Three men tasked with ramping up American drone capabilities told Senators they are making progress, but said they faced rapidly evolving challenges.
Just days after the United States fired a one-way attack drone for the first time in combat, a Senate committee on March 5 highlighted an urgent need to increase military unmanned vehicle production, training, and use.
“This issue has profound implications for both our warfighting readiness and our future prosperity. I’m not really sure Americans understand that fully yet,” said Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.), chair of the Senate committee on Armed Services.
During the hearing on Wednesday, Wicker acknowledged the U.S. combat debut of the “Low-cost Unmanned Combat Attack System”—or LUCAS drone—during Operation Epic Fury against Iran.
Admiral Brad Cooper, the Central Command leader of U.S. military forces in the Middle East, said the military had launched “countless one-way attack drones, achieving massive effects.”
Those drones were “originally an Iranian design,” Cooper said in a March 3 video. “We took them back to America, made them better—and fired them right back at Iran.”It was manufactured after “we captured it, pulled the guts out of it … put a little bit of ’made in America’ on it,” then made it an “indispensable” part of U.S. strikes against Iran, Cooper told reporters on March 5.
An Arizona-based defense contractor, SpektreWorks, developed the LUCAS based on the Iranian Shahed-136 model, according to an independent defense research website, GlobalSecurity.org.
Iran has supplied that weapon to Russia, the website says, ever since the Russia–Ukraine war began in 2022.
Test-fired for the first time in December, the suicide-mission LUCAS drone costs about $35,000 each—far less than reusable, more sophisticated models that can cost up to $40 million each.
Wicker said that the Russia–Ukraine war “has forever changed the character of modern warfare and demonstrated the growing importance of small unmanned systems—what we colloquially call drones.”
U.S. drone development has lagged, largely because the Chinese Communist Party heavily subsidized its drone makers.
That strategy rendered drone companies in America and other nations unable to compete with lower-priced and more-advanced Chinese drones, Wicker noted.
But, he said, “we’re finally on the cusp of charting a future for American drone dominance.”
President Donald Trump issued an executive order in June 2025, intended to remove obstacles so that the United States could “unleash” drone capabilities.
Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.), a committee member, championed the American Security Drone Act of 2023.
That law banned federal agencies from purchasing or operating drones tied to foreign adversaries such as China; it took full effect in December 2025.
“We have to keep fighting to ensure Communist China has absolutely zero role in our drone supply or anywhere in our military, which is critical to American safety,” Scott said during the hearing.
Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.), the committee’s ranking member, said: “For too long, the United States was hindered by self-imposed restrictions and bureaucratic red tape.”
China continues to dominate the manufacture of “critical components” of drones, such as motors and batteries, he said.
By Janice Hisle
