Well, Iran has it and it’s pretty darned intact. A couple of observations
Iran’s claim they shot it down is absurd, unless they shot out a wheel while it was rolling to a stop;There are some Iranian military intelligence folk who must be biting their tongues wishing that the politicans wouldn’t let the US know what condition it was in;Why there wasn’t the equivalent of a dead man switch that would destroy the drone if it lost contact for a period of time is inexplicable;This is a serious technological loss for the US; andThat thing is pretty cool.
Ugh. That one is going to hurt. I don’t believe that they’ll be able to copy it out right, but you can bet your sweet ass that China will be paying a *fortune *to get their hands on it. The next version of anti-aircraft radar is gonna nail us for sure.
The engine tech is going to hurt, too. I have no idea about the electronics, but they’re probably state of the art as well.
Ugh. That one is going to hurt. I don’t believe that they’ll be able to copy it out right, but you can bet your sweet ass that China will be paying a *fortune *to get their hands on it. The next version of anti-aircraft radar is gonna nail us for sure.
This. Having a copy of the vehicle, they can tune their radar to detect it (I think). No stealth for you!
Iran’s claim they shot it down is absurd, unless they shot out a wheel while it was rolling to a stop
This.
Also wondering why it didnt have a kill switch. I would assume that it has something that fries the internal electronics if it loses contact, but I make awful assumptions.
The claim is that they hacked the control signal and hijacked it according to latest reports. That would make more sense from the condition of the aircraft.
Relax, this is all part of the plan. This is exactly why we built these things. So we could send them places that we could handle losing them in. Iran is one of those places.
According to the NYT, we’ve been using drones to spy on Iranian nuclear facilities. This was on one of those missions. It was high risk so whatever we were looking at must have been very important. Better they get a just a drone than a pilot. Drones can’t confess to what they were really doing a la Gary Powers. We can continue to claim publicly that it was on a mission in Afghanistan and we just lost control of it. Whatever they get out the drone, we got way more out of the data we have been gathering. You can’t win every battle. Its only important if you win the war.