Michael C. Horowitz
Operation Epic Fury and Iran’s response to ongoing U.S. and Israeli attacks represent clear evidence that we are now in the era of precise mass in war, the high-volume use of low-cost, increasingly autonomous systems with high-accuracy guidance. In other words, there are a lot more drones on battlefields today, but not the ones you remember from the global war on terrorism. This shows that the lessons learned from the war in Ukraine, which has now dragged on for more than four years, are shaping the behavior of the United States, Iran, and Israel. The world is seeing the spread of a new form of warfare.
The United States is not the passenger it once was in this new format. The first wave of U.S. attacks as part of Operation Epic Fury marked the initial operational deployment of the LUCAS (low-cost unmanned combat attack system). Reverse-engineered from the Iranian Shahed-136 drone, the long-range, one-way attack loitering munition was sped through the Pentagon’s acquisition pipeline in just eighteen months, and it was only recently embedded in U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) in December 2025.
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