Iran's Military Claims To Have Downed US Surveillance Drone 522
mrquagmire submits a link to the Jerusalem Post's report that an American reconnaissance UAV has been captured by the Iranian military. "'Iran's military has downed an intruding RQ-170 American drone in eastern Iran,' Iran's Arabic-language Al Alam state television network quoted the unnamed source as saying. 'The spy drone, which has been downed with little damage, was seized by the Iranian armed forces.' ... 'The Iranian military's response to the American spy drone's violation of our airspace will not be limited to Iran's borders any more,' Iran's Arabic language Al Alam television quoted the military source as saying, without giving details."
sold to china (Score:3, Interesting)
Why is it that USA thinks it can push other countrys around so much? They are in everybodys face, from Europe on copyrights to violating the sovereign territory of many countries with airstrikes that kill innocents to drones.
Iran will sell this drone to China, I'm sure. The world needs China as a counterbalance to the aggression of the USA. It's better to have 2 superpowers than just one which can do whatever it pleases. If China is there to push back against usa, usa won't be able to cause so many probs anymore.
Isn't that kind of the point? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:First strike? (Score:5, Interesting)
Comment removed (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:First strike? (Score:5, Interesting)
Not really. The US has been flying manned combat aircraft into Iran for several years probing air defences. My Persian cooworkers have a social app that tracks when people on the ground see the planes, I don't speak farsi (or understand the language) so I can't point you at it unfortunately. Searches for USAF probing iranian air defences gives some results along these lines.
The US is trying to fly as deep into Iran as they can before all the air defence sites 'light up', they're trying to locate all the air defence radars etc. It's illegal, but it's been going on for years, and everyone knows the game, the americans pretend 'this time is the time' they're going to attack natanz etc. and the Iranians call their bluff. Presumably one of these days the Israeli's or someone else will take this data and go after air defence sites along with the nuclear facilities but who knows.
Re:Poking / Probing Iran's air defenses . . . ? (Score:5, Interesting)
Not saying this is what's happening, but there's a tactic of probing an enemy's air defenses to get them to switch on the radars they've been keeping hidden so you won't know to bomb them when the war starts.
Why are we provoking Iran? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Isn't that kind of the point? (Score:5, Interesting)
The problem with this is that those drones have encrypted radios and if they didn't get wiped in time closely guarded encryption keys.
Say what? Not changing crypto keys for every mission implies a level of incompetence I find hard to believe. Having hardwired crypto keys even more so.
No reason not to believe them (Score:5, Interesting)
Someone just blew up (at least) one of their missile bases. There are reports of more attacks.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/checkpoint-washington/post/image-shows-than-an-iranian-missile-site-was-destroyed/2011/11/28/gIQA7KZW5N_blog.html [washingtonpost.com]
Iran claimed it was an accident...
Course then the UK embassy then gets invaded and a drone is shot down. Or claimed. All a coincidence of course.
Re:USB sticks (Score:5, Interesting)
Probably it has a full bag of USB sticks loaded with the latest SCADA worms lol
Now this is an interesting Trojan strategy - fly RC Planes, er, drones, around annoying foreign country. Have specialized Stuxnet-type software embedded in the plane. Have annoying foreign country shoot down RC plane and try to disassemble it to gain secrets.
ZAP! You've been pawned.
Wouldn't be all that hard. If this actually happened there are going to be dozens of people just aching to open the thing up. First one to find the JTAG connector wins a prize!
Re:sold to china (Score:5, Interesting)
What is there to "win" in Afghanistan? We had an opportunity to be their friends/ally after the Russians left but we didn't.
No one wins in Afghanistan, no one.
America has not won a single war since WW2.
Re:First strike? (Score:4, Interesting)
Whoever modded this insightful, hit yourself, and excuse yourself from any military-related discussion. You are either utterly stupid, or utterly ignorant, and in both cases, you have no place in a discussion like this beyond asking "how does this work?".
Aerial surveillance, especially low altitude aerial surveillance is of CRUCIAL importance. You cannot see things like tunnel network entrances, weapon caches, small defence emplacements and so on with high altitude surveillance from U2 and satellites when they are properly concealed against it. And with that surveillance being in existence for decades, countries like Iran have long perfected such camouflaging. What looks like a natural hill to a satellite becomes a hidden pillbox full of anti-armor weaponry when photographed from an angle. What looks like a bunch of civilian trucks becomes a mobile radar site. What looks like a mobile radar site becomes a fake transmitters designed to attract HARMs. Etc. Fake "weapon systems" designed specifically to fool satellite surveillance are something of a Russian speciality.
If you don't believe it, look at end of cold war. USSR army size has been throught to be about 40% greater then it really was, because Red Army perfected techniques for faking weapon systems specifically for satellite and U2 surveillance. If there was a war, most of the first strike would end up hitting wooden models and balloons that look like weapons while real weapons would be hidden in bunkers and emplacements that look like natural hills to a satellite. That is what drones are for - exact mapping rather then general one you do with a satellite/U2 sweep.
Re:First strike? (Score:5, Interesting)
why Iran has been taking the ones destroyed over iraq and afghanistan apart for years.
Indeed most of the technical hacks(like the discovery of taliban troops with tv's capable of receiving drone transmissions are done by iranians.
However Iran has several times in the past claimed to have shot down a drone in their airspace, and not once have they actually shown the crash site. just parts. Parts from drones shot down over other countries.
Comment removed (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:First strike? (Score:2, Interesting)
If someone gets inside your house with a camera, without your permission checking your private stuff, perhaps you don't consider it an attack... I mean, at least if you never knew that it happened you don't consider harm was done.
Now ask that same thing to someone holding trade secrets if this is or not an attack, why is it different if it's a country?. Although, I agree that it would piss me off quite a lot.
Re:First strike? (Score:0, Interesting)
ya know what else is dumb? Believing what some wanker posts on slashdot.
Re:No reason not to believe them (Score:4, Interesting)
Iran claimed it was an accident...
Of course they do. But when you look at the satellite before and after images widely published on the web you see three different buildings in separate areas of the base taken out with other buildings between them left standing. The damage looks like James Bond work as opposed to an airstrike or drone strike.
.
Re:First strike? (Score:5, Interesting)
So the CIA is not assassinating the religious fanatics who are making Iran shitty in the first place, but assassinating Iran's rational, secular thinkers?
RATIONAL secular thinkers would not be arming religious fanatics with nuclear weapons.
Scientists (engaged in nuclear research) are hard to grow.
Radical religious fanatics require no education, and can be recreated virtually overnight.
One would have thought that religious fanatics willing to blow them selves up would be just about exhausted and cleaned from the gene pool by now even in a depressing society with a horrible economy. Yet such is not the case. There is no point in taking out fanatics. You can't win that way. You need to turn them against each other, and remove any means of acquiring weapons of mass destruction.
Pre Iraq, the Muslim world was united, Muslims would never attach Muslims, and attacking a Mosque was unthinkable. Now they are at each others throats and bombing each other's Mosques. ”Such subtlety . . . ” said Slartibartfast, ”one has to admire it.”.
Re:Isn't that kind of the point? (Score:4, Interesting)
For instance, Iran has been training and supplying people to fight in Iraq against US troops.
This is just propaganda BS, I've seen stories like this ripped to pieces. Think about it, Iran was at war with Iraq just a couple of decades ago, it's highly unlikely they'd be helping out the same people after 500,000 to 1,000,000 Iranians died fighting them.
Re:Poking / Probing Iran's air defenses . . . ? (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm not sure you understand what "sovereignty" means.
It means if you have your own country, it's your garage, not anyone elses.
Nobody lives in this world alone, we all have neighbors. Iran's neighbors include the rest of the world.
There are limits as to what you can do in *your* "garage", and those limits are what ever the majority of your neighbors say you can do. Your neighbors have banded together and decided that you can not build and operate a meth lab in your garage. Beyond the public policy about drugs, operating a meth lab is dangerous not just to the operators but also the neighbors. There are laws, and you can't do it.
Iran's neighbors - the rest of the world - have decided that certain activities related to building nuclear bombs is not allowable. No amount of "sovereignty" changes this. No amount of blather from Libertarian Tea Baggers changes this.
Nuclear bomb building is not allowed.
Eliminating Iran's ability to build nukes will make the world a safer place. Sooner or later, things *will* come to a head, and Iran will have to be dealt with, and it's likely to involve military action.
Re:sold to china (Score:4, Interesting)
I have a question in your mind which would have been easier to deal with, the religious zealots or the communist?
Easier for whom? :)
On a more serious side, obviously, so long as USSR remained in the game, Afghanistan would be aligned to it - meaning Soviet military bases on Pakistani border (and a Soviet-friendly India on the other side... it's precisely why Pakistan helped mujahideen so much, they had a lot at stake in that conflict!). On the other hand, given what Pakistan is today, perhaps it wouldn't be such a bad thing.
After USSR collapsed, though, commies in Afghanistan were destined to fall either way. It would have taken longer if U.S. didn't support mujahideen, but Pakistan support alone would be quite enough to wrap it up eventually. Maybe if someone took out Pakistan, then there was some hope for Afghanistan as a viable sovereign state which wouldn't be a theocracy...
For Afghanis themselves, I think Soviet Afghanistan would have been better in the long run. Soviets actually heavily invested in Afghani infrastructure, even before propping up communinsts - building roads and railroads, factories, hydro dams etc. Here [defenceforumindia.com] is a list, though I won't vouch for its correctness. When they had a puppet government in place, they've also started funneling money for the latter to build schools, hospitals and the like, to increase popular support (ironically, this actually generated some resentment in more conservative parts of the country, because Soviet-trained professionals often deliberately stomped on local values - e.g. a male doctor inspecting a female patient, or boys and girls studying together in schools).
Needless to say, most of it all went to hell under Taliban. Given the choice between a dictatorship that actually works on building up the country's economy and raising its standard of living, and a dictatorship that's mainly busy ensuring that all women cover their faces and preparing for Armageddon, I think the rational choice is pretty obvious.
Re:Isn't that kind of the point? (Score:4, Interesting)
For instance, Iran has been training and supplying people to fight in Iraq against US troops.
Not really. Most of the people fighting US troops in Iraq were Sunni (Saddam, his Ba'ath Party and his military were mostly Sunni). The present governments of Iraq and Iran are both Shia and are closely allied (no doubt to the annoyance of the US)... removing the Ba'ath Party from power and installing a Shia government was a great move for Iran. There are even allegations that it was Iranian intelligence that tricked the U.S. into invading Iraq through the use of double agents and false intel: US intelligence fears Iran duped hawks into Iraq war [guardian.co.uk]:
Some intelligence officials now believe that Iran used the hawks in the Pentagon and the White House to get rid of a hostile neighbour, and pave the way for a Shia-ruled Iraq... "It's pretty clear that Iranians had us for breakfast, lunch and dinner," said an intelligence source in Washington yesterday. "Iranian intelligence has been manipulating the US for several years through Chalabi." .... "When the story ultimately comes out we'll see that Iran has run one of the most masterful intelligence operations in history. They persuaded the US and Britain to dispose of its greatest enemy."
Did Iranian agents dupe Pentagon officials? [mcclatchydc.com]
"The revelation raises questions about whether Iran may have used a small cabal of officials in the Pentagon and in Vice President Dick Cheney's office to feed bogus intelligence on Iraq and Iran to senior policymakers in the Bush administration who were eager to oust the Iraqi dictator. Iran, which was a mortal enemy of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein and fought a bloody eight-year war with Iraq during his reign, has been the primary beneficiary of U.S. policy in Iraq, where Iranian-backed groups now run much of the government and the security forces."
Re:First strike? (Score:5, Interesting)
It's also as though someone wants to prevent a full-out shooting or nuclear war. Israel is taking a more and more hostile stance towards Iran. There are stories leaking about how the Israelis are going to attack Iran without US permission. If you were the US, you have to talk the Israelis off the ledge. So what do you do? You have to do what you did in the First Gulf War to stop the Israelis from coming into the war: hunt Scuds and do other shit to show them that you're providing an alternative. Israeli isn't going to let Iran get nukes. They will do anything to stop that, including a shooting war. Crippling Iran's nuclear capabilities in a backdoor way (I mean, Stuxnet was awesome, right?!) delays that war.