Iran's Cyber Attack Forces US to Replace Drones in Region
Officially, the General Atomics-made Avenger - a sleek, jet-powered upgrade of the iconic armed Predator and Reaper - is heading to Afghanistan as a combat-capable "test asset." The Air Force said in a statement that it loves how the Avenger's "internal weapons bay and four hard points on each wing," will give it "greater flexibility and will accommodate a large selection of next generation sensor and weapons payloads," as reported by Zach Rosenberg at Flight global.
But the point is, you don't really need those things in Afghanistan. Internal weapons bays, which hide the radar signatures of bombs and missiles, are for stealth: most warplanes don't have them. And it's not like the Taliban has been firing radar-guided missiles at NATO aircraft. Besides, there are already dozens of armed drones in Afghanistan. One more isn't going to make much of a difference.
Which begs the question: Is the 41-foot-long Avenger really meant for Afghanistan? Or is it destined to patrol over Afghanistan's neighbors, Iran and Pakistan, both of which do have radar-guided missiles? That was a job assigned to the more advanced Lockheed Martin RQ-170 Sentinel before one of those drones was downed in Iran two weeks ago. We're sure the Air Force has a few more RQ-170s to throw at Iran and Pakistan.
The Avenger reportedly carries a ground-mapping radar and the same ultra-sophisticated cameras as the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, making it a perfect candidate for quietly snooping above, say, nuclear facilities..
It's not a sure bet that the Avenger would even see action in Afghanistan. The air war over Afghanistan is winding down, big time. NATO warplanes dropped just 310 bombs last month, compared to 866 in November 2010, according to US Central Command. High-tech drone reinforcements are a more natural fit for escalating surveillance operations over Iran and Pakistan than for the Afghanistan war.
Iranian officials have warned that if see another air violation by the US, they would give Pentagon a crushing response.
The US Air Force purchase is apparently the first for the Avenger, but former US defense officials said the drone will actually be operating under the CIA. The swept-wing General Atomics robot is compatible with the same ground-based control systems as the Predator and Reaper and possibly the RQ-170, as well.
The replacement comes after US Defense Secretary Leon Panetta paid a surprise visit to Afghanistan earlier this week to investigate into the loss of the US RQ-170 Sentinel stealth aircraft which was downed by Iranian armed forces earlier this month.
Head of Afghanistan's Research and Strategy Center Gholam Jilani Zawak told FNA in Kabul that the downing of the drone has stirred deep worries among the US officials, and added, "Washington fears that Iran might provide its friendly states with access to the aircraft resulting in a reproduction of the drone by these countries (which are the United States' main adversaries)."
He said the US was so concerned about the disclosure of the drone technology that it even contemplated an air strike to destroy the aircraft but they canceled the decision for the dire consequences of such move.
With America still scrambling to explain why and how they lost a drone aircraft over Iran last week, the Pentagon is trying to make sense of how another high-tech unmanned spy craft crashed Tuesday morning in the Seychelles.
For the second time in two weeks, American authorities lost contact with a drone aircraft, this time resulting in a fiery crash in the Seychelles in the Indian Ocean. The United States has operated an Air Force base there since 2009 to dispatch drones for use in anti-piracy missions and to patrol the skies over Somalia and elsewhere.
Officials at the US embassy in Mauritius confirmed the crash on Tuesday morning, revealing that an MQ-9, or "Reaper" drone, had landed at Seychelles International Airport.
A week earlier, the US Department of Defense denied losing a drone, only for Iran authorities to in turn publish video proof of an American craft that they have recovered. The Pentagon later admitted that they lost contact with the drone while allegedly flying it over Afghanistan. But they later confessed that the drone was carrying a mission in Iran, prompting President Obama to ask Tehran to return the spy plane.
Iranian officials, including President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, shot down Obama's plea, however.
President Ahmadinejad told the Venezuelan TV last night, "The Americans have perhaps decided to give us this spy plane. We now have control of this plane."
Iran first announced on December 4 that its defense forces had downed the aircraft through a sophisticated cyber attack.
The drone is the first such loss by the US. US officials have described the loss of the aircraft in Iran as a setback and a fatal blow to the stealth drone program.
The US media revealed last Thursday that Pentagon and the CIA considered several options on how to retrieve or destroy the drone, including sending a cross-border commando raid and delivering an air strike to destroy it.
However all were deemed too risky, since Tehran would consider such an operation an act of war, should it be discovered.
"No one warmed up to the option of recovering it or destroying it because of the potential it could become a larger incident," an unnamed official told the Washington Post on Thursday.
The RQ-170 has special coatings and a batwing shape designed to help it penetrate other nations' air defenses undetected. The existence of the aircraft, which is made by Lockheed Martin, has been known since 2009, when a model was photographed at the main US airfield in Kandahar, Afghanistan.
The unmanned surveillance plane lost by the United States in Iran was a stealth aircraft being used for secret missions by the CIA, US officials admitted earlier this week.
The aircraft is among the highly sensitive surveillance platform in the CIA's fleet that was shaped and designed to evade enemy defenses.
The loss of the second drone within days raises questions about security within the US military and the unmanned crafts themselves. It was reported earlier this year that drones dispatched from Creech Air Force Base in Nevada were plagued with a computer virus that made its way into the cockpits of the crafts without American authorities able to quickly identify it. Even though US military officials claimed that the virus didn't harm the security of US aircraft, it is suspicious that now two American drones have been downed in only such a short amount of time, raising questions whether it is possible retaliation from Iran for an alleged cyber attack the year prior. Stuxnet, a 2010 computer worm that targeted Iranian nuclear facilities, was suspected to be perpetrated by American intelligence agencies, much to their dismissal.
The MQ-9 Reaper has the capability of launching laser-guided bombs and air-to-ground missiles, although the US Department of Defense says the craft in question was not armed and no injuries resulted in the crash.
Fars News Agency :: Iran's Cyber Attack Forces US to Replace Drones in Region
unlike the F-35 the Su-35 has finished development and it will enter service sometime next week.
