ehusmann wrote:Piet Luijken wrote:But still the US do confirm an UAV has been lost, so...
I doubt they will.
The US have already confirmed they did loose an AUV. They have not specified the type or the exact circumstances.
The aircraft shown by the Iranians does seem te be a RQ-170. Two things I noticed on the video are:
- the undercarriage is not shown. Destroyed in crash landing?
- There are two rather big seems across the wings on both sides of the centre. Almost as if the wings have broken off during a crash and have been "glued" on again.
My guess is that they noticed the UAV and started jamming all communications. That would just be a matter of picking up the communications frequencies and then massively jam these. That way they would not have taken over the UAV but prevented the US from controlling it, which would finally lead to a crash. The US then has to localize the crash site and has two options:
- send in a team of special forces to retrieve it. They once did send in special forces in Iran to free hostages and it ended in a disaster. Sending in a team might lead to a contact with Iranian forces, which sohould be prevented at this time. Those considerations might prevent them from doing it again. Also time would be extremely limited.
- Second option would be to bomb the crash site and remains of the UAV. Also time limited and dangerous.
And both options can be considered an act of war by the Iranians.
As I said before, if all the Iranians claim is true, it is quite worrying. Then they have technology to do something against UAV'. Their technology may be rather crude in just jamming the signals and communication, causing the UAV to finally crash. More worrying, by retrieving the UAV, they may now have gotten access to some technology we don't want them to have.
