Thanks for the links. I hadn't seen those articles.
Still, I find it hard to believe that Iran has the capability to hack our UAV's guidance control systems and land one without a scratch. They'd also have to know how to over-ride the self-destruct commands, too.
Seems a huge stretch, to me.
Here’s an interesting twist, were this the plot to a movie:
What if the Israelis hacked the UAV and landed it in Iran on purpose? What if we are leaking like a sieve to the Iranians and the Israelis were interested in cutting off the leakers sources of information.
What good is aerial surveillance to a regime in the US completely uninterested in a military option in Iran when it poses an existential threat to Israel?
The Israelis handing the drone to the Iranians is a clear message to DC - ‘you are checker players in a roomful of chess players’.
I AM NOT AT ALL SAYING THIS IS WHAT HAPPENED. I can say that seeing a picture of the thing on Iranian soil with not a single scratch on it made me wonder why we didn’t put a self-destruct mechanism on it.
Lord knows we risked a lot of SEAL team members necks destroying a stealth helicopter in Pakistan a few months ago. You’d think losing tether, jamming, or any other hacking or spoofing of the bird would result in some sort of reversable auto-destruct sequence which would lock in at some point to irreversable.
Someone knows how to steal our drones. Big leak somewhere.
Video are showing the Drone sitting in some Iranian hanger in perfect condition.
Maybe there was no self-destruct function or it was disabled before our remote control operators knew the drone had been taken. This could have been done by sending the video information from the drone of the last 30 minutes of flight back to the remote control center. As that video information is being sent back, they land the drone and disable the self-destruct mechanism by disconnecting the onboard battery supply. This disables the drone from any incoming commands to self-destruct. Meanwhile, the remote control operator at the remote control center is watching video of the drone in flight and not remembering that it was the same 30 minutes of video watched before. That would happen because the drone is fairly high up and surface information is quite mundane and not important. It’s only when they get to the target where they want to get close up ground information that the operators start paying attention. Otherwise, the in-transit-to-target video information is there just to make sure the drone is stable and in the air.
That is just my own conjecture on how they landed the drone without being self-destructed. I am no CIA expert.
I don’t mean to direct this at you specifically, but as a whole we have to stop being surprised when we discover that the Iranians are smart. They are among the smartest culture in the world. Many of them share a pretty twisted religion...but when it comes to math and science we underestimate them at our own peril.