After years of swatting $20,000 drones with $1 million missiles, the U.S. military has stood up a new unit in the Middle East built to fight on the enemy’s terms — cheap, fast, and expendable.
It’s called Task Force Scorpion Strike, and it comes armed with one-way attack drones known as LUCAS — the Low-cost Unmanned Combat Attack System.
Translation: America built its own version of Iran’s Shahed-136 and put it on the field.
The task force went operational four months after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ordered the services to quit admiring PowerPoint slides and start integrating drones across the force. This is the first visible proof that somebody listened.
LUCAS drones carry about an eight-foot wingspan. They launch off trucks, catapults, or rocket rails. They fly to the target. They explode. No pilot. No return ticket.
They’re built by U.S.-based SpektreWorks and were reportedly developed after American engineers studied a captured Iranian Shahed drone. Instead of dismissing it as crude, they copied what worked — then added U.S. communications upgrades and modular components.
The result? A mass-producible loitering munition that can operate in swarms.
That’s the key word: swarms.
Iran and its proxies have been flooding battlefields and shipping lanes with cheap drones, forcing the U.S. Navy to burn through expensive interceptors to keep commercial traffic alive. That’s not strategy — that’s bleeding money.
LUCAS reportedly costs in the $35,000–$40,000 range per unit. Compare that to the cost of a high-end interceptor missile and you start to understand what’s happening.
This isn’t escalation. It’s arithmetic.
CENTCOM Commander Adm. Brad Cooper dressed it up in official language, calling the move “innovation as deterrence.” But here’s the bottom line: deterrence fails when your response costs 100 times more than the threat.
Task Force Scorpion Strike is led by Special Operations Command personnel and tied closely to CENTCOM’s technology cell, launched last fall to push autonomous systems to the front lines faster.
That’s long overdue.
For two decades, the U.S. military chased boutique platforms — exquisite aircraft, billion-dollar ships, gold-plated systems designed for peer wars that never quite arrive the way planners imagine. Meanwhile, adversaries figured out they could impose real costs with lawnmower engines and commercial electronics.
Now CENTCOM is answering swarm with swarm.
Cheap with cheaper.
Attrition with scale.
This is what cost-imposition strategy looks like when it leaves the think tank and shows up in a desert hangar.
The drone war in the Middle East has entered its asymmetric phase. Not because America wanted it to — but because the math demanded it.
And this time, the U.S. might finally be playing the same game.