May 16-2014
With Supreme Leader Ali Khamenehi in attendance, the Pas-daran Sunday rolled out what they said was their successful copy of the US RQ-170 stealth spy drone.
The drone was captured December 4, 2011, when it landed in Iran. The Pasdaran said they have spent the last two years reverse engineering the aircraft and now have a duplicate.
From the outside, that was clearly a reasonable claim. But the heart of the RQ-170 is its electronic innards, which do its spy work and which could not be seen or checked.
An important part of the stealth technology is a special rubbery substance covering the exterior of the drone to absorb radar signals. The Pasdaran did not mention if they had tried to duplicate that coating.
But the Pasdaran said they had made the drone even better by adding a bombing capability so they could attack American ships with it. The RQ-170 has no bomb bay so any weapons would presumably have to be carried outside, which would eliminate the drone’s stealthiness by making it visible to radar. Since the drone is a mere 15 feet (4.5 meters) long, it couldn’t carry any big bomb.
In October, the Pasdaran said a major benefit to Iran was that the RQ-170 carries a fifth generation engine, while Iranian drones only have third generation engines. Brig. Gen. Amir-Ali Hajizadeh said capturing the RQ-170 had moved Iran ahead as much as 35 years in engine technology.
To capture the drone, Iran said it took over control electronically and commanded it to land inside Iran, giving the Islamic Republic an intact RQ-170, the most advanced spy drone in the world.
The United States said it was flying the drone on a reconnaissance mission in Afghanistan when the pilot lost contact.
Neither story is entirely believed. The stealth characteristics are not required for reconnaissance flights over Afghanistan where drones face no threat. So, it is widely assumed the RQ-170 was being used to spy on Iran.
The claim that Iran took over control of the aircraft is generally not accepted either, as Iran is not believed to have mastery of that technology. Furthermore, Iran displayed the RQ-170 with a skirt around its base, suggesting the plane had actually not landed but crashed on its belly and Iran did not want to show the damage.
A few weeks after the RQ-170 was displayed by Iran, the Christian Science Monitor quoted an unnamed Iranian scientist as saying his team of cyber hackers took over the stealth drone’s GPS signal and redirected the drone to land in a location in Iran instead of its base in Afghanistan.
But American experts were dismissive, saying that to accomplish such a feat would be a stretch even for countries with more sophisticated cyber experts and better technology. To divert a top-notch stealth drone with highly complex systems would require at least three, if not more, extremely difficult steps:
First, Iran would have to detect the stealth drone as it hovered up to 50,000 feet above ground; second, Iranian hackers would have to jam the GPS signal; and third, they would have to feed the drone “Trojan” signals, correctly encrypted, to deceive it to land in Iran.
Although experts concede that none of these steps is impossible, each of them is extremely difficult and, on aggregate, poses a near-impossible technological challenge for anyone, not just Iran.
“The weak point in the Iranian argument is how they detected the drone in the first place, which I find implausible given the existing quality of their air-defense system, which is not sufficiently sophisticated to detect it,” Dennis Gormley of the University of Pittsburgh told the Christian Science Monitor.
Gormley is an expert on unmanned aerial systems and has experience in intelligence operations. “Their air defenses are of a type that doesn’t have the ability to detect a low-cross-section [stealth] vehicle like the RQ-170,” he said. But Iran claims to have mastered stealth technology. Its claims of mastery exceed those of Russia and China.
John Bumgarner of the US Cyber Consequences Unit, a nonprofit cyber warfare think tank, said it would be “almost like science fiction” for Iran to detect the American drone.
But if Iran indeed detected the drone, the subsequent step involving the jamming of its signal would be comparatively easier because of the inherent weaknesses in GPS technology.
It is believed that Hezbollah has been in able to detect and crash Israeli drones in the past, although those vehicles have been significantly less sophisticated compared to the RQ-170, which is the most advanced drone in the world.
The third step – mimicking the drone’s signal to guide it to land away from its initial target – is a tougher task. The drone is designed in a way that once its GPS signal is jammed, it goes on autopilot and returns to its point of origin. The challenge would be to produce signals compatible with the drone’s encryption so it can be given faux commands that it would accept as real.
The Iranian engineer told the Christian Science Monitor his team found a simpler solution to the daunting task: They located a site in Iran with the same latitude (east-west axis) as the drone’s base at Shindand in Afghanistan. Then all they had to do, he said, was override the longitude (north-south axis) setting for the drone’s pre-programmed landing site. He said his team did that by using information they had previously collected from crashing other US drones.
However, this explanation does not hold water because the latitude where Iran said the drone landed is far from the latitude of Shindand. Shindand is at latitude 33 degrees 40 minutes north. Iran said the drone landed near the town of Kashmar, which lies at latitude 35 degrees 25 minutes north or about 210 kilometers (130 miles) north of the latitude of the drone’s base.
Thus, Iran’s own explanation of where it landed the drone contradicts the engineer’s explanation to the Christian Science Monitor of how the drone was nabbed.
While Iran now claims to have reversed engineered the RQ-170, the Americans are less worried about that claim than the possibility Iran would share the drone with China or Russia to help them understand its complex technology.
