Tehran tracked, captured, studied, copied RQ-170

https://medium.com/war-is-boring/f3fc9b2c087a

by vinnyglennon • 12 years ago

133 113 12 years ago

medium.com

aceperry• 12 years ago

Very interesting. I would love it if the Iranians open-sourced the drone that they captured. :-)

mschuster912• 12 years ago

Put it up on Kickstarter. iDrone ;)

Oculus• 12 years ago

Sentinel has two separate hard drives, both encrypted. After deciphering the hard drives, the IRGC-AF

And that's how we know most of what the Iranian military says regarding the Sentinel is completely fabricated. Correct me if I'm wrong, but wouldn't it be nearly impossible for them to decrypt a properly encrypted hard drive unless they had an powerful supercomputer?

mschuster912• 12 years ago

Fixed keys in the bootloader, RAM freezing attacks.

One does not break the crypto, rather the (ALWAYS) buggy implementation.

wyager• 12 years ago

wouldn't it be nearly impossible for them to decrypt a properly encrypted hard

Yes. But they probably weren't properly encrypted.

Experts don't even necessarily agree about what "properly encrypted" even means. There are so many things that can go wrong in any implementation.

rikacomet• 12 years ago

I wonder why they haven't put the encryption method out in public, they necessarily don't need to tell how they broke it. It won't be used anymore on American side, nor Iran would use it now that it is broken, so why not for educational purpose put it in public domain?

anologwintermut2• 12 years ago

Depends entirely on why and how it was encrypted. If we are talking about the flight control software, the airplane must(edit,not necessarily) have the keys to boot clearly.

If we are talking about recorded data, it's less clear. The imagery data may be encrypted to provide access control after the drives are removed from the plane and handed somewhere else. In which case, there's little reason the drone wouldn't have the decrypt keys.

You could encrypt the data with a public key and store it so that the drone itself can't read it. About the only reason to do this would be to ensure if it was captured, the target wouldn't see what was on it. I'd suspect the way the military planed to handle that eventuality, however, would use on an exothermic random number generator (a.k.a. a self destruct mechanism/ explosive charge) rather than encryption. There's a lot of way more sensitive thing on the aircraft than just what it took pictures of that you need to destroy.

derefr• 12 years ago

If we are talking about the flight control software, the airplane must have the keys to boot clearly.

Not necessarily. It could boot into a bootstrap state with a premaster secret, where it waits for a premaster-secret-encrypted drive-decryption key to be wired to it from its base-station before booting up. Kind of a very secure version of PXE.

tsuraan• 12 years ago

If we are talking about the flight control software, the airplane must have the keys to boot clearly

My laptop doesn't have the keys to decrypt its own hard drive; it boots to initrd and waits for my smart card, which does the decryption. I would imagine the military can do better.

alister• 12 years ago

If we are talking about recorded data, ... You could encrypt the data with a public key and store it so that the drone itself can't read it. About the only reason to do this would be to ensure if it was captured, the target wouldn't see what was on it.

In fact, there's a commercial (non-military) video recorder that does exactly that:

https://deniablevideo.com/

It's basically on-the-fly encryption of continuous digital video (and, in this case, audio as well).

It would work something like the following: A new random symmetric key would be generated every X minutes, and a snippet of incoming video would be encrypted with that key. Each of those random symmetric keys would be encrypted with public key encryption and saved so that the video can be recovered later by someone who has the private key.

Given that a commercial product exists to do this, you would think that a military drone must obviously be doing it as well, right?

Well, I'm not so sure since we learned that drones were not even encrypting the live video feed back to ground controllers as recently as 2009:

"Militants in Iraq have used $26 off-the-shelf software to intercept live video feeds from U.S. Predator drones, potentially providing them with information they need to evade or monitor U.S. military operations."

Full article is here: http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB126102247889095011

mnordhoff• 12 years ago

... wouldn't it be nearly impossible for them to decrypt a properly encrypted hard drive unless they had an powerful supercomputer?

It would be entirely impossible for them to decrypt a "properly encrypted" hard drive even if they did have any supercomputer possible for humans to build with current or near-future technology.

mpyne4• 12 years ago

Similar to how the Russians bootstrapped their strategic bomber (by copying, rivet-for-rivet, some interned B-29s).

commandar• 12 years ago

(by copying, rivet-for-rivet, some interned B-29s)

Not quite. The Tu-4 was a very close copy of the B-29, but the sheet metal the Soviets had available was slightly thicker (and thus heavier)than American sheet metal, which required some engineering to work around.

jacquesm10• 12 years ago

It was the difference between 'metric' and numbered gages that had this effect. They took the next standard size up but still ended up with a plane that weighed almost the same as the B-29. Makes you wonder how much weight the B-29 could have still saved.

ilamont• 12 years ago

After landing, Capt. Jarrell ordered the crew to stay aboard the B-29 while he left and tried to communicate with the Russian pilots, but none spoke English. A few hours later, the crew left the plane and joined Capt. Jarrell. Capt. Jarrell asked to be allowed to contact the American Consul in the city, but permission was denied. The Russian "Allies" interrogated the American crew for three days trying to obtain operational details about the plane and its capabilities. The crew refused to divulge secret information and after three days of questioning without contact from the American Consul, the crew refused to even speak for a week. On the 11th day after landing, the crew was finally able to speak with the Consulate. Unfortunately, the crew was not released to the consulate and remained prisoners of the Russians for seven months before being released along with about 100 other U.S. Army and Navy fliers forced to land in Russian territory during WWII.

The Russians kept the "Ramp Tramp" in spite of American protests, along with three other B-29s that landed on Soviet territory (two made similar emergency landings in Vladivostok and the other crash landed in Siberia). The Tupolov aircraft manufacturer examined the B-29s in minute detail and copied them almost exactly (a fairly remarkable engineering feat). The resulting plane was designated TU-4 (NATO code name BULL). The TU-4 remained the Soviet Union's primary long-range bomber until about 1955 when it was phased out in favor of newer types. Several TU-4s were transferred to the Communist Chinese Air Force in the mid-1950s and continued to serve for many more years.

Source: SOVIET UNION IMPOUNDS AND COPIES B-29 http://www.nationalmuseum.af.mil/factsheets/factsheet.asp?id...

maxerickson2• 12 years ago

The money quote:

At the end of the presentation, Hajizadeh said that Iran’s 1:7-scale copy of the drone has already flown, while half-scale and full-scale models would fly this year

So they haven't finished matching the capabilities of it yet (matching the capabilities is sort of implied by "copied").

AmVess• 12 years ago

Kind of a strange exercise they are doing. Not that I can blame them, I'd be pulling it apart to see what makes it tick myself.

As a practical exercise, however, this is rather futile; they aren't going to be able to replicate the stealth technology, nor the electronics, nor the engine...or anything else important, for that matter.

What they do have, however, is a large scale model making hobby. Maybe they should contact Airfix or Revell for a licensing deal.

jacquesm10• 12 years ago

The best way to find weaknesses in a system is to analyze, and then to see if you can replicate it. This has been done just about forever with weapons systems. Piloting a drone will teach you about the blind spots of a drone, that's golden knowledge if you need to take them down.

mpyne4• 12 years ago

If Iran is approaching this the same way they have approached "replicating" U.S. aircraft carriers then I don't think the West would have much to worry about with this. So I suppose that's the big question here, what exactly is this replicated drone—an accurate copy of at least the airframe, or a propaganda piece designed to appeal to the local populace?

cc4392• 12 years ago

They may not be able to replicate the materials used to build the aircraft. However as the article explains, they have all of China's resources at hand and China can surely build a decent turbo fan engine and the electronics are the easiest part to reverse engineer. The basic components are likely to have some production in China and all that corporate/DoD espionage gives them a leg up in mirroring whatever we design.

Material science requires far more technical and scientific expertise along with significant investment in production and the coatings and alloys are key to proper stealth but just having a capable drone will be enough to give Iran powerful reconnaissance capability even if we have the advantage in detecting their design.

beloch4• 12 years ago

There seems to be a lot of comments to the effect of, "They'll never get their version to work.". First, this probably isn't true and, second, it's not what's really important here.

How many parts inside these drones are off-the-shelf parts manufactured in China? Of the parts that aren't off-the-shelf, how many can be reproduced exactly just by sending a design files and a check to the right place? How much of the software do they now have binaries for? Iran could probably produce a drone configured to run on the U.S. TDRSS system fairly quickly. All they'd have to do is reproduce the drone that crashed exactly. Unfortunately, this wouldn't do them a whole lot of good. The big problem is probably going to be to reverse engineer and adapt the drone's software/hardware so they can be used with Iranian systems, which probably don't exactly have global coverage. It's another challenge still to learn enough from this design for Iran to be able to produce different designs. Copying is a great way to learn though.

The drone's stealth tech may be compromised for a variety of reasons, such as the difficulty of reproducing paint coatings, etc.. This brings us to what is really important. This same stealth tech was already compromised by the Chinese radar installations Iran used to detect and hijack the drone in the first place. Iran is already using Chinese radar systems and is probably not working alone. The opportunity to reverse engineer the latest stealth drone hardware is going to make China (or perhaps Russia) very generous to Iran.

Chinese radar systems can already penetrate the latest U.S. stealth tech given the right circumstances, but now they are likely to get even more effective. Stealth requires such huge compromises from aircraft designs that I wouldn't be surprised if stealth designs are soon abandoned. This incident is not the beginning of the end for Stealth aircraft, it's closer to the end of the end!

Zigurd3• 12 years ago

There is some history of countries, especially China, trying to reverse engineer airplanes. It isn't easy in practice, and not just secrets like the stealth paint. Iran's industry probably can't manufacture an RQ-170.

That said, it's pretty tragic to lose a modern drone intact. There is a lot to be learned even if the learning can't be directly translated into a clone.

trhway• 12 years ago

Iran's industry probably can't manufacture an RQ-170 ...
There is a lot to be learned even if the learning can't be directly translated into a clone.

yes, it isn't only about cloning. It reminds me about the MiG-25 flown to Japan from USSR. US didn't clone it, yet it was a huge win for US and a big loss for USSR.

beloch4• 12 years ago

China is actually doing pretty good. Not too long ago photos were leaked of China's F-35 clone. Interestingly enough, they dropped the V/STOL fan and slimmed down the fuselage. The result is a copy that will likely out-perform the original in the majority of applications. Yes, the Chinese copy has no V/STOL capability, but neither do the majority of F-35's. The non-V/STOL F-35's retain the fat, slow fuselage of the the V/STOL versions, ostensibly for interchangeability of parts, even though the percentage of parts that are actually interchangeable keeps going down further and further.

cc4392• 12 years ago

Stealth will end up as a footnote in the history of military technology just like reinforced concrete. Prior to WWI, reinforced concrete gave rise to an era where networks of large forts could hold against any attack with proper coordination. Then early formulations of "modern" high explosives combined with advances in metalworking gave rise to artillery that could easily blast any fort to pieces.

Stealth worked well against radar systems lacking the computing horsepower needed to filter an aircraft out of the noise. Military hardware lags far behind the capabilities of consumer hardware since the rate of progression has been so rapid while military projects are planned over decades but if systems from 1998 are capable of tracking the latest in stealth technology the next few years will be the bookend of the stealth era.

Personally, I think the future will be an environment where swarms of small drones are thrown against these advanced radar systems in an effort to overwhelm their tracking capability. It'll be an updated strategy along the lines of Baldwin's "the bomber will always get through" ideology. The difference is that drones don't cost lives so the weak point of WWII era bombing strategy won't be of any concern. The winning side will be the one that can afford to keep throwing 1,000 drones at every mission.

adventured3• 12 years ago

There will always be more weapons to shoot down each drone, at a lower cost, than there will be drones. The throw 10,000 drones at them approach will not shake the super powers.

Aircraft bombing runs against high powered military nations is long since over. It will never see a return as a broad strategy method.

The swarm strategy won't produce a winning side in any scenario except for ones in which a high-powered military takes on a weaker military. Nothing will fundamentally change about who dominates the global military sphere.

pavelrub3• 12 years ago

The future is moving towards hypersonic platforms to deliver extremely-rapid strikes that rely on speed to penetrate highly defended targets. This is the direction that the U.S. military is taking with programs such as Prompt Global Strike [1].

See DARPA Falcon Project [2], Boeing X-51 [3] and Lockheed SR-72 [4].

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prompt_Global_Strike [2] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA_Falcon_Project [3] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_X-51 [4] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_Martin_SR-72

dsl2• 12 years ago

The primary reason "their version won't work" is because the Iranian's didn't capture all the ground control systems.

jacquesm10• 12 years ago

Drone technology is within the reach of high level amateurs, stealth is optional and Iran is a nation state. They could do this if they really wanted to.

Iran is full of clever people, in spite of the impression that we get of them in the West as backwards and 'religious idiots' (which is mostly propaganda and would qualify tons of people in the West just as easily). The Mullahs have many faces, they're anything but dumb and they are quite capable of enlisting the help of science when it suits their goals. The fact that they abuse Islam to control their population and to violate human rights on many levels does not detract from any of that.

pavelrub3• 12 years ago

The fact remains that in terms of military technology Iran is decades behind the western world. Their monthly demonstrations of "the best [aircraft|ship|submarine|drone] in the world" which then turn out to be fiberglass models of non-existing things, or photoshopped images, doesn't help to improve their image much either.

If it was that simple for them "to enlist the methods of science" to develop something worthwhile, they would have done it long ago. In fact Iran seems to have serious problems with military and defense R&D.

3327• 12 years ago

Strange comments here. It saddens me that the US lost a drone like this. Maybe not everyone is American here, but the technology in this vehicle will be in China's hands Russia's hands etc. The whole world will miss the old world order some day. By that I mean today's world order. the US will some day will not be able to police the world for one reason or another. Then the world will realize how valuable what the US stood for despite its shortcomings.

us0r• 12 years ago

" but the technology in this vehicle will be in China's hands Russia's hands etc."

While I don't think it is necessarily a good thing they have this technology, when has either been threatening to the US (recently)? I get Russia blames everything on America and they aren't exactly friendly to Americans when traveling there (yet there sure are a lot us there) but as actual military threats - I've either completely missed the story or it doesn't exist.

Personally, I'm more worried about the determined Pakistani dad who lost his wife and children in one of our adventures which completely missed the target.

lancewiggs• 12 years ago

Personally, I'm more worried about the determined Pakistani dad who lost his wife and children in one of our adventures which completely missed the target.

I'm concerned about undereducated radicalised individuals from any country. No country is free of these, even Scandinavian ones.

The question is how many are created, what sort of access to weapons they have and what sort of support system is in place to make sure they don't implement their plans.

I note that the answer to any those three questions is not "more guns".

Zigurd3• 12 years ago

If we were not messing with Iran for what might be relatively unimportant reasons, the drone would not have been lost, and Iran might not be so tight with Russia.

Drones are a tempting way to "do something" when doing nothing, or doing less, might be wiser.

BugBrother12• 12 years ago

It seems that dictators generally need to make enemies out of the world's democracies.

This is so the populations don't start to get ideas about why their junta's steal so much money and they don't have any freedom. "Democracy and freedom are just lies -- the westerners are degenerates which tolerate homosexuality, etc."

So if Iran couldn't antagonize the West for what you consider "relatively unimportant reasons" (e.g. being one of the world's worst terror supporters), they would just try harder. And still be tight with other juntas which also fear democratic influences of their slav... population.

meric5• 12 years ago

"Then the world will realize how valuable what the US stood for despite its shortcomings."

The West, maybe.

Not if you're living in a Middle Eastern country, with oppressive rulers kept in power by US funds, forcing the country to sell its oil resources cheaply.

Not if you're living in Eastern Ukraine, where the US toppled an elected government to install a government that is hostile to your people. http://www.presstv.com/detail/2014/03/25/355978/nuke-8-milli... You could pretty much tell her attitude to them by the way she suggested the 8 million ethnic Russians living in Eastern Ukraine should be nuked.

Not if you're living in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Iran. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9RC1Mepk_Sw#t=79 All countries where the U.S. has sought to destroy domestic, independent, public institutions if and when they arise.

If you're living in an African country where the U.S. has previously tried to destabilize your government, and where China instead have offered to build infrastructure for your country, you might not be so sad that the US has lost a drone, which it was probably using for spying purposes.

If the world was Panem, then U.S. is the Capitol, and its closest allies are the Capitol's adjacent districts.

Of course, you're probably from the U.S., if not, then probably, U.K or Australia, or N.Z. Of course you'd have something to lose if the US will some day not be able to police the world.

EDIT: What's the downvote for? A lack of citations?

xi• 12 years ago

EDIT: What's the downvote for? A lack of citations?

Maybe because of them? The article about Timoshenko is written by a serious antisemitic nutjob.

rat87• 12 years ago

The US did not bring down an elected government in Ukraine. It was taken down by Ukrainian protesters. While I admit that having the threat of force cause elected albeit very corrupt politicians to flee is very sketchy its a million times better then what happened in Crimea and eastern Ukraine and especially in Crimea Russia orchestrated quite a bit of it.

user97562• 12 years ago

In general avoid politics on Hacker News.

Especially if you diverge from the "party line". Such truths hurt. Cf eg BugBrother's comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7795134) (no downvotes there incidentally...)

This would however all be comical if it wasn't so tragic.

"It seems that dictators generally need to make enemies out of the world's democracies."

The US (and Europe) has set out to antagonize not only Iran, but Russia, and China. For what reasons?

"This is so the populations don't start to get ideas about why their junta's steal so much money and they don't have any freedom. "Democracy and freedom are just lies -- the westerners are degenerates which tolerate homosexuality, etc."

Oh yeah, the evil easterners threatening our freedom.... So.. that the population don't get any ideas about the "elected" government's corruption (the military spending, the banks, the rich 1%, etc)?

Any form of government that "we" don't like is lying about everything -- the easterners are degenerate who tolerate nothing and support terrorism!

Don't waste your time. You can't help a person who has decided to hit rock bottom. They'll only bring you down with them. That's the tragedy.

growupkids4• 12 years ago

How exactly are OPEC countries forced to sell oil cheaply?

How exactly did the US topple Ukraine government?

Which African countries did the US destabilize?

Citations please.

jsmcgd• 12 years ago

One could add Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia to the list. Also most of South America.

enraged_camel• 12 years ago

I used to think this way, but I no longer do.

In the book 1984 -- which has far more similarities to today's reality than I am comfortable with -- the Oceanians are utterly and completely convinced that their side is the good side. Throughout the book there are various hints that this is in fact not the case. But the Oceanian government's control on information, combined with people's cognitive dissonance, prevents the truth from being realized. And the few who do realize it are imprisoned, tortured and converted (or killed).

What would today's world be like if China and/or Russia were the dominant power? The answer is that no one knows. No one can know. It's like asking, "what would the world be like if Hitler had won?" That alternate universe was created so long ago that it is simply not possible to conceive of.

It is silly to look at today's China and Russia and conclude that they would continue their current practices and ideologies after becoming dominant world-powers, since said practices and ideologies are very likely what is preventing that from happening. It is also possible that there will be a reversal of roles, with them becoming "good" and the USA becoming a tyrannical, fascist state. I'd say there is a scary amount of indication that the latter is very likely, actually.

BugBrother12• 12 years ago

You are allowed to write that in the Western world. Some people in USA and other countries live good lives by writing conspiracy theories about their own countries.

Try to do something similar in China or a similar autocratic state. It might be a problem to write that in Russia today, too. :-(

And hopefully, China will change. I've seen arguments that to get beyond a certain GNP/Capita, countries have to democratize (unless they have lots of oil, of course).

(What scares me, is the possibility with AI and language understanding -- to have a 1984 control state with a working free economy; future history as a foot trampling a face...)

jotm3• 12 years ago

Actually, you can see how a soviet-dominated world would look today by looking at ex-communist and USSR-influenced countries - there's a distinct pattern of shit buildings, bad organization, corruption, oppression and a pessimistic attitude that is most evident closer to Moscow (Romania, Hungary, Bulgaria) or their own capitals (Latvia, Poland, Slovakia) and fades slowly as you move away. Belarus, for example, is too far gone, it's still a soviet-style country with big problems that no one talks about (because no one cares as long as they stay in their place and shut up).

zik• 12 years ago

As a non-American I see it differently - the US illegally flew an aircraft in another country's sovereign airspace, spying on them. I don't want anyone doing this over my country (Australia) - but no matter which country it's done to it's illegal and wrong.

mpyne4• 12 years ago

Actually it was, in this case, probably at a standoff distance and hijacked remotely by Iran (perhaps by local GPS jamming) which, as a reminder, borders Afghanistan, Pakistan and the Persian Gulf.

There's no good reason to send a drone into Iranian airspace in the first place when you have things like NRO's Keyhole satellites to get imagery for you; even if there was a bigger upside, Iran actually has a good set of military radars so a political situation could easily be expected (not to mention something worse, like this).

jzwinck• 12 years ago

1926: "It saddens me that Britain has lost control of its colonies. Maybe not everyone is British here, but the resources in these colonies will no longer benefit the Crown. The whole world will miss the nineteenth century world order some day."

The world will move on, as it always has. Today's politics and militaries will be as obsolete in a few hundred years as this drone will be in a decade.

You know who misses the old world order? Whoever was in power back then. Even after their entire population has been renewed by death and birth, broken empires are nostalgic. Those they policed, however, mostly enjoy their museums.

growupkids4• 12 years ago

I'm sorry, I don't follow. You're comparing 19th century imperial Britain with 21st century America? A country headed by an African American, progressive pro-international community President?

beloch4• 12 years ago

The U.S. has dominated the UN to the point where the UN is no longer credible. The U.S. staunchly promoted the authority of the Hague over everyone else while simultaneously denying its jurisdiction over U.S. corporations and citizens. The U.S. sat idly by while it's own corporations triggered famines and genocide, all to make a buck. The U.S. actively deposed unfriendly democracies and propped up friendly despots. The U.S. even failed to meet it's obligations in trade treaties, making any country who has signed a free trade treaty with the U.S. look foolish for allowing themselves to be made less "equal" than the U.S. is.

If China supplants the U.S. as the world's preeminent superpower only a small percentage of the world's populations will really notice. Ask yourselves this: If the U.S. was such a great brother to the world, why is that world so eager to deal with "the dreaded communist enemy"? China and Russia are both countries with dubious records in many respects, but the U.S. has behaved badly enough that the devil the world knows is no more appealing than the devils they do not know. Russia and China are probably torturing their prisoners, just as the U.S. is, but are they eavesdropping on every single conversation of entire nations? Are they trying to reforge the internet so that their corporations can make a few more bucks? Are they pressuring other nations to enact draconian anti-piracy laws that stifle innovation?

I'm not anti-American. The U.S. has explored more of space than any other nation. The U.S. is the world's longest surviving democracy, even if that democracy has been perverted into a plutocracy. Despite how the country is run and the dubious quality of its own students, the U.S.'s post-secondary academic institutions are still second to none, largely because they attract the world's best and brightest. However, the notion that U.S. control of the world is a fundamentally good thing is ridiculous, and it's past time even americans dropped it. Quite frankly, americans have squandered the gifts of their forefathers and desperately need to earn their place in the world again. The U.S. simply has not been a beacon to the world for a good long time.

adventured3• 12 years ago

Which US corporations triggered genocide and famines, and in which countries?

jonnathanson• 12 years ago

"but are they eavesdropping on every single conversation of entire nations?"

China is, almost certainly. They have legions of hackers, spies, and sniffers in a constant state of attack on almost every communications system in the industrialized world.

The only difference between our program and theirs is that theirs isn't (yet) as effective. But it'll get there. In the meantime, their authoritarian system controls for leaks more effectively than our government does. There are fewer would-be Edward Snowdens in China, and any that do exist are locked up in camps somewhere.

I'm not here to justify any of the charges you're (quite correctly) leveling against the US. But let's not be naive. Any of the things you mentioned we're doing -- surveillance, corporatism, internet protectionism, etc. -- China is doing, and Russia would do if it had the capability.

Nobody's hands are clean here. I think that's your main point, and to a large extent, I agree. But we shouldn't weaken that point by attempting to argue degrees of it. Especially when those degrees are largely a matter of technical capability, not ethical inclination. Any dirty deeds we're doing that Russia and China aren't, Russia and China can't yet do. They would if they could.

snowwrestler• 12 years ago

Ask yourselves this: If the U.S. was such a great brother to the world, why is that world so eager to deal with "the dreaded communist enemy"?

The world is not eager to deal with Russia or China on any sort of strategic level. Repressive regimes like Iran, Assad's Syria, and North Korea are the only nations who have strong strategic alliances with China and Russia. Everyone else is happy to trade when them when they get a good deal, but that's it.

This is also why I doubt that the U.S. place in the world is endangered any time soon.

curiousDog• 12 years ago

I really, really hope such a day doesn't come. @GsElevator put it well the other day, "If it weren't for America we'd all be eating Bratwurst for dinner"

jacquesm10• 12 years ago

Borscht maybe, bratwurst very unlikely.

Intermernet• 12 years ago

I think you'll find, that although the US did have an influence in the later days of WW2 in Europe, most of the really bad stuff was over by the time they came in.

Not to say that that they didn't assist immensely, but the victory over Hitler wasn't decided by US troops.

The war in the Pacific was a completely different (and somewhat sad) story.

Htsthbjig2• 12 years ago

Empires come and go.

The US empire, like any other empire before them will be replaced by something else.

Of course you are American, by the mere fact of being born there your have privileges over people born in the rest of the world.

For example, any time you have problems you print money,money that thanks to petrodollars and US military the rest of the world have to buy by force. You export inflation to the rest of the world.

So instead of you suffering for your own abuses, you make suffer the rest of the world. Every new QE(Quantitative Easing) makes people from Egypt go from 30% of the population not being able to buy the basics to 70% and so on.

The rest of the world is not happy, and of course they plan to replace the petrodollar as soon as they can, to replace the "Exorbitant Privilege".

Of course as an American you believe this is fantastic, but put yourself into someone else in the world skin just for 5 minutes or so. People that work much harder than Americans but live way worse, people that speak at least two languages(most Americans barely speak one), engineers, physics PhDs, whatever, and you will start seeing another picture.

bzbarsky2• 12 years ago

Note that the dollar as reserve currency means the the rest of the world is exporting unemployment to the US via currency operations. http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2011/09/07/an_exorbita... has a good analysis of the situation there. The US would be much better off economically if USD were not the world's reserve currency. In particular, we wouldn't need the QE business at all if we weren't having China's and Germany's unemployment forced on us.

Of course it's simpler to latch on to the phrase "Exorbitant Privilege" and hate the US than it is to try to analyze all the pieces of what's going on.

supergirl• 12 years ago

You should add sarcasm tags otherwise we'll think your serious.

knowaveragejoe• 12 years ago

There's a lot of claims in this article, but from what I can tell they're taking the Iranian media's reports entirely on good faith. Given Iran's propensity in the past to stretch the truth(putting it lightly) with regards to their military capabilities, I'd take this article with a huge grain of salt.

This was linked in the Further Reading section, which seems to debunk many of those claims(similar arguments have been made in the comments here):

https://medium.com/war-is-boring/ed9dd24dffa8

That a drone landed in Iranian hands is still an intelligence failure—the CIA is widely believed to operate the Sentinel. But one rule of drones is to not fly anything you’re not willing to lose. This is because drones are finicky and crash at higher rates compared to manned aircraft.
Aviation Week also reported in 2011 that the RQ-170’s sensor package was already obsolete. And it’s unclear if Iran managed to copy the drone’s sensors. Even if the Iranian drone can fly, it doesn’t mean it can spy.

Shivetya• 12 years ago

obsolete for us isn't obsolete for everyone.

plus we are the great satan so anytime they triumph over us its a victory for their leadership, let alone the proof they need to rightly claim we are doing what they claim we do

Pxtl• 12 years ago

I'm more disturbed that they managed to remotely "trick" a US drone into taking new orders.

Imagine if that was a Reaper.

geoffsanders• 12 years ago

I'm prior Air Force.

Few pieces of military technology are so individually valuable to overall tactical and strategic capabilities that knowledge or possession of such technology would tip the scales one way or the other. An exception would be the nuclear bomb.

We may have embarrassingly given the Iranians a freebie, but their ability to dissect and understand it is far different from their ability to reproduce or manufacture it for any tangible military advantage.

Keep in mind, the global dominance of the U.S. Air Force isn't rooted in any one aircraft or technology, rather it comes from the massive network of supporting technologies (e.g. global radar networks, manufacturing technologies, communication and satellite tech, etc.) and personnel (e.g. intelligence agencies, engineers and scientists, pilots, etc.) that support such advanced aircraft.

adventured3• 12 years ago

People seem to miss the part where Iran won't be able to build a thousand of these, supply them, fly them, train for them, maintain them, upgrade them, equip them with the appropriate technology, and build the next generation of them.

It'd be like saying: oh look I stole an Intel processor, and was able to figure out how it works. Now all I need is to build a fab and a global supply chain so I can churn out thirty million of them. Or hey, I know how PageRank works, Google better watch out.

omilu• 12 years ago

yes good point, one stealth drone design does not an air force make.

hangonhn• 12 years ago

I'm part way through James Fallows' "China Airborne" and he talks about what it would mean for China to have an airline industry like the US. It means it would have the technical know-how in designing engines, manufacturing high-precision parts for engines, advanced metallurgy for body, wings, etc., advanced electronics, and software to tie it all together. In addition, it must have the organizational ability to direct all the flights around the country and do advanced scheduling (computationally difficult) to minimize wait time, etc.

China is part way there but not completely. It will be a while. Even their fighters today use Russian engines.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chengdu_J-10

If someone is going to copy the RQ-170 and use it operationally the same way the US does, it won't be China and much less Iran anytime soon.

growupkids4• 12 years ago

A bit of a click bait headline. The end of the article summarizes by stating "even if the Iranian Sentinels fly on the schedule, they probably won’t be truly stealthy." The intent of the RQ-170 is the be stealthy, a copy that's not stealthy isn't a copy. It's propaganda.

qq66• 12 years ago

The bottom line is that you can't fly a bunch of planes around an airspace without losing a few, and the people who build and fly these planes know this.

Second, the technology behind bare-bones drone surveillance isn't that special. For $250 you can get an "FPV" remote control plane (first-person view) that lets you fly around and see a real-time video-feed from the plane. Of course the RQ-170 is a million times more powerful than a Walmart toy, but the fact of the matter is that any government that wants to can put surveillance drones in the sky.

eyeareque• 12 years ago

I think their copying is more propaganda for them than anything else. Just look at how they're displaying these models for show in a plastic tent. Really?

Tehran tracked, captured, studied, copied RQ-170

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