Smoke plumes rise following missile strikes in Tehran, Iran, on Sunday.ATTA KENARE/AFP/Getty Images
The U.S.-Israeli military attack that killed Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and members of his high command involved widescale deployment of several cutting-edge technologies, including artificial intelligence and the first use by U.S. military forces of a weapon inspired by Iranian technology.
The U.S. Central Command said Saturday that it had “employed low-cost one-way attack drones for the first time in combat.” The LUCAS drones, built by Phoenix-based Spektreworks Inc., cost US$35,000 each and were modelled after Iran’s Shahed-136s, which have been used in the Ukraine war and hit several Gulf state sites in response to the attacks on Tehran.
“History was made yesterday, yet many overlooked the significant headline,” Lorin Selby, a retired second rear admiral with the U.S. Navy and national security expert, said in a LinkedIn post Sunday about the LUCAS drones. “The era of the $35,000 weapon has begun.”
The drones complemented other technologies that have increasingly shaped recent military actions, including the capture by U.S. forces of deposed Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro in January.
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The New York Times reported that the CIA, working with Israeli counterparts, had tracked Ayatollah Khamenei’s movements for months and learned a meeting of top Iranian officials would take place early Saturday at a compound in Tehran. While it is not clear what other technologies were used, both the U.S. and Israel have many modern electronic warfare tools at their disposal.
The Ayatollah “was unable to avoid our Intelligence and Highly Sophisticated Tracking systems and, working closely with Israel, there was not a thing he, or the other leaders that have been killed along with him, could do,” U.S. President Donald Trump said in a Truth Social post on Saturday.
Prior to the attack on Venezuela, the U.S. Space Force and the Cyber Command were involved in suppressing defence forces in that country, General Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said at the time. The U.S. Navy also used its electronic attack platform, known as EA-18G Growlers, to jam enemy radar and communications systems, The Wall Street Journal reported. Some observers believed the U.S. Cyber Command also disrupted Venezuela’s electrical grid.
That followed the reported use of cyberweapons by the U.S. military last June to disrupt Iran’s air missile defence system during strikes on three nuclear sites.
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Reuters reported Sunday a wave of cyberattacks took place alongside the U.S.-Israeli attacks. News websites were hacked and a religious calendar app called BadeSaba displayed messages telling users, “It’s time for a reckoning” and urged armed forces to give up weapons and join the people. There was also a near-total internet blackout in Iran Saturday.
“I would expect that in connection to a kinetic assault that various hacking technologies would have been deployed to disrupt and deter communication within Iran,” said Matt Holland, who used to write code for cybersecurity missions when he worked for the Communications Security Establishment, Canada’s cyberspy agency, and is now an Ottawa-based cybersecurity entrepreneur.
The U.S. military is a customer of Palantir Technologies Inc., a Denver-based data and analytics giant whose flagship products allow the use of virtual digital twins of physical locations to inform real-time decision making. Palantir’s AI-based software is also used by U.S. military intelligence to analyze drone and sensor data to pinpoint targets.
The U.S. military has also been a big user of large language model (LLM) artificial intelligence technology. The Wall Street Journal and Axios reported that Anthropic PBC’s LLM platform Claude was used during Saturday’s action. That was despite the fact that Mr. Trump a day earlier directed all federal agencies to stop using Anthropic, accusing the San Francisco company in a Truth Social post of forcing the government “to obey their terms of service instead of our Constitution.”
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(Anthropic was the first LLM company to have its models used across the Defence Department’s classified network. Later Friday, rival OpenAI said it had reached a deal with the Pentagon to deploy “advanced AI systems in classified environments.”)
The Israel Defense Forces, meanwhile, have deployed an AI-based system called Habsora to generate attack targets using intelligence data since 2021. Israel has also conducted attacks on Hezbollah’s communications system, including a sophisticated campaign that saw it remotely detonate pagers used by members of the Iranian-backed terrorist organization in September, 2024.
Israel’s flourishing tech scene has also produced startups specializing in cybersecurity and other advanced technologies.
Mr. Holland said he expected the U.S. and Israel “would have mapped out all the computer/infrastructure assets that they would want to disrupt ahead of time, so it would be a rapidly executed plan once they decided” to attack, including everything “from hacking tools to signal jammers to passive listening of signals generated by key areas within Iran.”
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Ken Nickerson, a technology adviser and fellow with the Creative Destruction Lab in Toronto, said: “You definitely want to disable command and control from issuing radio commands to missile systems to launch” and deploy drones or other “loitering munitions in the sky” to attack sites “as soon as they turn on their radio frequencies.”
The development of the LUCAS weapons came after U.S. Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth implored the military last year to establish dominance in drones.
Eliot Pence, chief executive of Canadian defence technology startup Dominion Dynamics, said the LUCAS drones offered a low-cost way for the U.S. military to take out anti-aircraft radar systems and complement big-ticket hardware such as fighter jets and missiles.
Combining cheap and expensive military hardware “is not something the U.S. has ever done. It’s the new way of warfare,” he said.
With a report from Reuters