Sarah Kreps

Thank you.

It's great to be here.

Yeah.

So these are new for the US military.

And for years, the US was using medium altitude, long endurance drones, the kind they would use in counterterrorism strikes.

So these Lucas drones are fairly new.

They're also called loitering munitions or kamikaze drones.

And

Ironically, they're reverse engineered from Iran's own Shahed-136 drones, which had been used widely by Russia in Ukraine and by Iranian proxies.

So the U.S.

saw these drones and then adapted the design to create an affordable and mass-producible American version of that.

So

These are far cheaper than either missiles or precision guided munitions and certainly the kind of drone that people might have seen for counterterrorism.

Well, actually, I don't think it's all that different.

I mean, obviously, these are very different contexts, but where military innovation really thrives is in a war zone.

And so that has been most salient, most operative in Ukraine the last few years.

And what was happening is that

Initially, they were using kind of a bit more advanced drones, and then they basically ran out.

And so what the Ukrainians started doing was developing really on the fly these smaller drones, which sometimes the explosives would be manufactured in someone's garage and then strapped on, and then this drone would fly and basically be used as a kamikaze weapon.

And that actually seemed to work pretty well.