Iran to 'reverse engineer' US drone

[Robb]

10. I don't think Iran even has an RQ-170.

There are a few pretty good analyses out there (and a few kind of funny ones) that outline several problems with the photographs and video Iran has put forward of the UAV they claim to have brought down electronically.

Iran's track record on actually having shot down what they've said they did speaks for itself. Our own government (and President) are being more than a little vague -- yes, we lost a UAV. No, we won't confirm the one on Iran TV is the one we lost. Yes, we've asked Iran to let us have it back if it's ours. And so on. There's a sense, at least to me, that we're not in on the joke.

The RQ-170 was Lockheed's big return to the UAV market. It's a fairly secret aircraft, in that there are only a handful of bad photos in the public sphere of it. I find it revealing (!) that the UAV Iran is showing us is being shown in no new ways, at no new angles -- in other words, we're not seeing a detail of the exhaust, which would be a first (and something I'd LOVE to get a look at), or a close-up of the landing gear, or any indication of sensor placement.

This is all stuff that a haphazard filming -- which is what we're kind of led to believe this was -- would probably show us. But no dice. Instead we've got this weird table-skirt banner stuff, and a brief walk from the magician's distance around the front of the thing.

Another matter that no one's latched onto yet: part numbers. A typical Lockheed UAV system will have more than 1,000 parts, each with its own number; 90% of those parts will have the number printed or stamped on them. A single part number would go a long way.

Finally, as I was using Google's image search to find more pictures of the thing Iran's showing us, I stumbled across this:




It's probably pure coincidence that Iranian students built this last year, and that it looks so similar in construction materials. It's a small drone called the Shir Dal.