[HereInTheHeartland]

It looks like we saw it in action; I would hope that was on purpose.

[Travis McGee]

I thought our frequency-hopping algorithms made jamming our drones impossible?

[Army Air Corps]

Ping.

[arkady_renko]

John Bolton should have been on the Presidential primary circuit. Plain talking, no nonsense Republican.

[Venturer]

I said from the beginning the drone was jammed by the Iranians. Bolton is right if they can jam our drones , they can probably jam our GPS guided cruise missiles.

[PapaBear3625]

This would actually be a good thing. We’ve been getting too used to fighting against technologically-inferior opponents, and getting dependent upon weapons systems that rely upon nobody being in a position to jam signal reception: GPS-guided bombs, remote-controlled UAVs, etc, etc.

[RFEngineer]

The jamming is possible, but highly unlikely. At 50,000ft, the energy levels required are just too high to effectively and reliably jam data links and GPS - especially when you don’t know where the victim of your jamming is located.

The antennas are shielded by the body of the aircraft. Then again, it IS theoretically possible.

[Lonesome in Massachussets]

I find it hard to believe that if such a drone loses its link to the controller that it is not programmed to autonomously return to base. As a matter of fact, it would not be particularly hard to program the drone to execute the entire mission, regardless of jamming and to continue to transmit information back to base. The only capability you would lose is the ability of the operator to make real time adjustments, for whatever reason.

If the Iranians capability was truly “sophisticated” they would never have leaked a word about it, much less boasted. Boasting, evening when heavily cloaked with disinformation, gives the enemy far too much intelligence. If they had leaked the “feat” to the press, surrounded by a bodyguard of disinformation, it would have served their public relations and intelligence objectives far better.

Everything I've heard about this in the press makes me think the Iranians are definitely delighted by their luck, but they are exploiting it like total amateurs and the Western mainstream media is exhibiting its habitual dilettantism.

[Sundog]

There’s only one way to find out. Send another.

[Jack Hydrazine]

RADAR TECH.: Sir. The radar, sir. It appears to be... jammed.

HELMET: Jammed? Raspberry. There’s only one man who would dare give me the raspberry. Lone Starr!
-Space Balls(1987)

[lacrew]

This whole episode is curious. Could Iranian radar even detect this thing up in the air? If not, how did they find it - did they somehow recieve and interpret the radio signal controlling the aircraft?

And, judging by its non-wrecked condition, it looks like it did not ‘crash’...so was it ‘jamming’, or was it ‘taking over the controls’?

If the Iranians/Russians are able to do this, it seems there is little they can’t do (I’m thinking satellite communications, etc.).

Wow....still hoping for a Trojan Horse scenario.