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A U.S. unmanned aerial vehicle crashed near Qorveh in the Iranian northwestern province of Kordestan in late May, Iranian media sources said yesterday.
The report is unconfirmed. If true, the downing raises a number of issues and problems for Washington, which is loath to see its prized technology end up in foreign hands, according to Stratfor, the global intelligence company.
The unmanned aerial vehicle, or UAV, may have been shot down while conducting surveillance on Iranian facilities being used to develop weapons of mass destruction.
There are numerous missile and WMD facilities in northwestern Iran, including the Mo'allem Kalaych facility, which reportedly houses gas centrifuges used for enriching uranium and is suspected of producing materials for nuclear weapons, and Qazvin, potentially one of Iran's major chemical weapons facilities.
However, such facilities normally are observed by satellites. If the United States is supplementing its satellite surveillance on these facilities by committing unmanned vehicles to conduct real-time, low-level reconnaissance, this may be a sign that the administration is preparing to evoke its emerging "pre-emption" and "defensive intervention" strategic doctrine and may be preparing to strike Iranian WMD facilities.
On the other hand, the story may revolve around Iraq. A UAV patrolling Iraqi skies may have gone off course due to Iraqi jamming and crashed in Iran. On May 27, Iraq state radio said Iraqi air defenses took control of a U.S. drone and forced it to land "by our own means." American military spokesmen have said the Iraqi report was false.
If true then the much-glorified U.S. UAV program has suffered a major setback. The ability to electronically jam unmanned vehicles would be a serious blow to the U.S. military's ability to conduct surveillance and strike missions in hostile territory and would cast doubt on the effectiveness of the new generation of weapons technology.
Strangely, Tehran has been playing it cool. The Iranian government has not chastised Washington for infringing on its sovereignty nor stirred the masses with anti-American rhetoric as it has tended to do, but rather the official Islamic Republic News Agency played down the event, saying that the "wreckage was too strewn to identify ownership."
This may be a move to avoid an international incident and the domestic backlash from the regime's more hard-line elements and could give the Iranians an opportunity to barter over returning the valuable pieces of wreckage to gain concession from the United States.
Alternately, Tehran may be keeping mum because it wants to sell the remains of the state-of-the-art technology to international bidders such as China who would love to advance their own unmanned flight programs.
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