The U.S. military has stood up its first operational unit armed with Low-Cost Uncrewed Combat Attack System (LUCAS) kamikaze drones, a design reverse-engineered from the Iranian-designed Shahed-136, in the Middle East. The establishment of Task Force Scorpion Strike (TFSS) is a major development, and offers a way “to flip the script on Iran,” according to a U.S. official. Earlier this year, TWZ laid out a detailed case for why America’s armed forces should be investing heavily in rapidly-produced Shahed-136 clones as an adaptable capability that could be critical in future operations globally, as you can read here. U.S. Central Command announced the creation of TFSS today, which it said is a direct response to Secretary of War Pete Hegseth’s “Unleashing U.S. Military Drone Dominance” initiative that kicked off earlier this year. TFSS falls more specifically under the auspices of U.S. Special Operations Command Central (SOCCENT), which oversees U.S. special operations activities across the Middle East. CENTCOM’s Rapid Employment Joint Task Force (REJTF), established in September to help fast-track the fielding of new capabilities in the region, was also involved.

TFSS consists of about two dozen troops that will oversee the establishment and operations of drones, the U.S. official told us, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss operational details. The delta wing LUCAS drone, which is roughly 10 feet long and has a wingspan of eight feet, was developed by Arizona-based SpektreWorks in cooperation with the U.S. military. “I do not want to get into numbers [of drones fielded], but they are definitely based and delivered at an amount that provides us with a significant level of capability,” the official added. The LUCAS design includes features that allow for “autonomous coordination, making them suitable for swarm tactics and network-centric strikes.” “Costing approximately $35,000 per platform, LUCAS is a low-cost, scalable system that provides cutting-edge capabilities at a fraction of the cost of traditional long-range U.S. systems that can deliver similar effects,” Navy Capt. Tim Hawkins, a CENTCOM spokesperson, also told TWZ. “The drone system has an extensive range and the ability to operate beyond line of sight, providing significant capability across CENTCOM’s vast operating area.”

“LUCAS drones deployed by CENTCOM have an extensive range and are designed to operate autonomously,” CENTCOM added in a press release. “They can be launched with different mechanisms to include catapults, rocket-assisted takeoff, and mobile ground and vehicle systems.” “We can push them from various points,” the U.S. official told TWZ when asked about whether the LUCAS drones could be launched from ships. “They can be launched through various mechanisms, and land is not the only place from which to launch these.” As an aside here, TWZ has previously explored in great depth the arguments for adding a variety of drone types to the arsenals of U.S. Navy ships to provide additional layers of defense, as well as enhanced strike, electronic warfare, intelligence-gathering, and networking capabilities, which you can find here. Overall, the LUCAS drone’s core design was based directly on the Shahed-136. “The U.S. military got hold of an Iranian Shahed,” according to the U.S. official. “We took a look and reverse-engineered it. We are working with a number of U.S. companies in the innovation space.” “The LUCAS drone is the product of that [reverse-engineering] effort,” they added. “It pretty much follows the Shahed design.”

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U.S. military experience aiding in the defense of Israel, as well as observations from the war in Ukraine, have been key drivers in recent pushes to develop and field new drone and counter-drone capabilities, now including the LUCAS design. Beyond the particulars of the LUCAS drones themselves, the confirmation that an operational American unit in the Middle East is now armed with them is a major development. Before now, at least publicly, the U.S. military had only shown concrete interest in LUCAS and similar designs for use as threat representative targets for testing and training purposes rather than as operational weapons. “We are now at a point where not only are we building them in mass, but we have already based them in [the] Middle East for the first time,” the U.S. official stressed to TWZ. “In essence, we are able to flip the script on Iran.” “I’ll let you read between the lines, but the fact that we are basing it where we are basing it, and the fact that we have seen what the Russians have done to Ukraine, what Iran has done to fomenting instability with the use of drone technology, the 12-Day War threats they posed to Israel and how partners and allies have to expend vast amounts of resources to defend against these attacks, we are now taking a page from their playbook and throwing it back at them,” the U.S. official continued. “In essence, Iran enjoyed overmatch and an advantage through the high volume of drone attacks they were able to effectively deploy, and they are hard to defend against at such a high volume.”

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In addition to Iran, “we don’t have a problem hitting the [Iranian-backed] Houthis [in Yemen], we could throw it in their face as well,” the U.S. official continued. However, “with the Houthis, you have more of a target-find problem, [rather] than sending a bunch of things into Iran with lots of stuff to hit.”

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SpektreWorks is not the only company in this marketspace. In the United States, at least one other firm, Griffon Aerospace, has been pitching a Shahed-esque drone called the MQM-172 Arrowhead to America’s armed forces. While the general concept has existed for decades, similar delta-winged one-way attack munitions are steadily emerging globally among allies and potential foes alike, including in China. Russia is also said to be assisting North Korea in establishing its own domestic capacity to produce Shahed-136s, or derivatives thereof, as part of an exchange for Pyongyang’s help in fighting Ukraine. At the same time, while today’s announcement about TFSS and its LUCAS drones is significant, it is still being presented heavily as a regionally limited capability to be employed by special operations forces. Whether or not there are efforts to stand up similar units elsewhere within the U.S. military in other locales is unclear. Top U.S. Army and U.S. Air Force officers have openly expressed an extremely high desire to field a Shahed-like kamikaze drone capability as soon as possible. Still, the U.S. military’s standing up of its first operational unit armed with Shahed-like long-range kamikaze drones is a major development — one that has a high chance of serving as a springboard to much broader fielding of similar capabilities.

The Russian military has more armored vehicles than it did on the eve of Russia’s wider war on Ukraine in February 2022. And for one main reason. Despite losing as many as 16,100 vehicles in action in Ukraine, the Russians have more than compensated for these losses by pulling nearly 13,000 old vehicles out of long-term storage—and complementing these older vehicles with around 4,000 brand-new vehicles.

also those 16k loss numbers are probably exaggerated since they come from the very trustworthy Ukrainian government, so it’s even worse (or better )

The upshot is that the Russians had 20,000 vehicles in February 2022. 45 months later, they have 21,000. Yes, many of those vehicles are less sophisticated than the newer—and lost—vehicles they replaced. All the same, they represent a potent and enduring armored force. If the Kremlin chooses to use them sparingly. The implication is a foreboding one for Ukraine and any other country Russia may target. “Russia is not exhausting its armored reserves,” explained analyst Delwin, who crunched the numbers. “Modeling forward with constant 2025 loss levels and stable new production, the total fleet remains above 2022 levels through at least 2030.”

How Russia replaced 16,000 lost vehicles

Yes, Russia could struggle to make good major vehicular losses after 2030. That won’t help Ukraine, however—at least not now. There are divergent trends inside Delwin’s overall figures, of course. According to Delwin’s count, which draws on the work of open-source analyst Jompy, there’s been a slight decline in the Russian tank inventory since 2022 even as the Russian armed forces have massively expanded with new regiments and brigades. This makes sense, as the tanks’ main role has changed. As recently as 2022, large formations of tanks—sometimes dozens at a time—would operate independently or in combined-arms formations with other vehicle types. Tank attacks were still feasible … and common. But that was before tiny first-person-view drones were everywhere all the time along the 1,100-km front line of the wider war.

Why tanks matter less in 2025

A handful of $500 FPVs can knock out a million-dollar tank. FPV drones have been responsible for destroying more than two-thirds of Russian tanks in recent months. Now tanks on both sides of Russia’s wider war on Ukraine usually stay far behind the front line, hiding in underground dugouts and only occasionally rolling out to fire a few cannon rounds from kilometers away. Tanks are far less central to Russian battlefield doctrine than they were just four years ago. When Russian tanks do roll into direct combat, it’s usually as the lead vehicles in small mechanized assault groups including infantry fighting vehicles (IFVs) and armored personnel carriers (APCs) hauling squads of infantry. Wrapped in layers of improvised anti-drone armor and fitted with mine-clearing plows, the tanks clear a path for the trailing vehicles, detonating mines and absorbing as many drone strikes as possible.

Vital battle taxis

Tanks support the IFVs and APCs, which are now the most important vehicles on the battlefield. They carry and protect the infantry whose job it is to occupy and hold new positions as Russia aims for incremental territorial gains rather than dramatic breakthroughs. And that’s why the number of APCs in Russian service has grown—a lot. Delwin noted “a sharp increase of 38%” in the quantity of infantry-carriers as the Kremlin replaces losses and equips new units with their share of the vehicles. The total number of heavier IFVs, such as the BMP-3, has slightly declined, however, as there were never as many of these vehicles in storage compared to lighter, simpler APCs such as the MT-LB.

While many Russian assaults now involve troops infiltrating on foot or on motorcycles—methods of attack that favor a military that’s flush with manpower and ambivalent toward casualties

—mechanized assaults “remain a consistent tactic,” Delwin wrote, “with monthly losses in the low hundreds during such operations.” “These vehicles remain essential for assaulting fortified positions, though increasingly paired with light motorbike units and infiltration-oriented assault teams,” he added. As long as the Russians mix infantry assaults with mechanized assaults, they’re at low risk of actually running out of vehicles.

The Czech Republic had every intention of donating its roughly 30 T-72M4CZ tanks to Ukraine. Just one problem—the three-person tanks, deep upgrades of the Soviet-designed T-72, don’t work. So Ukraine won’t be getting the tanks, even though it could surely use them. The Ukrainian armed forces went to war in February 2022 with around 1,000 tanks. They have since lost more than 1,000 tanks and received another 1,000 or so as donations. That should mean the Ukrainians have as many tanks as they started with 45 months ago. The problem is that the Ukrainian armed forces have doubled in size. At the same time, hundreds of surviving tanks are badly worn out after nearly four years of hard fighting. As a consequence, there’s a tank shortage in Ukraine—one those Czech T-72M4CZs won’t be helping to solve.

Italian fire controls failed—and can’t be repaired

The problem with the T-72M4CZs—which underwent an upgrade in the early 2000s—reportedly lies with the TURMS/T fire control system from Italian firm Selex Galileo, according to Novinky.cz. The TURMS/T helps the crew aim the tank’s 125-mm main gun. Something is broken inside the fire controls. “In the summer and autumn of this year, control tests were carried out repeatedly and without success,” the Czech defense ministry told Novinky.cz. “The problem occurred with the so-called rectification, i.e. the accuracy of the firing of tanks.” “Repairing these components is not technically possible, as confirmed by their Italian manufacturer,” the ministry added. Unable to shoot accurately, the T-72M4CZs are almost certainly destined for scrapping. The Czech army is re-equipping with 44 modern German-made Leopard 2A8 tanks.

The broken tanks won’t dent Prague’s overall military support for Kyiv. Outgoing Prime Minister Petr Fiala revealed last week that Czechia has sent Ukraine military support worth $832 million since February 2022—and actually profited from the effort, receiving $1.19 billion in return through foreign aid and defense contracts. The Czech-led ammunition initiative has delivered over 1.5 million large-caliber artillery shells to Ukraine.

Why tanks matter less in Ukraine’s drone war

Tanks aren’t the most important vehicles in the Ukrainian inventory—and not just because tanks are best at offense while Ukraine is on the defense. Tanks are vulnerable to the tiny explosive drones that are everywhere all the time along the 1,100-km front line. According to NATO officials, FPV drones have been responsible for destroying more than two-thirds of Russian tanks in recent months. The Russians still deploy tanks in an offensive role, but only after wrapping them in layers of anti-drone armor. The Ukrainians deploy a few tanks for swift counterattacks against Russian incursions, but for the most part, Ukrainian tanks hide out kilometers behind the front line—leaving their dugouts only briefly to fire a few rounds at distant targets, like artillery. Forbes described this shift as the “era of the cautious tank”—a complete overhaul in how Ukraine deploys its armored forces after losing over 1,000 tanks to Russian drones.

Ukraine’s restructuring cut tank requirements

Meanwhile, the Ukrainian ground forces have reorganized in part to make more efficient use of their dwindling tank holdings. Starting in late 2024, the ground forces converted 11 tank, mechanized, and territorial brigades into heavy mechanized brigades by reducing the number of tank battalions in each brigade and increasing the number of infantry battalions. Each Ukrainian corps now has a heavy mechanized brigade. The reorganization resulted in lighter and easier-to-support brigades better suited for the kind of war Ukraine is waging right now. But the restructuring also reduced Ukraine’s overall requirement for tanks—at least for now. So, no, 30 old Czech tanks won’t make or break Ukraine’s war effort.

I love how this reorganization is painted as being totally about efficiency and adaptation and not at all related to all the vehicle losses the Ukrainians have suffered, but when Russians use motorcycle assault tactics, now that of course is an indication that they’ve ran out of tanks, if it’s the other side then the explanation could never be adaptation to the specific conditions of the war.

Five months after releasing a plan to accelerate the development of artificial intelligence, the Trump administration is turning to robots. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick has been meeting with robotics industry CEOs and is “all in” on accelerating the industry’s development, according to three people familiar with the discussions who were granted anonymity to share details. The administration is considering issuing an executive order on robotics next year, according to two of the people. A Department of Commerce spokesperson said: “We are committed to robotics and advanced manufacturing because they are central to bringing critical production back to the United States.” The Department of Transportation is also preparing to announce a robotics working group, possibly before the end of the year, according to one person familiar with the planning. A spokesperson for the department did not respond to a request for comment. There’s growing interest on Capitol Hill as well. A Republican amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act would have created a national robotics commission. The amendment was not included in the bill. Other legislative efforts are underway.

The flurry of activity suggests robotics is emerging as the next major front in America’s race against China. It’s the latest example of how the Trump administration is embracing industrial policy in a bid to compete against Beijing in critical sectors such as AI. But promoting the spread of robotics also threatens to undermine one of Trump’s chief goals: reviving the U.S. manufacturing workforce. A general-purpose humanoid sounds like science fiction. But advances in artificial intelligence are enabling human-like robots to take on increasingly sophisticated work by processing more data more quickly. The International Federation of Robotics estimates that by 2023 China had 1.8 million industrial robots inside its factories, four times as many as the U.S. China, Japan, Australia, Germany and Singapore all have national robotics plans. Catching up would require substantial investment. Funding is on pace to hit $2.3 billion in 2025 – double last year’s total, according to CB Insights. Goldman Sachs estimates the global market for humanoids could reach $38 billion by 2035.

The industry has been pushing administration officials and lawmakers to get involved. They say robots are the physical expression of AI. Any push to strengthen AI competitiveness must also include a plan for advancing robotics, they say. Companies want tax incentives or federal funding to help companies integrate advanced automation, stronger supply chains and widespread deployment. They also want trade policies to confront Chinese subsidies and intellectual property practices. “It’s important that we lean in, think about a national robotics strategy and support this burgeoning industry in the U.S. so that we can remain competitive,” Apptronik CEO Jeff Cardenas told MM. Apptronik, an Austin startup backed by Google and valued at $5 billion, has developed a general-purpose robot called Apollo, one of the first humanoids to operate inside an auto factory.

Uh… why the fuck are they making humanoid factory robots? Like the whole advantage of robots is that you can make them NOT humanoid, and thus pick whichever shape is most optimal for the specific job it’s going to be doing, which in manufacturing is rarely that of a human - that’s why most industrial robots are basically just an arm with some tool attached to the end. Androids are cool in sci-fi settings, but very much not the most important style of robot in practice.

“There is now recognition that advanced robotics is crucial to the U.S. in terms of manufacturing, technology, national security, defense applications, public safety,” said Brendan Schulman, VP of policy and government relations for Boston Dynamics. “The investment that we’re seeing in the sector and the efforts in China to dominate the future of robotics are being noticed.” An unresolved question is how a national robotics push would square with the administration’s goal of reviving American manufacturing. Skeptics warn that if companies automate too aggressively, the U.S. could end up reshoring factories only to staff them with machines - not people. A paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research found that as firms automate, many workers in routine or replaceable roles experience lower employment opportunities and reduced earnings.

Another scenario looks very different - one where robotics and manufacturing reinforce each other and where workers build, deploy and maintain robots that power industrial growth. That’s the vision some in the industry are pushing. Jeff Burnstein, president of the Association for Advancing Automation, said robots make workers more productive, which could expand job opportunities. “When companies are investing in robotics they’re also investing in more people because their company is doing better,” he said. “It’s not man versus machine, but it’s man and machine that will take us into the future,” Cardenas said. “This is our view - robots that augment human capability and human capacity, versus robots that replace us. I think it’s important that we’re there first.”

Air Force leaders are axing more major organizational changes started under the Biden administration such as reorienting commands, creating new offices, and shifting combat forces for a potential fight with China, the service’s top leaders said Tuesday. The service will no longer stand up Air Development Command, which aimed to subsume Air Education and Training Command and further combine the service’s force-development efforts, consolidate its functional managers, and create several new centers of excellence for certain career fields. Instead, AETC will retain its name and responsibilities, Air Force Secretary Troy Meink and Chief of Staff Gen. Ken Wilsbach said in a press release that described a memo sent to their service the previous day. Nor will the service reorient Air Combat Command to “focus on generating and presenting ready forces,” but rather keep it working to “organize, train, and equip combat ready Airmen,” the release said.

The service will:

• Stop establishing its Air Base Wing concept.
• Cancel plans for a new Program Assessment and Evaluation Office to handle resource analysis.
• Not create an Air Force Materiel Command Information Dominance Systems Center, Air Force Nuclear Systems Center, or an Air Dominance Systems Support Center to sustain and improve aircraft and intercontinental ballistic missiles.

These steps are the latest in Meink and Wilsbach’s efforts to undo “Reoptimization for Great Power Competition," a 24-point plan released in early 2024 by then-Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall. Execution of the plan, which aimed to prepare the Air Force for a potential fight against China, was put on hold in February by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. For months, it wasn’t clear what initiatives Meink, who took office in May, would keep or gut. In September, the Air Force secretary told reporters that he was “getting close” to making decisions on the reorganization plans tied to China, but hinted that he wasn’t “a big believer in the competition side of the house.” In the press release, he and Wilsbach appeared to allude to the Trump administration’s decisions to shift national-security focus to the Americas. “As our adversaries and the strategic environment continue to evolve, our approach to ensuring a credible and ready force must also adjust. Air superiority is not guaranteed,” the service leaders wrote. “Through flexibility and clear-eyed assessment, our Air Force will continue to fly, fix, and fight now and into the future.”

In October, the service spiked plans for a new Integrated Capabilities Command intended to speed up the acquisition of new technologies and weapons. One former defense official familiar with the past efforts said it wasn’t clear how the current Air Force leaders intend to improve such integration. “There’s different ways to solve that problem and it is not shocking to me that they would choose a different way than what was chosen by the previous team, but the question remains. How are you going to do it?” the former defense official said. “The announcements that I’ve seen do not explain how it’s going to be done, and so my concern would be if they just don’t do it, if they don’t provide that integration function, it will knock back our ability to compete with China.” The official added that Hegseth’s mandate to reduce the number of general and flag officers across the military services likely sealed the fate for many of those commands and centers the Air Force hoped to create. The memo also scraps a plan to to change Air Forces Central Command and Air Forces Northern Command/Air Forces Space from numbered Air Forces into Service Component Commands that report to the Air Force Secretary through the Air Force Chief of Staff. Those will remain as numbered Air Forces. Similarly, Air Forces Southern Command will remain the air component to U.S. Southern Command and the 12th Air Force will be re-established as a numbered Air Force inside Air Combat Command, the release said.

The memo noted that Meink and Wilsbach were keeping some elements of the reoptimization plan, including keeping warrant officers focused on cyber missions, wing units of actions, large-scale exercises and keeping various smaller integrated development and capabilities offices. The former defense official said it was encouraging to see some of those ideas kept, and believes some of those smaller offices could take on some roles that those centers would have taken on for the service’s integration efforts. “They can beef up those organizations to perform more of the functions that you would have seen, for example, in the system centers,” the former defense official said. “That’s certainly a possible solution, and I hope they do that.”

The Pentagon has “cut off contact” between American defence officials and their German counterparts, according to the head of Germany’s army. The United States has traditionally treated Germany as one of its most important European allies. It is thought to have about 35,000 soldiers stationed at German bases such as Ramstein and Stuttgart, which serve as staging posts for American operations across Africa and the Middle East. Since President Trump’s return to power in January, the relationship between the countries has become markedly cooler. Outwardly, Friedrich Merz, the German chancellor, has put on a brave face, striving to establish what appears to be a cordial personal rapport with Trump. However, Lieutenant General Christian Freuding, who took charge of the German army in October, has publicly expressed the widespread concerns that the military partnership is starting to unravel.

In an interview conducted a few weeks before his promotion, published by The Atlantic, an American magazine, on Monday, Freuding said he had previously been able to exchange text messages with his US opposite numbers “day and night”, but the channels had now been “cut off, really cut off”. Freuding, 54, said he had grown up near the US army base at Grafenwöhr in southwest Germany and had regarded the American military presence as a symbol of the western security order since he was a teenager. However, he said he saw signs that this order was beginning to crumble, such as when the US had failed to warn the Germans that it was halting arms deliveries to Ukraine in July. Freuding said he now had to rely on German diplomats in Washington, where “there is somebody who tries to find somebody in the Pentagon”, to keep up to date about his ally’s defence plans.

In public, several senior officials from the Trump administration have pointed to Germany’s rapidly rising military spending as a model for other European nations to follow. Frustrated by the difficulty of scaling up arms production at speed, the government in Berlin has begun encouraging other branches of its ailing industrial base to work with the defence sector. On Tuesday, the defence ministry held a summit with business leaders representing some of the country’s largest manufacturers. Katherina Reiche, the economics minister, announced a “matchmaking platform” that will aim to link spare capacity in underperforming sectors such as car-making with demand in the arms industry. Hans Christoph Atzpodien, the head of the BDSV umbrella group for defence manufacturers, said there was an urgent need for “upscaling” but cautioned that it would be difficult to repurpose workers, machines and factories from other industries. “There are of course many in the car-parts industry who hope they can apply their capacity and resources to defence,” he said. “But you always have to say that the scale of production and the working methods are different, so you always have to warn that this process will not be easy.”