Iran claims to down US stealth spy drone

AssassinsMace said:

Whether they jammed it or not I would guess that it came down because it ran out fuel.

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Even the dignified Americans are not spinning this story.

The Islamic regime is more concern with domestic politics than international powerplay - well, what can you expect from a country that'd condone its citizens and militia to rampage an embassy? The regime is just there to score domestic opinion.

If this is a "serious" military operation, it'd be kept quiet throughout and won't even get any limelight.

t2contra said:

Even the dignified Americans are not spinning this story.

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Is it less logical than the Iranians took control of it and landed it safely intact? At most they could maybe interrupt its operations.

If that ship shown on the Vid really is the drone, I am not convinced. That is not the resuilt of a landing it's a crash not a bad crash but a crash none the less.

An Iranian engineer claims they spoofed the GPS signal and guided the UAV to an Iranian base. Wow! I expect nothing less from the quality of their engineers and scientists.

"The GPS navigation is the weakest point," the Iranian engineer told the Monitor, giving the most detailed description yet published of Iran's "electronic ambush" of the highly classified US drone. "By putting noise [jamming] on the communications, you force the bird into autopilot. This is where the bird loses its brain."

The “spoofing” technique that the Iranians used – which took into account precise landing altitudes, as well as latitudinal and longitudinal data – made the drone “land on its own where we wanted it to, without having to crack the remote-control signals and communications” from the US control center, says the engineer.

The revelations about Iran's apparent electronic prowess come as the US, Israel, and some European nations appear to be engaged in an ever-widening covert war with Iran, which has seen assassinations of Iranian nuclear scientists, explosions at Iran's missile and industrial facilities, and the Stuxnet computer virus that set back Iran’s nuclear program.

Now this engineer’s account of how Iran took over one of America’s most sophisticated drones suggests Tehran has found a way to hit back. The techniques were developed from reverse-engineering several less sophisticated American drones captured or shot down in recent years, the engineer says, and by taking advantage of weak, easily manipulated GPS signals, which calculate location and speed from multiple satellites.

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I want to make just one point, while I find a lot more here to think about. Autolanding systems have been developed over more half a century by now and many civilian airliners are able to use it. ( No need to run the additional risk in daily operations. Just stop flying when there is fog. But if landing at zero visibility is necessary for survival to could be done ). There is absolutely no reason why drones are not equipped to fly home and land without human help. If they have a field of there own they would just have to ask the controller, a relatively simple computer, whether their landing would interfere with that of another drone, in which case they would have to remain airborne, circling around, for another few minutes.

delft said:

I want to make just one point, while I find a lot more here to think about. Autolanding systems have been developed over more half a century by now and many civilian airliners are able to use it.

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Perhaps, that was what the Americans were thinking when they developed the drone or when engineers developed our android phones and car navigation system.

Iran is just doing things the Iranian way

paintgun said:

Iran is just doing things the Iranian way

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Most of this makes sense, but why would the US not bomb the plane on the ground in Iran, possibly using an armed unmanned vehicle? It was considered, but not done. Would the reputation of the US really be more damaged by leaving a destroyed spy plane in a remote place in Iran or the same plane slightly damaged exhibited in Tehran?

delft said:

Most of this makes sense, but why would the US not bomb the plane on the ground in Iran, possibly using an armed unmanned vehicle? It was considered, but not done. Would the reputation of the US really be more damaged by leaving a destroyed spy plane in a remote place in Iran or the same plane slightly damaged exhibited in Tehran?

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I believe the concern that stayed America's hand is a combination of confusion over how they lost the drone if the Iranians actually did have a hand in this (even if they weren't successful, any jamming and hacking attempts needed to be checked out in case it really was as the Iranians claim. After all, if they had somehow managed to compromise US UAV commends, sending more UAVs into Iran is hardly a great idea); the lack of suitable assets - it is unlike that the US has a stealth UCAV operational. That means that if they wanted to bomb the crash site, the need to send in conventional reapers, cruise missiles, special forces or B2s.

Conventional UCAVs and cruise missiles would be next to impossible to disguise and keep secret, even a B2 strike could leave pretty conclusive evidence that the US dropped bombs on Iran. Even if dropped over empty desert, that is still an act of war. And I think even the US is not arrogant enough to be so brazenly involved. This being a black ops thing would not have helped matters, as any strike would be been highly classified.

That could tie the US in all sorts of knots if the Iranians took bomb and missile fragments from any strike against the drone and planted them at some of the mysterious explosions that have happened in Iran of late.

Imagine how bad that would have looked. And worse, it would have been next to impossible for the US to prove it's innocence. Those would have been real American bomb/missile fragments from weapons they dropped on Iran.

But even if they were willing to risk that to bomb it, B2s without comprehensive jamming support flying deep into Iran when their air force and air defences are fully operational would be a massive risk. Same of not more so about sending in a specops team in stealth helos.

So, with poor options, and a real risk that any attempt to destroy the drone would only make things many times worse for America, it would have been easy to just wait and hope that the Iranians done find it before a sand storm bury it or something.