Question about that drone
In the thread about the drone captured by Iran, “Mr. Frank” made the following comment:
The military wanted to destroy the drone on the ground. Obama turned down their request. Why?
I was curious to see whether this was the case. Because the comment contained no link, I Googled it and found quite a few comments of the same type on various discussion boards. But all I could find as the source of the information was this statement by Dick Cheney:
“The right response to that would have been to go in immediately after it had gone down and destroy it,” Cheney said told Erin Burnett of CNN’s’ “OutFront”
Cheney said the president had three options on his desk but rejected all of them. “They involved sending somebody in to try to recover it or, if you can’t do that, and admittedly that would be a difficult operation, he certainly could have gone in and destroyed it on the ground with an air strike,” he said.
“But he didn’t take any of the options. He asked nicely for them to return it. And they aren’t going to do that,” Cheney said.
Interesting. Cheney doesn’t say where he got his information, but I assume it was from military sources annoyed at Obama.
Of course, there’s no way to tell whether it’s true or not, or what the risks of such an air strike would have been in comparison to the risks of letting the Iranians examine the drone and learn from it. I read somewhere (unfortunately, can’t find the source at the moment) that the design of the drone makes it resistant to the reverse-engineering Iran claims it’s undergoing. It’s almost impossible to know whether that’s true, either, but if it is then the capture of the drone would be most valuable to the Iranians for propaganda.
But here’s my question: why don’t drones feature a mechanism by which they can be destroyed remotely if they fall into enemy hands? That would seem to be a rather obvious plus to incorporate into the design, but this is hardly my field of expertise.
Maybe our panty-waist President decreed that since such an explosive device might injure someone on the ground, they shouldn’t put one in the drone.
Neo, according to reports by knowledgeable folks, this UAV contained at least two safety features.
If it lost contact with its control it should have returned automatically to its base.
Or, failing that, it should have self-destructed.
Clearly, neither option worked as planned.
There were numerous reports on FNC before the Cheney interview stating that Obama had actually been presented with three options, but rejected them because they would have offended the Iranians. (Actually, involved further incursion by some means into their sovereign territory.) I have no idea of the origin,or accuracy, of the reports; but, they were out there early on.
There has also been some chatter about Iranian jamming capabilities. We know that the Taliban has been able to intercept video transmissions from some drones. It’s possible that the Iranians have a jamming system that blocked the drone pilot’s control, and might have caused trouble with the self-destruct mechanism.
The thing that is suspicious to me is how undamaged the thing looks.
Iran was ready to return the drone, but Obama forgot to say “Please!”
Iran has now Russian-made system of radioelectronic jumming and “zombing” drones named “Avtobaza”. It was deployed near nuclear facilities where drone was flying. At least, this is what Russian state TV said.
The ability of a secretive unmanned device to destroy itself has been a feature of military equipment since the 1960s. Some early warhead-type missiles could self-destruct, on command. Even NASA satellites can do the same.
The main reason we would like the drone back is to find out why it went down. Was it actually shot down, or was there some type of failure?
We just don’t know anything. Since the drone is in their hands, i say there’s a good chance it’s there for the purpose of misleading them or even something more clever than that.
Steve H–having been part of our gubmint for several decades, and having observed all sorts of shit that, well, just made me wonder sometimes if we were just “too dumb to live”–I find your faith in our government and in its intelligence, common sense, forcefulness, and real cunning touching in the extreme.
“The thing that is suspicious to me is how undamaged the thing looks.”
I agree. Things don’t fall from the sky and remain intact. The drone looks like it came out of the factory straight to Iran. (No, I don’t think that is true.)
I will take Cheney’s word. I wish he were not on his last legs from the cardiovascular standpoint.
I will never forget Bush and Cheney re-entering the WH from the Rose Garden early in W’s first term; Bush held the door for Cheney, and entered 2nd. Whatever his policy failings would become, that marked Bush forever in my mind as a fundamentally decent man.
Please stand by for an announcement by the Iranians that the drone has been converted to Islam and will be making its confession on YouTube.
Although Cheney didn’t say it exactly that way, he may have been speaking, not from inside knowledge, but from a general understanding of what the options would be.
There aren’t a whole lot of possibilities.
(Interestingly, in that brief piece, Cheney doesn’t say what the third option would be.)
The single most haunting possibility is that we’ve been penetrated back here in America — and that positive control of the RQ-170 shifted over to Iran & Russia.
That’s the best explanation for its non-return and non-self-destruct.
The idea that this bird was flying over western Afghanistan is to laugh.
That the poltoon-in-chief was, and is, clueless enough to beg for its return tells all.
SteveH,
The same occurred to me. After all, we’ve done it before.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siberian_pipeline_sabotage
This is just one reported false flag operation but there have been strong hints of others over the years.
The RQ-170 is just semi-stealthy. The really secret parts of the stealth technology – engine nozzles and exhaust. fairings, etc. – are not on that bird. The only possible compromised technology is the “paint” on the exterior. Easy to substitute an earlier, inferior formulation in order to mislead.
The electronics are fairly standard and are just about impossible to reverse engineer anyway.
The CIA and other agencies are more than happy to be portrayed as incompetent. Make their job easier.
The damn thing should have had a inertial guidance system onboard that could have reversed the flight path back to base and is not beholden to outside influence.
I don’t get the whole issue. Don’t we expect drones and other aircraft to be shot down and captured? I would never devise a product that I expected would never fall into the hands of our enemies.
Am I missing something?
ASIDE. from the humiliation (Which is HUGE in the paranoid inferior hoer masculine Islamists) and Ahmadinejad making Obama his bitch in front of the rest of our enemies, and his annoying narcissism, Barry is ENDANGERING our nation with his ideology,incompetence, ego, and weakness.
Iran is threatening to shut down the Straight of Hormuz, strangling our crucial oil supply routes and the worlds, he is REFUSING to drill here, and open up the Keystone pipeline to pacify his idiot leftist OWS base.
ENERGY IS NATIONAL SECURITY!!!! And to depend on a Middle East that this amateur has DESTABILIZED, for all of our energy needs, is not just incompetent politics, IT IS SUICIDE. ECOMIC SUICIDE—-AND NATIONAL SECURITY SUICIDE.
WE NEED TO IMPEACH HIM, HOBBKE HIM, AND VOTE HIM OUT NOW!!!!
I can’t believe there have been 2 threads on this any no one has mentioned how much this feels like Carter & the Hostages.
At least Carter tried a military operation to get the hostages out.
MOMO—Obama has so insanely surpassed the cowardice and incompetence of Jimmy Carter, Jimmah looks like Reagan standing next to the boy man.
p.s. In my post above, I meant to type “Hyper Masculine” paranoia of the Islamists. They HATE weakness in others with a severe intensity because it touches on their own fears and sense of inferiority and shame.
Obama is a pantywaist idiot. And I’m not using the words I really wanna use.
I can’t cite the source anymore, but my understanding came from a military spokesman who said that the drone lost it’s tether and landed BY DESIGN.
The “by design” part is suspicious since a valid assumption would be that the aircraft would be over enemy territory if it lost it’s tether. Nonetheless, that would explain the intact nature of the craft.
I doubt that it was intentionally snatched by the Iranians because it took a couple of days for them to get out there and secure the thing, did it not? If they were jamming and taking over the aircraft they would have had teams in place to secure it as soon as possible.
Sounds to me like bad planning. If we’re sending drones into enemy countries, we really need to have established in advance how to deal with this stuff. No kicking the problem upstairs and taking hours for the cookie pushers to decide.
Just speaking out of my hat, but how much intelligence can be gleaned from an unmanned drone? Surely it is little more than a radio controlled airplane with camera and bombs attached. Perhaps it just isn’t worth the hassle.
Maybe it’s a black op whose objective is to infect and incapacitate whatever (probably military) system they connect the drone’s technology to in order to reverse-engineer it.
Heh. Black op.
Or maybe I’ve been watching too much “Chuck.”
As I understand it, the big advantage of drones is loiter time. Satellites have periods of non coverage. Another advantage is you are not putting a pilot in harms way who could then become a hostage.
The only important question is whether the U.S.A. can survive as America until January 2013 when Obama is put out.
Every day until then has the potential of more harm and damage.
It’s like a race to the finish line: Can he destroy America – which I believe his his overall intention, calling fundamental transformation is just a euphemism for saying wrecking it – enough before 2013 to make the next election an exercise in futility….or not.
Are there any other questions?
Drones? Like a mosquito in size relative to the other one.
Mike Mc:
Even voting him out doesn’t solve he problem. My greatest fear is what Obama will do, if he loses the election, between early November when the votes are counted and mid January when the inauguration takes place. That’s a period of a little more than 2 months when he can do an incredible amount of damage by presidential declaration alone. Watch out America!
blert gets it. The USA’s drone control software has been breached. The craft never thought it was in trouble, so no failsafes were activated. That’s the scenario which the evidence supports best.
All the fretting about reverse-engineering the hardware is a second-order problem. We keep building the machines, and the enemies just commandeer them when convenient. And what else in our national defense has been hacked?
Herman Cain made a point about software integrity as essential to defense. He suggested that Chinese and other hackers were the most underestimated threat to the US. But all y’all thought he wasn’t well-studied and/or didn’t care about foreign policy.
I am not much for conspiracy theories, but I have to wonder if a small amount of Iranian and/or Chinese money might not have found it’s way into Obama’s campaign chest…
Seems there were similar questions during Slick Willy’s administration. Something about missile guidance technology… Just a thought.