On Iran’s Stealth RQ 170 Capture 9, December 2011
Posted by thegulfblog.com in Random.Tags: American drone caputres, Beast of Kandahar, Beast of Kandahar caputred, Iran, Iran shot down drone, RQ 170, RQ 170 captured
trackback
So Iran did actually manage to get a hold of one of America’s drones this time? I would imagine that there are some highly concerned people in Washington and some people buying air tickets and grabbing bags full of cash in Moscow and Beijing.
Iran insists that it remotely jammed the UAV and landed it on purpose. But Iran lies quite a lot about these things. Their technology is, obviously enough , enormously inferior to America’s, but America’s hubris knows no bounds: hence the debacle in Iraq with the feeds from UAVs. Certainly, it is not beyond the realms of possibility that Iran hacked the feed and took control of it (their asymmetric warfare capabilities need to be noted as significant, in particular) but it is more likely that either 1) a technical error from the US side caused the issue or 2) Iran managed to scramble the signal somehow. Either which way, these UAVs are designed to land themselves somewhere flat so certainly it didn’t need the Iranians to guide it down.
Certainly, this is a blow for America. How bad a problem remains to be seen in a few years when grainy footage emerges from a Chinese military base of a wing shaped UAV taking off.
Yet such a UAV has such eventualities taken into account; there is some degree of expendability built in.This is not to try to minimize the loss; as Michael Dunn notes, now for one thing Iran will be able to learn exactly what the RQ 170 actually does (i.e. only photography, sigint, radar suppression etc or some combination thereof).
There are, of course, two other possibilities entirely. 1) That Iran has made this out of leftover polystyrene and sticky back plastic or that 2) this is some enormously elaborate sting by America. Neither are that likely, but neither can be ruled out. Let the speculation begin.
The Gulf blog 
Fools under-estimate IR, so future will tell, who is right & who is wrong and who has gained & who lost ! US Govt. is not only lier but criminal also.
there is a plethora of images showing Chinese UAV and UCAV’s (including flying wing designs like the RQ-170) in either development or testing.
For analysis on this issue I’d suggesting look at these links (in order):
http://aviationintel.com/?p=4322
http://aviationintel.com/?p=4476
Certainly they’ve got their own. But it’s just like with people; it’s what is on the inside that counts.