The most interesting intelligence-related incident in recent times has been the loss of an American RQ-170 Sentinel ''stealth'' Unmanned Aircraft System to Iran earlier this month. Another term for the aircraft is ''low-observable Unmanned Aerial Vehicle'' or UAV. The ''RQ'' denominator indicates that it is not an armed aircraft, unlike the Predator or Reaper UAVs with their ''MQ'' prefix and air-to-surface-missile fits.
The RQ-170 was developed by Lockheed Martin and is ''owned'' by the US Air Force's Air Combat Command 432nd Air Expeditionary Wing. The emblem of the Wing's 30th Reconnaissance Squadron, which operates the Sentinel for the CIA and other agencies, is a black crow standing astride a globe. (In the US system, crows and blackbirds are typically symbols of electronic warfare or secret mission operators.)
The Sentinel was introduced into service in 2007 and has been used so far to conduct reconnaissance over Iran, Pakistan (including monitoring of Osama bin Laden's compound at Abbottabad), and North Korea. This particular UAS was being operated out of Shindand air base in western Afghanistan. The Sentinel's presence in Afghanistan first became public knowledge when it was photographed at Kandahar air base in 2007, and dubbed ''the beast of Kandahar''. Its existence was officially acknowledged in 2009.
Video footage shown by Iran suggests that the Sentinel was recovered largely intact. The shrouding used for the public display of the UAS probably indicates some hull and landing gear damage. Iran claims that it electronically controlled the drone to a safe landing 250km inside its border with Afghanistan. The Commander of Iran's Revolutionary Guards Corps said: ''After entering the country's eastern space the plane was caught in an electronic ambush by the armed forces and it was brought down on the land with minimum damage.'' The lack of more substantial crash damage could indicate that the Sentinel malfunctioned and went into a flat spin, ending in a heavy landing.
The Sentinel has a failsafe backup system that sends it back to its operating base if controller contact is lost. This would not, of course, be effective if it had malfunctioned. When the Sentinel failed to return, operators initially hoped it had crashed and been destroyed.
It is possible that Iran could have commandeered the Sentinel, rather than it suffered a malfunction and landed on its own as claimed by the US. Another possibility is that Iran jammed the control link until it ran out of fuel.
Iran's acquisition of the UAS relatively intact is certainly an embarrassment for the US intelligence community, but is probably not as critical as suggested in most Western media reporting.
Images of the Sentinel suggest it was probably designed to avoid use of highly sensitive technologies eg, the exhaust is not shielded by the wing, it has rounded (rather than blunt) leading edges and over-wing sensor pods, while other stealthy options were not optimised at the expense of endurance.
Indeed, there appears to be no panic in the US military or aerospace industry about a loss of stealth or advanced intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance technology. A US official was quoted as saying: ''The Iranians don't have the ability to reverse-engineer it, and there was no fancy technology on board ... There could be a bit of a problem if the Russians or Chinese get the [airframe].''
As a single-engine UAS, loss over a target's territory would be inevitable over time. Ever since the loss of Gary Powers' U-2 spy plane over the Soviet Union in 1960, and the emergency landing of a damaged US Navy EP-3E on China's Hainan Island in 2001, the US has emphasised the importance of not allowing sensitive technologies to fall into adversaries' hands. (The Lockheed EP-3 is the signals intelligence version of the P-3 Orion.) Both incidents were intelligence and propaganda windfalls for the Soviet Union and China, as they were able to exploit or reverse-engineer captured technologies.
The light colour of the Sentinel UAS suggests that it was probably intended to operate at altitudes of around 15000m. At higher altitudes - above 18000m, dark tones provide the best concealment. The lower operating altitude would also allow use of an off-the-shelf engine and less sophisticated sensor systems, such as a Full-Motion Video payload. FMV is the key to activity-based intelligence analysis; both the CIA and National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency see activity-based intelligence as the key to better monitoring of Iran, and they are expanding that capability.
With its moderate degree of stealth and other characteristics, it is likely that the Sentinel, with its 26m wingspan, is a tactical, operations-oriented platform, and not one optimised for strategic intelligence gathering against, for example, Iran's nuclear facilities. Its primary purpose is probably to fly in the border regions of target countries to gather information about missile tests and telemetry, as well as collect signals and multispectral intelligence. In the case of Iran, Sentinel is also probably using FMV to track Iranian supplies of weapons and aid to insurgents in Afghanistan.
Iran, Russia and China are said to be keen to exploit the captured technology, which will include up-to-date, if not advanced, ISR systems, a current generation UAS engine - probably the General Electric TF34 turbofan, and to analyse ''the stealthy coating'' and structure of the aircraft. Iran says it plans to clone and mass produce the Sentinel for use against its enemies.
The main concern the US will have as a result of the Sentinel's loss is whether Iran has the technological capability to interdict these aircraft and monitor data links. Its loss could possibly have been facilitated by Russian or Chinese electronic warfare technicians. If Iran has, or has access to, advanced electronic warfare capabilities (which seems unlikely), there could be serious implications for more stealthy US platforms operating over Iran.
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