Air Force Says Iran Didn't Down Drone

First time accepted submitter QQBoss writes "The Air Force is not saying what caused the RQ-170 UAV to crash in Iran, but that Iran's claim to have forced it down is erroneous. The drone didn't come down and land gently as Iran had suggested it did. At least Iran got a good photo op, though the more interesting question is what technology will they be able to glean from what they did capture."

Comments

Forget PR

[oldhack]

Did USAF figured out how/why the drone got captured?

Re:Forget PR

[Ethanol-fueled]

Yeah, I also laughed out loud when I saw the page in the link.

I do find it credible that Iran didn't use technical wizardry to down the drone. As a former Air Force electronic warfare technician, I'm guessing that Iran just flooded the area with high-amplitude noise jamming to trigger an automatic landing routine. My knowledge is not current, but much military technology nowadays uses 2 other (3-letter-acronym) types of satellite-based navigation technology with better precision than that of GPS.

There's a reason for classifying technology, and it's not to hide super-secret features. It's to prevent the enemy from knowing what a piece of shit the technology is.

But then again, seeing how the Joint Strike fighter and the F-22 both turned out to be flimsy, overpriced pieces of shit, It would not surprise me to see hurried Tijuana design practices in the systems integration. The last good American aircraft was the ultra-versatile, ultra-reliable F-15 airframe, which is still being adapted for use. I know because I worked on 'em, back in the days when their main antenna array was mechanically scanned :)

Re:Forget PR

[rtb61]

Who can forget how this all started out.
It not ours we didn't lose one.
We lost one but that's not it.

We want it back.
Now it's, 'er' yeah, it's our's but they didn't bring it down, we lost it all on our own (somehow that's meant to be better.

Of course the web site source is going wildly counter Republican dogma about the dangerous Iranians "the Iranians are constantly lying about their military exploits, especially when it comes to developing new weapons and technology. This is apparently done mainly for domestic propaganda as satellite photos never show more than a few prototypes of these wonder-weapons". So no great threat after all.

The real battle at the moment is between the US and Israel. The US administration is sick of Israel forcing into losing situations, losing billions and losing soldiers and knows Israel is actively trying to goad Iran into attacking Israel.

Likely Russia and China will not be too impressed in Israel launches an airstrike even a series of airstrikes on Iran in an attempt to precipitate a conflict and draw in the US at the US's expense.

Likely this will result in both China and Russia supply Iran with the latest weapons to test them against US hardware.

Re:Forget PR

[dkleinsc]

We run a secret intelligence agency, and have an acknowledged PsyOp division, aimed at the general US population.

Incidentally, that would be admitting to breaking the law, because the US military is bound by law to aim psyops solely at foreign populations.

Re:Forget PR

[Ethanol-fueled]

Why are you contradicting yourself?

Noise jamming is not "technical wizardry." It is the crudest form of electronic jamming known to man. It's the "hail mary" of the jamming world. If Iran used it, they did so because their technology is primitive, not because they had inside information.

Yeah that's called "security through obscurity" and no self-respecting security relies on it.

Tell that to the Serbians who shot down an American stealth fighter using primitive sixties-era Russian technology.

Re:Forget PR

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

Do you remember when laws used to be enforced? That seemed to work OK. I wonder why they stopped?

Re:Forget PR

[hairyfeet]

Well don't forget it was only a couple of years ago (late 09 i believe) that Intel quit making the 386 because the military was still buying and that thing is so old they haven't been found even in goodwill stores in nearly a decade, hell I throw away machines a dozen times more powerful than that old POS chip.

Despite all the talk of the "high tech military' by the time the gear gets through committees and sub-committees and 14 levels of bureaucratic BS the stuff is pretty damned ancient. I don't know what is sadder, how much really old crap our soldiers are dealing with or how the really old crap is better than the new stuff, like the F35 which is up to what? A billion plus just to fix the bugs they've found so far? Frankly i think we'd be better off having some more F-15s and F-18s cranked out even though those are old designs.

but if this program is anything like what we've seen with the fighters the only thing the program is really good at is cost overruns and the thing probably has so many bugs you could knock it down with a hacked iPhone. How much you wanna bet the Chinese will end up with it like they did the stealth chopper we lost going after Bin Laden and the F 117 they had dug up in Kosovo? Maybe they can figure out how to make it at a decent price and have it actually functional.

Re:Forget PR

[timeOday]

I think you and the GP are missing an important, falsifiable statement from the story: "The air force did say that, because they had figured out what brought the RQ-170 down, they were continuing to fly RQ-170s on reconnaissance missions."

.

I have a hard time believing they would do this if your theory - simple jamming - were correct.

I also have a hard time believing the GP that US propagandists would use such a simple, falsifiable lie.

So, I think the most likely scenario is that this new high-tech drone simply broke down over Iran and crash-landed.

Re:Forget PR

[Patch86]

Great when you're flying over enemy-infested desert mountain ranges, but not so great when flying over a city or key piece of infrastructure. The military is (generally) not in the business of "let's just blow everything up regardless!".

Re:what they'll get..

[DigiShaman]

They will exchange or gift it to some other nation in exchange for diplomatic relations. Namely China or Russia. Aside from the whole stealth paint technology, it provides little extra value.

Alt. Scenario

[Anonymous Coward]

U.S. receives intelligence that Iran are working on tech to bring down an enemy drone safely.
U.S. plays along and lets Iran "land" a drone with sub-par/poisoned tech on board.
U.S. pretends to try and reproduce the bug that Iran publically announces, hence the delay.
U.S. claims that Iran's method couldn't have possibly worked and that it was an unknown error.

Iran thinks that U.S. is either incompetent or has failed to realise the key, unreleased, step in their methodology.
U.S. lets Iran believe that their method works, and, optionally, leads them down the garden path with poisoned tech on board the planted drone.
When Real War breaks out, U.S. has an advantage, drones continue to fly and Iran wastes time and energy trying to perfect their drone-capturing skillz.

Re:Self-Destruct anyone?

[Anonymous Coward]

Bingo! - except you can't say this one didn't have any.

TFA's case is that this was a crashed drone; why it got re-painted the wrong color in the pics.

If you're going to bondo for the photo-session, there's no reason you can't also bondo the damage from the self-destruction of the important bits.

Given the extensive standard-procedure self-destruction built into any other flying intelligence equipment, it's nonsensical to think these drones don't have it. Just don't expect it to evaporate the whole vehicle -- that stuff adds weight. There will just be enough to chemically burn the really important parts. This drone likely had some scorch marks before the re-paint.

Re:Uh

[icebike]

Do people expect the military to admit that their drone wasn't hacked and gently landed? Of course they're going to save face here.

Did you read the linked article:

Then many Americans familiar with the RQ-170 carefully studied the pictures of the "captured" RQ-170 and immediately suspected something was off. For one thing, the RQ-170 shown was the right size and shape but the wrong color. Not just a different color from that seen on many photos of the RQ-170s in Afghanistan but also a color unknown in American military service. A closer examination of the Iranian RQ-170 photos indicated that the Iranians had reassembled an RQ-170 that had crashed and broken into three or more pieces.

It wasn't even the military that first noticed the paint job.
And the landing gear was always hidden by drapery.
If it landed intact why hide it?

Re:Self-Destruct anyone?

[izomiac]

I would imagine one could politically argue that putting explosives on an unmanned aircraft is just a convoluted way of making a missile, the use of which would be an act of war. Furthermore, I'm sure the designers made them exceptionally difficult to reverse engineer, and there are probably digital and perhaps even chemical self-destruct mechanisms that aren't as flashy nor leave as much visible external evidence. For all we know, Iran got a warped airframe with a bunch of melted circuit boards and oxidized stealth paint.

Re:Why Drones? Right Here's Your Answer

[ironjaw33]

Imagine if this was a U2 or similar piloted vehicle instead of a drone. We'd be preparing the bombers right now, along with special congressional resolutions condemning the Iraqis to death for "capturing" one of "our boys."

There are at least two cases where this has happened. The Soviets shot down a U2 in 1960 and held the pilot hostage for over a year until he was traded for another prisoner. Also, in 2001, the Chinese forced a P-3 to land on Chinese soil and held the crew hostage for 10 days before they were released. In both cases, I'm sure the Soviets and the Chinese pored over whatever sensitive stuff was left intact and wasn't destroyed by the crash in the case of the U2 or the US aircrew in the case of the P3.

I wasn't born in the 1960s so I couldn't tell you what the public sentiment was at the time, but in the 2001 incident, I don't remember anyone caring all that much about the hostage crew, all the way up to President Clinton. If I remember, the Chinese forced Clinton to give some kind of apology before they released the crew.