The following is all merely wild speculation on my part.
During WW2 Churchill had the code breakers at Bletchly Park.
(The goose that lay the golden eggs and never cackled)
It was called Ultra and gave the British access to German morse traffic that was encrypted using the Enigma Cypher machines.
Before they could take action based on the decrypts they often had to send out a scout plane to spot a target such as German submarine wolf packs. This was so the Germans would have a plausible explanation for how the British had gathered the information. Otherwise they would have known that Britain had discovered a way to read their top secret radio traffic.
It is quite possible that we send drones out on missions for much the same reason. We may have much more advanced technical means to gather data. The drones would thus allow other nations to believe we were getting the information from the drone fly overs.
The drones may just be a cover story to deflect speculation about something much more amazing. And a captured drone could be a great way to mislead an adversary as to our technical level. We could get them to believe all sorts of nonsense based on what they discovered in the drone.
That plan would require a deep thinker in the White House and that we do not have.
The Churchill thing is worse than that. They intercepted information that the Germans were planning to bomb a particular small city, and Churchill had to let the city get bombed because they felt they couldn’t afford to lose such a strategic advantage just to save one city.
I’ve heard that this was done for a military purpose, as was the abandonment of the helicopter during bin Laden’s capture. Knowing that we already have something 10x better, we leave our previous generation of technology out in plain sight to signal the enemy about how far ahead of them we are. They waste time and resources replicating what we already have while we stay a generation or two ahead of them.
The drones may just be a cover story to deflect speculation about something much more amazing. And a captured drone could be a great way to mislead an adversary as to our technical level. We could get them to believe all sorts of nonsense based on what they discovered in the drone.
Nice theory, may have something to it.
I agree with the possibility of what you describe and raise you one. In the Reagan years, we had a program to respond to the Soviet “Line X” program. It was NOT well-known within the CIA, and only Reagan and a handful of his most trusted CIA contacts knew of it. It permitted high tech designs to be “stolen” by the Soviets but this tech had built-in catastrophic design flaws that resulted in gigantic melt-downs after about a year. If, for example, this is something Petraeus and Panetta recommended as part of a “cheap” Iran strat, I could see it.
That or Hussein is more evil than we thought.
Your theory is plausible.
Drones CAN be made with relatively low technology: a remote controlled airplane with 1990s era spy cameras and transmitters.
OTOH, we just don’t know what the Iranians have captured. It is wishful plausibility.
Your theory is plausible.
Drones CAN be made with relatively low technology: a remote controlled airplane with 1990s era spy cameras and transmitters.
OTOH, we just don’t know what the Iranians have captured. It is wishful plausibility.