How valuable is downed US drone to Iran?
Now that US officials are privately confirming that Iran has a US super-secret RQ-170 drone, two key questions remain:
How did the CIA鈥檚 unmanned spy aircraft fall into Iranian hands, especially since photos and videos show it to be largely intact? And how valuable a loss is it?
Pentagon and CIA officials have not publicly acknowledged that the bat-shaped thing shown by Iran is the RQ-170 that went missing earlier this week. But unnamed high-level officials have told several news sources that it appears to be an actual RQ-170.
Meanwhile, analysts differ on the cost of the loss to US intelligence and technology.
鈥淭his is the jewel for them now,鈥� robotics expert Peter Singer of the Brookings Institution told the Associated Press. 鈥淚t depends on what was on the plane on this mission, but one sensor it has carried in the past is an AESA radar. This is a very advanced radar that really is a difference maker for our next generation of planes, not just drones, but also manned ones like F-22s and F-35s.鈥�
Other experts aren鈥檛 so sure.
鈥淔rom a secrecy standpoint, it鈥檚 like dropping a Ferrari into an ox-cart technology culture,鈥� national security analyst Richard Aboulafia told Air Force Times. 鈥淏ut I鈥檓 sure they can sell it to someone who can get some kind of information out of it. But the mission systems are likely to be too encrypted to be of use to anyone.鈥�
The Iranian news site Nasim reported Thursday that Russian and Chinese experts were on their way to Iran to examine the downed drone.
Ty聽Rogoway, an aviation writer and photographer who blogs at , notes that the RQ-170 has done much of its work over Pakistan, a country with close ties to China.
鈥淚f indeed Iran shot down an RQ-170聽as it has claimed,聽or聽one had聽crashed while spying on Iran鈥檚 nuclear program or conducting other duties over their airspace, it may be a technological loss to America but not to the extent that all of our most sensitive stealth secrets would be totally compromised,鈥� he writes. 鈥淚n other words, the wreckage would be akin to say (with great speculation) America鈥檚 early 90鈥瞫 stealth technology, with a few sensitive聽modern subsystems onboard.鈥�
Earlier, analysts had figured that had an RQ-170 been shot down or otherwise crashed, it would have ended up 鈥渁 pile of wreckage,鈥� as one put it.
Given what appears to be a nearly-intact drone in Iran鈥檚 hands, however, they鈥檙e now wondering why it didn鈥檛 self-destruct or automatically return to base when its ground controllers lost contact, as it鈥檚 programmed to do.
鈥淓ither this was a cyber/electronic warfare attack system that brought the system down or it was a glitch in the command-and-control system,鈥� national security analyst Dan Goure of the Lexington Institute in Arlington, Va.,聽told Air Force Times.
He compares it to the shooting down of the CIA鈥檚 high-altitude U-2 spy aircraft over the Soviet Union in 1960.
Loss of the RQ-170 drone is 鈥渢he biggest Christmas present to our enemies in probably a decade, at least,鈥� Goure said. 鈥淓verybody now will get an understanding of our state-of-the-art intelligence collection capabilities.鈥�
