plawolf
Lieutenant General
Advanced modern UAVs like this have many back up and redundancy features in place for things like loss of communications. If contact was lost with the ground station, the drone is almost certain to be programmed to fly automatously to a pre-set set of co-ordianates, which would be haves well outside of Iran, and could easily be near a US military base or signals station to maximise the chance of re-establishing contact and recovering the drone intact.
With modern digital frequency agile communications equipment, even detecting and effectively being able to jam it would require cutting-edge signals processing equipment and software that may or may not even be operational in the west (well, unless you go old school and just jam the hell out of every frequency under the sun, but that will hinder your own forces as much as the enemy, so is not a real solution in my book). To suggest that Iran managed to hijack the command link (can it even do that without a satillete of its own?) is simply not credible given just how difficult such a task would be. Such a thing would, in all likelihood, be well beyond the capabilities of even the US, Russia and China.
Just think of the implications if that was true. If you can successfully hack a top end secure datalink (which is almost certain to be a Link16) to take over the drone, then you can also hack into the secure datalink of every weapons system and platform that uses such a datalink.
You would be able to not only download enemy datalink data in real time, but also input data of your own, be it false co-ordinates to send incoming missiles into empty desert or the enemy's own forces, or send fake radar signals to misdirect enemy defences to even uploading viruses that shut down enemy radars and weapons systems or just tells planes to crash themselves or eject their pilots etc.
That is something not even fictional writers would dare to wet dream about, and would be a near impossible task even if you had yourself actual examples of link16 datalinks to examine and experiment with.
As I and others have already pointed out (albeit in different threads - seriously, there are discussions on this in at least three other threads that I have seen. The mods really should try and pull it all together here for ease to reference), it is intimately more probably that the drone crashed by itself, and the Iranians get doubly lucky that the drone survived the crash in such amazingly good condition.
With modern digital frequency agile communications equipment, even detecting and effectively being able to jam it would require cutting-edge signals processing equipment and software that may or may not even be operational in the west (well, unless you go old school and just jam the hell out of every frequency under the sun, but that will hinder your own forces as much as the enemy, so is not a real solution in my book). To suggest that Iran managed to hijack the command link (can it even do that without a satillete of its own?) is simply not credible given just how difficult such a task would be. Such a thing would, in all likelihood, be well beyond the capabilities of even the US, Russia and China.
Just think of the implications if that was true. If you can successfully hack a top end secure datalink (which is almost certain to be a Link16) to take over the drone, then you can also hack into the secure datalink of every weapons system and platform that uses such a datalink.
You would be able to not only download enemy datalink data in real time, but also input data of your own, be it false co-ordinates to send incoming missiles into empty desert or the enemy's own forces, or send fake radar signals to misdirect enemy defences to even uploading viruses that shut down enemy radars and weapons systems or just tells planes to crash themselves or eject their pilots etc.
That is something not even fictional writers would dare to wet dream about, and would be a near impossible task even if you had yourself actual examples of link16 datalinks to examine and experiment with.
As I and others have already pointed out (albeit in different threads - seriously, there are discussions on this in at least three other threads that I have seen. The mods really should try and pull it all together here for ease to reference), it is intimately more probably that the drone crashed by itself, and the Iranians get doubly lucky that the drone survived the crash in such amazingly good condition.
