Iran downs RQ-170 Sentinel Spy Drone

I would prefer to think the US has inserted a Trojan Horse within Iranian defenses.8)

Hopefully russia gets its hand on this and reveal its secrets to us also

Actually, U.S. didn't send any such UAV/Drone intentionally to Iran. They were stationed in Iraq or A'than and by mistake it went in Iran due to connection/Network issue.

Like recently, Our heli went to P.O.K. by mistake.....

Easier said than done !!

You are turning into a pessimist.

I don't see how it is such a big deal in the larger picture. At least not the drone part.
We can't say that such a scenario would never have crossed American minds and they wouldn't have made provisions (inside the drone and otherwise).
I don't know what exactly, but I ought to assume that Americans would have prepared themselves as they knew that eventually somewhere this was going to happen.

Regards,
Virendra

Livefist: GUEST POST | Why The Beast Was Lost
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GUEST POST | Why The Beast Was Lost
-By Aditya Mandrekar
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With news that Iran may have downed one of
the United States' most secret spy-planes -- an
RQ-170 Sentinel built Lockheed-Martin -- the
internet has been abuzz with claims, counter-
claims and outright denials that it could have
happened. Now that Iran has officially released
footage of the UAV in their possession - one that
does resemble the 'Beast of Kandahar' from the
few photos available - speculation has turned to
precisely why the UAV is in Iranian hands.
But first, two things that can be inferred from the
video released:
The UAV may be a blended wing design, but
there are no obvious "stealth" characteristics. A
meshed air intake is not enough to make an
aircraft low-observable and could simply be there
to prevent foreign object damage (FOD). The
control surfaces too do not have any serrated
(jagged) edges that are needed to spread radio
wave reflections; neither do various panels on the
aircraft.
Amusingly, the aircraft is placed on a plinth
instead of its own landing gear. Which means
either the gear stayed retracted or was torn off on
landing, either pointing to signs that it wasn't
made to land in a controlled manner.
So how is the Beast in Iranian hands?
The most exotic claim is of course 'it was hacked'.
This is also the one least likely to be true and
ironically the one explanation that the speculators
seem to long for. The possibility of a spy plane
flying with a datalink continuously active is quite
low. There are many reasons for this, but
security (exposing the communication channel
for long durations) and power consumption (to
power the receiver and, in some cases, a
transmitter for two-way communication) are
chief concerns. UAVs obviously can be fed
course correction updates in real time if sudden
changes are necessary. But these will be brief and
short transmissions that will be irregular and hard
to break into - encryption levels are beyond the
average supercomputer's power to break in
reasonable time, not to mention the possibility of
passcodes changing every mission.

Russia and China has asked Iran's access to the downed drones USA



Russian and Chinese experts appealed to Iranian authorities asking them to prevent IRI was shot down in the U.S. drones, wrote on Thursday, the Iranian newspaper The Tehran Times citing an informed source at Iran's armed forces.

It is also possible, the newspaper continues, that the UAV will be on display, reports "Interfax" .

As reported by the newspaper VIEW, according to media reports, American downed Iranian military reconnaissance aircraft invisible CIA was used to collect information on Iran's nuclear facilities, as well as the training camps of militants "of Hezbollah."
On Tuesday it was announced that the U.S. spy plane RQ-170 performed the task of American intelligence , but the nature of the device was not specified. Earlier, Pentagon spokesman John Kirby expressed concern that Iran's military might to seize the data about the secret techniques of the American UAVs.

On Sunday, Iranian television channel «Press-TV» spread the information that the Iranian air defense forces in the east of the country shot down an unmanned U.S. aircraft.

The coalition of the International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan (ISAF) later said that the drone, the destruction of which on Sunday announced in Iran, could be lost during the last week in the job in Afghanistan.

How to write a military expert Vladislav Shurygin: "Management of UAV is its main vulnerable heel. To communicate with control centers, and managed, UAVs must have "thick" radio channels, which are protected from external influence is extremely difficult. They can score a noise, but this is the most primitive solution. Much more serious option is to capture anti-UAV control. To do this, to break the encryption system and the control signals, drowning out the signal control center, to take control of the UAV to its signal. "

Meanwhile, on Monday in the Western press materials, according to which the Iranian electronic warfare drone shot down an American Lockheed Martin RQ-170 Sentinel, and "planted" it, using the set of "motor depot" , which Russia recently supplied to the IRI.

Translated from Russian to English by using Google translation

I need to read the rules.ВЗГЛЯД / Источник: Россия попросила у Ирана доступ к сбитому беспилотнику США

I thought that on Day 1 when Iran claimed to shoot that drone. Chinese Copy-Paste team on high alert.

well well... once upon a time in world war 2, japanese zeros were big trouble for americans, they were agile and more active than american fighters. their weakness were unknown but one fine day a brave american got a japanese zero in good position after a raid on japanese base.
they flew it again and again and studied it thoroughly. they came to know the weakness of it lies in its cockpit made up of aluminium sheets which can be penetrated by bullets. they studied its flight and came to know about the positions in which it will become easy shot. after that day, zeros were mosquitoes and mustangs were frogs, they ate every japanese zero in the air.
end of jaapnese miracle.

i dont know what makes me think of this history crap seeing this story????

We got the point but Galaxy, you could have simply asked AV to translate it for us.

Coming back to the topic, it was natural that the downed drone will be studied by Chinese and Russians. While Russians are good at aircraft design and development and Chinese also have recently emerged, they are still behind west in electronic warfare.

I am sure we would also do the same thing if it had come in our side.

Oops. Ya, Might be. That didn't came in my mind.

Getting caught every once in a while is all part of the intelligence game.






On May 1, 1960, an American U-2 surveillance plane was downed by a SA-2 surface-to-air missile over the Sverdlovsk area of the Soviet Union. The U-2's mission -- code-named Operation Grand Slam -- was to photograph Soviet ballistic missile sites to inform the missile-gap debate raging in Washington. Though Grand Slam was the 24th deep-penetration flight over Soviet territory in four years, and CIA analysts warned of improvements in Soviet air-defense radars and missiles, the risks were deemed worth taking. As Secretary of State Christian Herter had noted in a plea to President Dwight Eisenhower to resume the U-2 flights: "The intelligence objective outweighs the danger of getting trapped."


Is history repeating itself? On Thursday, Iranian state television showed two men in military uniforms running their hands across the swept-wing frame of what the broadcast claimed was an RQ-170 Sentinel drone. An unnamed U.S. official said with "high confidence" that the drone displayed was the Sentinel that had gone missing 140 miles inside of Iran. (Only days earlier, a senior official had claimed: "The Iranians have a pile of rubble and are trying to figure what they have.") Several officials have acknowledged that the drone was under CIA control on an intelligence collection mission inside Iran.

It is understandable that an event with headlines that include the words "Iran," "drone," and "nuclear" generate a great deal of attention. Yet, for all the bytes and ink expended in discussing the downed Sentinel drone, it is neither surprising nor particularly revealing. As was true in 1960, the benefits of spying on Iran outweigh the dangers of the program being revealed or a downed aircraft, and are what Americans should expect from the $55 billion spent last year on national intelligence. To understand why this downed drone is such an ordinary event requires an understanding the day-to-day process of the U.S. Intelligence Community (IC).

Here's how it works. Senior policymakers provide tasking guidance to the IC through the National Intelligence Priorities Framework (NIPF), which is the "sole mechanism for establishing national intelligence priorities," according to an Office of the Directorate of National Intelligence (ODNI) directive. The NIPF process is coordinated by the ODNI, and results in a matrix listing the intelligence priorities of policymakers based on topics covered at National Security Council meetings and discussions with cabinet officials. The NIPF is updated every six months and signed by the president. As was described to me recently, the matrix consists of some 30 issues of concern for collection ranked in horizontal bands, running from A (most important) to C (least important), with some 180 state and non-state groups listed on the vertical axis. Finally, the matrix is color-coded based on the degree of current priority. After the ranking, the matrix is then translated into specific guidance from the DNI to senior IC managers for allocating collection and analytical resources.

Though the NIPF is highly classified, it is likely that there is no higher priority intelligence target than Iran's nuclear program, ballistic-missile sites, and air-defense system. Given that the Sentinel was reportedly on a CIA mission, there is certainly a presidential memoranda of notification (or several) that broadly authorizes the covert collection efforts in Iran. Moreover, assuredly the Senate and House intelligence committees have been briefed often and thoroughly about the CIA's use of the Sentinel over Iran.

Since Iran is among the most important intelligence collection priority, it would only make sense for the United States to utilize its most advanced capabilities, just as the U-2 spy plane was a half-century ago. The United States has reportedly been flying drones of various capabilities and missions over Iran since as early as April 2004, some of which Iranians believed to be UFOs. The following year, Iran protested the drone flights to the United States through Swiss diplomatic channels, and via letters to the U.N. Security Council, demanding "an end to such unlawful acts." The RQ-170 Sentinel drone itself, pictures of which were first published in 2007, had flown from Afghan airbases over Iran "for years," according to the Associated Press. (Of course, Iran also flies surveillance drones against U.S. military assets, as demonstrated in this grainy video of the USS Ronald Reagan.)


That one of many drones dedicated to collecting intelligence over Iran has fallen into Iranian hands is also expected given the law of averages. Drones crash at rates higher than manned aircraft for any number of reasons, including due to human error, incorrect information, network interference, system failure, weather, or being shot down. As a former official warned: "It was never a matter of whether we were going to lose one but when."

With an array of advanced sensors and unmatched speed and loiter time, the RQ-170s flying above Iran probably had four collection priorities: 1) The location and activities of all known and suspected nuclear sites, including air sensors to retrieve remote traces of tell-tale signs of nuclear activities, such as krypton-85; 2) The location and activities of ballistic-missile production facilities and test ranges; 3) The location of training camps for terrorist organizations such as Hezbollah; 4) The location and technical characteristics of Iran's integrated air-defense system, including the transmitting power and spatial coverage of radars and performance characteristics of surface-to-air missiles. Any information was obtained was assuredly corroborated by multiple other intelligence collection platforms.

While intelligence collection in Iran will undoubtedly suffer somewhat, the primary concern regarding the crash is the prospect of Iran providing the Sentinel to other foreign governments. Iran's semi-official Mehr news agency reported "that Russian and Chinese officials have asked for permission to inspect the U.S. spy drone." This prospect is likely given historical precedent: In 1998, Chinese officials reportedly visited Khost, Afghanistan, to purchase intact Tomahawk cruise missiles that failed to explode in an U.S. attack on Osama bin Laden's hideout. The following year, Chinese intelligence agents reportedly bought the wreckage from a downed U.S. stealth F-117 Nighthawk, some of which might have been reverse-engineered for China's J-20 stealth fighter.

When the ill-fated U-2 was lost over the Soviet Union, its superior replacement, the A-12 OXCART, was already well under development at the ultra-secret Skunk Works facilities -- so the U-2 was no huge loss. Similarly, the Sentinel's downing will only be a temporary setback. As Aviation Week reported, the Sentinel's sensor package considered "so invaluable when it debuted in Afghanistan about two years ago is considered outdated." The hyper-spectral sensor capabilities mounted on future stealth drones will make the RQ-170 Sentinel seem quaint. When those future drones also unfortunately fall onto the territory of Iran or other adversaries, people will be surprised and unnecessarily alarmed then, too.


Iran Has America's Super Spy Drone. So What? - By Micah Zenko | Foreign Policy

Returning US drone back or not, Obama asks, Iran says “NO”



2011-12-13

United State President Obama">Obama said on Monday it had asked Iran to return an American top-secret spy drone back that went down in Iran on Dec. 4; meanwhile, Tehran has cited the capture as a victory for Iran and displayed the nearly intact drone on state TV.

It was Mr. Obama" Obama’s first public comment about the drone, a remote-controlled spying aircraft, in a case that has raised American tensions with Iran.

President Barack Obama">Obama said the U.S. wants the top-secret aircraft back. "We have asked for it back. We'll see how the Iranians respond," Obama">Obama said during a White House news conference with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki on Monday.

Mr. Obama">Obama was answering this question: “And speaking of Iran, are you concerned that it will be able to weaken America’s national security by discovering intelligence from the fallen drone that it captured?”

Mr. Obama">Obama would not comment on what the Iranians might learn from studying the downed aircraft. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said it is difficult to know "just frankly how much Iran is going to be able to get from having obtained those parts."

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Panetta said they are not optimistic about getting the drone back because of recent Iranian behavior that Clinton said indicated "that the path that Iran seems to be going down is a dangerous one for themselves and the region."

"We submitted a formal request for the return of our lost equipment as we would in any situation to any government around the world," Clinton told reporters at a State Department news conference with British Foreign Secretary William Hague.

"Given Iran's behavior to date we do not expect them to comply but we are dealing with all of these provocations and concerning actions taken by Iran in close concert with our closest allies and partners," she said.

Panetta said the request to return the drone was appropriate. "I don't expect that that will happen," he said. "But I think it's important to make that request."

Neither Obama">Obama nor Clinton would provide details of the drone request, but diplomatic exchanges between Washington to Tehran are often handled by Switzerland, which represents U.S. interests in Iran. The State Department said Monday that the Swiss ambassador to Iran met with Iranian foreign ministry officials last week but refused to say what they discussed.

Iran TV reported earlier Monday that Iranian experts were in the final stages of recovering data from the RQ-170 Sentinel, which went down in Iran earlier this month. Tehran has cited the capture as a victory for Iran and displayed the nearly intact drone on state TV. U.S. officials say the aircraft malfunctioned and was not brought down by Iran.

On Monday, Iranian military officials were quoted in the state-run press saying they were extracting intelligence data from the drone and would reverse-engineer it to learn how it works. The semiofficial Fars News Agency said Iran’s armed forces had captured a prize that “can blunt the U.S. technological edge over its adversaries.”

Iran lodged formal complaints last week about what they called the drone incursion, protesting to both the United Nations Security Council and Switzerland’s ambassador to Tehran, who is responsible for American interests in Iran. Iran also complained to Afghanistan for allowing the Americans to use it as a surveillance base, the Afghanistan Foreign Ministry said Sunday.

Returning US drone back or not, Obama asks, Iran says “NO” - Taiwan News Online