Despite reports that Iran hijacked a United States stealth military drone early this month and forced it to land in hostile territory, not everyone is buying the hype.
“Some kind of mechanical malfunction” is probably what caused the unmanned drone, a Lockheed Martin RQ-170 Sentinel (nicknamed the “Beast of Kandahar” by Afghans who’d seen it), to go down 140 miles inside Iran on Dec. 4, according to John Pike, director of the Alexandria, Va.-based think tank GlobalSecurity.org.
George Smith, a senior fellow at GlobalSecurity, echoed his colleague’s assertion.
“Stuff goes wrong,” Smith told SecurityNewsDaily. “It’s certainly an embarrassment to the United States, as advertised. The bragging on the part of the Iranian government is unsurprising.”
Pike agreed, telling SecurityNewsDaily, “The Iranians are great braggarts.”
Pike believes Iran lacks the technological capability to exploit a vulnerability in the drone’s GPS system. That’s how Iran claimed to have taken control of the drone, according to an Iranian engineer speaking on condition of anonymity to the Christian Science Monitor.
