One of the vulnerabilities of UAV's is that they rely on remote command systems... systems that use communications that can be intercepted, jammed, or overrridden. The drone the Iranians 'shot down" is in awfully good shape for something that was supposed to have been shot down.
The response to this should be good. Not to the drone going down, because I'm shocked it took this long for an intact drone to be captured. But to President Obama not taking action to re-take or destroy it. I don't know what you do in that situation. It's certainly not worth getting any US troops killed over. And trying to destroy it is just going to piss the Iranians off even more. It's not like they can just reverse engineer the thing. I'm sure this will require some reprogramming and redesign, but it's not like we weren't doing that already anyway.
What makes you think that? And even if they can't, what's to say that they don't sell it to someone who can?
For an administration reluctant to push very hard on sanctions, it's quite understandable why they'd be reluctant to use "big" weapons and only authorize intelligence-gathering in the first place. Although even that has historically been considered provocative. I think you're not focusing enough on Bear's point, though. If they have the technology and skill to divert a drone, we may have been left with no other weapons available to reasonably do anything. We weren't going to send in the Marines, so to speak. We couldn't bomb We certainly don't have the stealth fighters to use in this situation. With no drone capability all we're reasonably left with in this situation is harsh language and pointed fingers. Maybe we can reprogram / redesign but it's not just the Iranians we're dealing with here. I'm sure they've already offered access to it to the Russians, Chinese, North Koreans, et. al. Where they may have been (at a guess) 5 years behind us in this technology, they may wind up getting a 2-3 year boost from an up-close look.
This actually would be a good time to have Diplomatic Relations with Iran. Back in during the Cold War, a Soviet Pilot would defect. If the Soviets were in a mood, they'd ask for the plane back. We'd oblige by taking it apart, packing it in crates, and sending it back after we'd examined it, of course. The Chinese did the same thing to use several years ago when that Recon plane had to make an Emergency Landing. I know some of you remember that. But, I digress. Yeah, about that. This is why I don't like the arming of drones. If you'll indulge me in a little hyperbole, what's to keep a script kiddie with a CB radio and a grudge from nuking his school?
Who knows how it ended up in Iran? They might have "diverted" it, but it could just as easily have run out of gas or malfunctioned. We had to know that sooner or later one of these things was going to end up in enemy hands.
Given that this smells a whole lot like they hijacked the bird, I doubt such an exchange would be possible.
If they truly had the tech savvy to divert a drone, then the remote destruct seems mooted. Presuming that Iran lacks that skill I'm gonna go with the option of the thing simply malfunctioning and dropping out of the sky at an unfortunate set of coordinates.
Don't believe for a second Iran could hack our bird. My guess is it lost communications for some reason and simply landed itself because it didn't have any other executable option. Here's an idea...store a map of adversarial countries in the drone's memory. If the need arises to land and your GPS location is within the boundaries of those countries...BLOW UP.
Yeah, like Paladin and other's I have to agree that 'Not Shot Down' != Hacked. There are lots of other options for what could bring it about, most more probable. Hopefully it fried it's Comms before being captured.
Rumor has it that the hard drives on US military aircraft have to be kept super cold to work and that if the plane crashes the drive quickly warms up and irreversibly erases itself.
Rumor also has it that our UAV's are programmed to only make soft landings at approved airfields. Any other landing execution is supposed to result in the bird crashing hard.
And this is why Skynet happens. Because what's the answer to this going to be? "Make them autonomous." And once they're autonomous? Yeah. J-Day, sooner or later.
My niece is a mechanic on these birds. I was reluctant to discuss it with anyone or even her for security reasons and putting her in a bind but she said it was Ok for her to discuss some aspects of it without a problem. I'll ask her about this.
I have a hard time believing that the Iranians did this on their own. Now if they had outside help from Russia or China I could see it. Even then I have a hard time believing that they were able to do it. It's radio communications, but the encryption is supposed to be a mother fucker to break. Yeah you could do it, but not in the amount of time of a flight I'm guessing.
He was in a hard spot but ultimately I think he made the right call. We can't afford a war with Iran right now. Right now the Russians or the Chinese or both are in Iran with the Iranians and they are carefully going over every inch of that craft.
My guess is this bird was hacked and ordered to land. And it was able to be hacked because we've probably got another John Walker somewhere in our military who has access to these drones information. I have a hard time believing that they don't have the option of crash or return to base if it loses communications with the base.
"The virus is logging each keystroke that the remote pilots input, and officials are trying to determine whether any classified information is actually being lost or sent outside the network. Schactman says the military has had a hard time wiping out the virus." That's code for: They got our codes for the birds. In fact you could give your spy a usb stick and tell him to go stick it in a computer the first chance it gets and that's how it got the virus.
The Russians, Chinese, and yes, the Iranians have ample amounts of a key tool in solving such problems: Cash. And if that bird made a controlled landing in Iran, it means SEVERAL technologies failed, and allowed the bird to "believe" it was coming down at a friendly airfield.
I've always been concerned about the way our system is set up dependent on tech as it is. I've always been of the opinion that anything anywhere can be hacked given the time and resources. The fact that we use GPS as extensively is very worrysome to me. The Chinese have already shown they have the capability to take a sat out in space and that's just taking out the physical aspects. I am pretty sure it's a 24/7/365 task to figure out how to effect data from the sources by someone somewhere and it's concerning because if they can do this then there is no reason to believe they are much further into our systems than we think. This was just a test of their efforts and quite a successful one apparently. When they said it was intact I knew there was no way in hell that our encryption held up. I believe it was landed as well.
If that's the case, then somewhere along the line, someone forgot what "drones" are for. Specifically the part about them lost behind enemy lines without it being a big deal.
Yeah, better the Army lose a toy airplane than someone's son/daughter/husband/wife/mother/father never coming home again.
Well, technically, Iran's only an "enemy", not an "Enemy", of the U.S. The point's been made in other threads that drones make it way too easy to perform incursions into other countries that, if we had to send troops, we wouldn't otherwise think about doing. Because it's so easy, we wind up doing it way too much. This type of thing, whether accidental or a deliberate taking by the Iranians (or whoever) is almost inevitable.
