Video - Cooter breaks down the story even before the story broke down.
USAToday | Another intriguing question, said John Pike, executive director of Global Security.org, is what the drone's mission in Iran would have been. The same model drone was reportedly used to spy on Osama bin Laden's compound before the raid that killed him in May. Drones can provide round-the-clock surveillance that satellites cannot.
U.S. officials are concerned that Iran is developing nuclear weapons.
"What can I learn from a drone?" Pike said. "The best day and time to bomb an office park if I was trying to kill people there. A drone is going to stake the place out."
The Air Force released few details and no photos of the RQ-170 Sentinel, one its most advanced unmanned spy planes. Iranian authorities on Thursday displayed what they claimed was the drone their forces brought down.
The drone is alleged to have crashed last week in Iran. The NATO military command in Afghanistan has acknowledged it lost control of an unarmed, unmanned spy plane near Iran. A senior Pentagon official, who requested anonymity because he is not authorized to discuss intelligence matters, said the spy plane was on a mission for the CIA.
The plane's shape and coatings allow it to evade radar detection. Russia and China are testing their own stealth planes, so the technology is known to them. The prize on this lost drone, said Peter Singer, director of the 21st Century Defense Initiative at the Brookings Institution, is the advanced radar and other sensors it can carry.
The RQ-170 has carried the same radar that will be used in top U.S. fighter jets — the F-22 and the new F-35, Singer said. The Chinese are a generation behind in developing such capability, he said, and would be keenly interested in obtaining it.
"This is the jewel for them," he said. The drone may also have carried an advanced sensor for monitoring nuclear sites, Singer said. "Bottom line, it's never easy to reverse-engineer anything, let alone something like a radar, but having a working or even damaged system in hand to study up-close makes it a heck of a lot easier to both defend against it in the future or build your own derivative," he said.
U.S. officials are concerned that Iran is developing nuclear weapons.
"What can I learn from a drone?" Pike said. "The best day and time to bomb an office park if I was trying to kill people there. A drone is going to stake the place out."
The Air Force released few details and no photos of the RQ-170 Sentinel, one its most advanced unmanned spy planes. Iranian authorities on Thursday displayed what they claimed was the drone their forces brought down.
The drone is alleged to have crashed last week in Iran. The NATO military command in Afghanistan has acknowledged it lost control of an unarmed, unmanned spy plane near Iran. A senior Pentagon official, who requested anonymity because he is not authorized to discuss intelligence matters, said the spy plane was on a mission for the CIA.
The plane's shape and coatings allow it to evade radar detection. Russia and China are testing their own stealth planes, so the technology is known to them. The prize on this lost drone, said Peter Singer, director of the 21st Century Defense Initiative at the Brookings Institution, is the advanced radar and other sensors it can carry.
The RQ-170 has carried the same radar that will be used in top U.S. fighter jets — the F-22 and the new F-35, Singer said. The Chinese are a generation behind in developing such capability, he said, and would be keenly interested in obtaining it.
"This is the jewel for them," he said. The drone may also have carried an advanced sensor for monitoring nuclear sites, Singer said. "Bottom line, it's never easy to reverse-engineer anything, let alone something like a radar, but having a working or even damaged system in hand to study up-close makes it a heck of a lot easier to both defend against it in the future or build your own derivative," he said.
1 comments:
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