Iranian TV Shows Downed US Drone 612
First time accepted submitter loic_2003 writes "Iranian TV has broadcast footage of an advanced U.S. drone aircraft that Tehran says it brought down using electronic methods to override its controls. The BBC's James Reynolds watched the footage and said the fact that the drone appeared undamaged provided some evidence to support Tehran's version of events. The film was captioned 'RQ170 — advanced U.S. spy plane' and carried on the Vision of the Islamic Republic of Iran Network 1 channel."
Anyone else not surprised? (Score:1, Insightful)
I mean given that hobby R/C work pretty much the same way, just way smaller scale, who would have thought that you could override a remote signal.
I guess the suits in Washington never had a hobby otherwise they would know this.
Next they will want to put weapons on them cause they could never be taken control.... never mind.
Now I already realize these things must have some kind of scrambled frequency, but still generate enough interference and you have a drone.
It sounds feasible (Score:4, Insightful)
I seem to recall reading that the communications to the drones are largely unencrypted for some unknown reason, so if that's the case, I could see someone overriding the controls and bringing down the plane.
It seems very unlikely that an uncontrolled aircraft would come down in one piece, yet the US claims that the drone in Iran's possession is one they lost control and track of. The idea that the US could lose track of a piece of technology that size with all their spy satellites and spy planes doesn't seem very likely to me, further lending credence to Iran's story.
Methinks the US may have been caught red-handed spying on Iran. It's not a surprise that they would be doing so, but it is very surprising that they've been sloppy enough to get caught.
Re:It sounds feasible (Score:2, Insightful)
"caught red-handed spying on Iran"
And this surprises who again?
Oh Iran ... You Are Too Cute (Score:3, Insightful)
So you've downed a pristine intact drone from your mortal enemy. Do you A) keep it secret to have an upper hand and send it to a lab to analyze all of its weaknesses and offer this information to your allies or B) take pictures in front of it with propaganda surrounding it and show the world? Well, I guess when you don't know how to do A you have to go with B!
I think it costed to a landing after it failed.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Honestly a drone takeover requires you to be above it. They get control from satellites and AWAC's that are flying ABOVE Them. they do not get controls from ground based transmitters. Plus how did they get their hands on the C&C protocols?
IF they did this, then the USA military electronics is a complete and utter joke. But right now I'm claiming that it glided into the sandy wasteland after it had a failure and they found it.
Re:Oh Iran ... You Are Too Cute (Score:5, Insightful)
They used plan B in order to allow the Chinese to use plan A.
Re:Oh Iran ... You Are Too Cute (Score:5, Insightful)
The propaganda they'll get out of taking down one of the mighty U.S. spy drones (and establishing that they ARE, in fact, being spied on by the U.S.) is WAY more valuable to the regime there than any stealth tech they'll get out of it. And they'll still get that tech anyway. It's not like they're not going to tear it apart when the press conferences are all over.
Re:The US military had a plan to recover it... (Score:5, Insightful)
If by "offend," you mean "possibly start a fucking war by sending U.S. troops into Iran, all for the sake of a lousy drone" then yes.
Re:The US military had a plan to recover it... (Score:5, Insightful)
What you call "offend" would more commonly be understood as war. I'm going to guess it was the President's decision not to engage in a war against Iran.
Re:Would it matter? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:The US military had a plan to recover it... (Score:2, Insightful)
I think we all know who made that decision.
Someone smart enough not to get into a shooting war with Iran?
Re:Anyone else not surprised? (Score:3, Insightful)
My current speculation is that they couldn't override the control signal, but they could jam it, and then the drone did some kind of emergency crash landing or whatever.
Re:The US military had a plan to recover it... (Score:2, Insightful)
Yeah Obama's such a pussy, not wanting to invade a sovereign nation the US is already on bad terms with just to pick up a crashed drone that has no bleeding-edge tech on board.
Re:I think it costed to a landing after it failed. (Score:5, Insightful)
But right now I'm claiming that it glided into the sandy wasteland after it had a failure and they found it.
For a recon platform, that's a pretty crappy fail safe mode.
Re:Oh Iran ... You Are Too Cute (Score:5, Insightful)
Lets see here. We're waging robo war in Pakistan, Afganistan, Iraq Yemen - virtually surrounded their whole country - some 100K troops near their borders. ...and if I understand you, you're complaining that the Iranians used some props you find offensive.
We're beating the drums of "Those Iranians are the worst since Hitler..."
We're probably assassinating their scientists.
We've invaded multiple countries without provocation for a long time, and waged countless covert wars and actions against those we don't like.
We supported a proxy war [using our best friend Saddam Hussain - (where have I heard that name before?)] using weapons of mass destruction against the Iranians, using US intelligence.
And less than sixty years ago we helped overthrow a democratically elected government in Iran and put in place the Shah. [Who was evil in ways that Hitler *would* understand.]
You sir, have a most misplaced sense of decency [or a most woefully inadequate knowledge of the history of the dealings of your country].
Of all the offenses betwixt the USA and Iran, I'd posit that the balance isn't even close to parity. The Iranians have a lot of IOU's due against the US. [Like enough to use one every day for a century.]
Re:Undamaged? (Score:2, Insightful)
The CIA "version" seems to have gone from "We don't think they have the capacity to do that, and they've lied about it before, so it's probably fake," to "Actually, we did lose a drone in about the right time period over Afghanistan near the border, we should look into that," to "Yeah, they seem to have intercepted our drone over Afghanistan." Doesn't seem to be the story changing, just them gaining new information.
Best Part Of The Video (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Anyone else not surprised? (Score:5, Insightful)
Clearly the solution is to have the planes fly autonomously, so if the signal from the remote control is broken, the onboard AI can move and deploy weapons at its own discretion.
Re:Holy crap! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Oh Iran ... You Are Too Cute (Score:2, Insightful)
Real mature.
About as mature as Fox is every day, or NYT headlines saying "The Evil Has Landed" when Ahmadinejad visited New York a few years back. Pot, kettle, black.
Re:Anyone else not surprised? (Score:4, Insightful)
What I don't understand is why they didn't have it wired to self-destruct, at least the internal systems if not the entire aircraft.
AFAIK, manned Air Force aircraft are equipped with labels on the sensitive avionics and components saying something like "in case of imminent capture, shoot here to destroy." I'd think that self-destruct would be an absolute requirement for a drone.
I mean, the USAF is pretty darn good at destroying things. You'd think if you were flying it over hostile territory you'd at least equip it with enough thermite to make the electronics and optics go away should the drone lose contact with HQ for longer than some preset time period.
Or maybe that's what happened in a kinder, gentler fashion. Maybe a self-destruct did happen to the internals, including the flight controllers. The "my-controller-has-melted" control-arm position might be preset to a glide configuration so that it will cause the least amount of civilian damage if it goes down.
Or maybe it was deliberate. Maybe it's a Trojan horse with a secret compartment filled with VX or anthrax or something, on a remote control that can be triggered by an operator when Ahmadenijad gets close enough to gloat. "Remember the tooth."
Re:Aggression by whom? (Score:5, Insightful)
it was cited as response to an American act of aggression.
Illegally invading another country's sovereign airspace is an act of aggression.
Now we hear that they overrode communications and forced the drone to land.
Any stray military aircraft would also be offered a choice of being forced to land, or be shot down, under the same circumstances.
It's also possible that the drone was patrolling the border from inside Iraq or Afghanistan
The US lately seems to have no problems with crossing borders in Pakistan and Yemen and even killing people there in complete violation of international law. Why would flying over Iran be a problem? You have played the "poor innocent America we mean no harm we come in peace" card far too often. Sorry.
There's an air of deliberation here that doesn't square.
Oh it squares alright. Just like the ICBM launched off the California coast earlier this year oh no sorry it was a "jet". Just like the Chinese sub popping up next to the USS Kitty Hawk and saying hi. Just like the satellite that got blown out of the sky. It says "look what we can do - please invest more trillions in easily circumventable drone technology".
Re:Aggression by whom? (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, it's their airspace, they can do whatever they like to objects in it.
Besides, I overheard a report on CBS that this drone is a part of a spy drone fleet which was routinely flying over Iran and collecting information for years. If the goal is really to stop foreign spy planes flying over your land, it might be more beneficial to down the plane and showing it to the hole world instead of shooting it down.
Re:but why would Iran show their hand? (Score:5, Insightful)
What battlefield advantage? Anything they MIGHT have will be wiped out by B2 stealth bombers before any other shots are fired.
If anything, Iran gets to wave this at the Security Council (china and russia are pals with veto power) when the US wants to "librate" them. Nukes or not, Iran has not attacked the US or Israel directly, or violated any airspace under their operation. The US can't exactly say the same, can they.
Iran is not going to make the same mistake playing chicken with the US like Iraq did. Israel has already played our hand with the unprovoked attack on Iran's nuclear development (pissing off China and Russia)
Their goal is to talk smack to get Israel to keep stepping over the line... They are not attacking anybody right now.... Playing "fair" is not the same as violating international law and Iran is playing very carefully.
You all realise Iran is next... Right? (Score:5, Insightful)
The revolution failed.
The US military is pulling out of Iraq.
The propaganda "Iran is a terrorist" is ramping up. Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iran.
UN resolutions to fill the requisite paperwork so it's all "legal".
Economic sanctions on major exports.
There have been softening up attacks on the defences and other strategic targets.
All that's left to do really is have some "event" which will be seen as an act of war on the part of Iran as justification. Some Arch Duke Ferdinand.
Re:Anyone else not surprised? (Score:4, Insightful)
If I were designing a drone that was supposed to be uber-top secret, I'd fill it with C-4 and program it to explode if signal was lost after a designated period of time.
Re:Anyone else not surprised? (Score:5, Insightful)
It works *nothing* like an R/C model, aside from the fact that radio signals are somehow involved. R/C models are flown "by hand", i.e. the pilots manipulate the elevator/ailerons/throttle etc directly. The drones are almost entirely flown by the on-board autopilot, flight management computer, and inertial navigation. These are indeed connected via radio to the control center but rest assured, it is not being intercepted or overridden by external agencies.
This one had a malfunction, went into a fail-safe mode, ran out of fuel, and landed more-or-less intact. Of course they are claiming more than that.
Brett
Re:Anyone else not surprised? (Score:5, Insightful)
What could possibly go wrong?
Re:You all realise Iran is next... Right? (Score:5, Insightful)
Why not?
I see you have enrolled and will be in the first APCs in the firing line. Or not?
They are more of a danger than Iraq ever was
They are certainly more dangerous, the drone capture kind of demonstrates that in itself. No?
They are also battle hardened.
They are also 4 times the size of Iraq.
The place is mountains not flat desert.
They are religious zealots.
They defeated Iraq using human wave attacks against superior weaponry.
They have had a decade of isolation to improve their military.
They supply oil to China. China just sent a very public but unofficial message that they were likely to go to war over Iran.
Oil will hit another peak and cause a bigger depression.
Russia is an Iranian ally who supplies gas to Europe.
Russia just went on missile alert and warned the west they were moving their ballistic missile launchers into position.
Does this help with "why not"?
They'll never crack it, eh? (Score:5, Insightful)
Snoop it all you like
Ok so you've got this unbreakable communications connection between drone and control...
Please explain the completely undamaged big beige plane sitting in the Iranian hangar.
Re:Anyone else not surprised? (Score:4, Insightful)
Don't kid yourself. They're military grade, and they're military-grade priced. And the tech inside is all American sourced chips, as they don't trust foreign chip foundries for this kind of stuff.
But a few ounces of thermite or C4 are cheap insurance. Not being remote commanded while inside enemy airspace? Blow it up.
The Iranians didn't remotely operate this device. They might have jammed its frequencies, as that's within their technical capabilities. But nobody's breaking the military encryption. It's not a Panasonic web cam being remotely operated and subject to URL tampering.