUCAS, it faces challenges to meet manufacturing and supply demands required to deploy vast amounts of single-use weapons, while also facing growing attacks from adversarial drones on overseas installations and domestic targets.

PBS News’ Tim McPhillips spoke with Michael Horowitz, Director of Perry World House at the University of Pennsylvania and Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations to break down what you need to know about the LUCAS drone.

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