RQ-170 Sentinel Captured By Iran
With Iran releasing a video showing the captured RQ-170 Sentinel drone in a desert camo scheme it is almost impossible to say that their claim of having the drone is untrue but I don’t believe they were able to bring it down.
The video shows the front and an elevated view of the drone with no damage visible, although the underside isn’t visible so damage underneath is possible. If the drone had been shot down or brought down by using electronic warfare and come down in an uncontrolled manner I would expect to see damage on the leading edge as it impacted the ground. No such damage can be seen leading to the possibility the landing gear was down and that would have taken any damage when the drone became earth bound again.
Whilst the video isn’t especially high resolution I believe you can also see a opening on the underside of the drone where the front landing wheel would be. This gap would only be there when the gear was down. Why not have it standing on its own wheels rather than on a raised platform then? I believe the landing gear was either ripped off or damaged when it landed on what I guess was rough ground.
Did Iran take control of the drone or jam the communication used to control it? I don’t think either is likely. The drone is controlled over an encrypted military satellite which I’m certain will have anti-jam functionality you find in other military datalinks such as LINK 16. Hacks of US satellites via a ground station have occurred (the only publicly reported one was of satellites used by NASA and the US Geological Survey to monitor things like climate change) but this was more a risk of them repositioning the satellite rather than accessing the data they handle. Even if they did get access to the datastream they would need to break the encryption and then work out how to correctly format commands to send to the drone, all this having to be done it realtime. China is often accused of being behind hacking attempts against US companies and military facilities but Iran doesn’t have anywhere near the same ability.
If they did manage to interrupt the communications of the drone it would have fallen back to a default plan which would be to fly to a predetermined, and safe, section of airspace where it would circle waiting for communications to be restored. There have been instances of where this has failed and the drone has failed to return or for communication to be restored but these all ended with the drone crashing or being shot down. If Iran had shown the RQ-170 with damage I might consider this as an option but the undamaged leading edge is a big indicator it came down in at least a partially controlled manner.
So what happened? I’m guessing an engine failure. The operators would still have full control over the drone but may not have had the altitude needed to glide it back to a safe location. I think they would have glided it as far as they could then put down the landing gear and executed a controlled crashed landing on the most suitable improvised landing strip they could find. This would leave the drone very much undamaged. It would then be a race to see if the US special forces team could get to it and either destroy it or recover it before Iran did. If the US believed that the RQ-170 hadn’t been tracked over Iran there would be a good chance the Iranians wouldn’t even be looking for it.
Why take the chance? Why not just slam it into ground and destroy it? One thing we’ve learnt from Afghanistan is that when a UAV comes down they don’t destroy themselves. They don’t have large amounts of fuel like a manned aircraft and travel slowly so they don’t have the kinetic energy needed to destroy itself. A situation which would be made even worse if I was right about it gliding. Dispatching forces to recover sensitive parts, destroy it with explosives or guide a fast jet it to hit it with a precision guided munition is normal practice. This is very much the downside of UAVs. Whilst they offer the ability to remain over the target for a long time and don’t have the risk or limitations of being manned when things go wrong you have no-one to improvise either. You are then left with a situation like this one where you have to decide if to send a special forces team to somewhere dangerous, risking their lives, or let the technology fall into the enemies hands.
