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The CSM Drone Exclusive Does Not Make Sense
The Christian Science Monitor had an Exclusive story, Iran hijacked US drone, says Iranian engineer, which several people here have linked to.
The story by Scott Peterson does not make sense. It says that the Iranians jammed the Remote Piloted Vehicle's satellite control channel and then spoofed GPS signals to make the RPV believe it was near the airstrip it came from:
The “spoofing” technique that the Iranians used – which took into account precise landing altitudes, as well as latitudinal and longitudinal data – made the drone “land on its own where we wanted it to, without having to crack the remote-control signals and communications” from the US control center, says the engineer.
There is yet no known drone operational that is capable to do an autonomous landing. This for very good reason. A drone does not know if the runway it wants to land on is clear. It is not aware of other air traffic around and the algorithms to correct for weather effects (wind shears) are quite complicate. An autonomous landing drone would be a serious danger for the people around the airbase it is supposed to land on. It is therefore very unlikely that the RQ-170 downed in Iran had an auto-land feature.
Indeed:
It is a common misconception that U.S.-based operators are the only ones who "fly" America's armed drones. In fact, in and around America's war zones, UAVs begin and end their flights under the control of local "pilots." Take Afghanistan's massive Bagram Air Base. After performing preflight checks alongside a technician who focuses on the drone's sensors, a local airman sits in front of a Dell computer tower and multiple monitors, two keyboards, a joystick, a throttle, a rollerball, a mouse, and various switches, overseeing the plane's takeoff before handing it over to a stateside counterpart with a similar electronics set-up. After the mission is complete, the controls are transferred back to the local operators for the landing. Additionally, crews in Afghanistan perform general maintenance and repairs on the drones.
This why I have suggested that the Iranians must have gained control over the local control channel:
What the Iranians seem to have done is to take over the drone's line-of-sight control. This after electronically disrupting its satellite link. Disrupting the satellite link alone would not be enough as the drone would then have followed some preprogrammed action like simply flying back to where it came from. With the line-of-sight control active a satellite link disruption would not lead to a preprogrammed abort.
The control connections to the drone may well be encrypted. But encryption always takes time and, landing a plane, a slow reaction to input (latency) is not what one wants. It is therefore likely that the encryption, at least at the latency sensitive local control channel, is only minimal encrypted if at all. Therefore:
We can reasonably assume that the Iranians have some station near Kandahar Airport that is listening to all military radio traffic there. They had four years to analyze the radio signaling between the ground operator and such drones. Even if that control signal is encrypted pattern recognition during many flights over four years would have given them enough information to break the code.
The story someone fed to the CSM, be it by the CIA or an Iranian spy service, is wrong. Things can not have happened the way it describes them. One can only guess who's interest is served in publishing that make-believe story.
Aviation journalist David Cenciotti at The Aviatonist agrees with me that the story is false. But he thinks the drone crashed or had a parachute to land.
In my opinion the RQ-170 is unlikely to have a parachute (which would have to be quite big for this 10,000 pound vehicle) and any unplanned landing in the mountainous Iran would have created more damage than is visible in the available pictures.
My two weeks old hypothesis that the local control channel was hijacked by the Iranians and used to land the drone (with some superficial damage) still seems to be the most plausible explanation. By now I find this especially plausible because no other explanation I have read so far, all quoting experts and military sources, have failed to mention even the possibility of a local control channel hack. By now that seems to be a too obvious avoidance of that possibility in the analysis to not be on purpose.
b @ 10
Is an Ayatollah or a Marja in the sense of a Shia society, more of a “cleric” (in the “western” catholic sense), or more of a jurist i.e a Professor of legal science? Or maybe something else?
Thanks for the welcoming words.
To answer your question, its “maybe something else”. The answer to your question is actually quite complex, as the understanding of the role of an Ayatollah entails understanding a different culture and civilization’s self-understanding of religion, which definition is in many elemental ways alien to the Western self-understanding of religion and the role that the priestly class plays in it. In other words, as your last question wisely foresaw, it is *not* the case where we have a series of pigeonholes, two of which are labeled “Jurist” and “Professor of Law”, and we simply have to decide which pigeonhole to place our Ayatollah in, or, say, place 40% of him in one hole, and 60% of him in another. That is not the case: in so far as the analogy obtains, the configuration of the woodwork is different.
So a proper answer would have to go into a comparative topology of characteristics and functions, which would take forever, and which I would probably not do a good job at. So my response will be necessarily selective rather than comprehensive.
One of the problems that our Prophet (with whom be peace) did away with or tried to do away with was the very existence of a priestly class as such. The successfulness of this aspect of his project is again another huge subject, which we will have to ignore. The important thing to understand for the purposes of this discussion is that the relationship between man and God in Islam is unmediated – neither by an individual cleric nor by a clerical class, nor yet by the organizational structure of that class of clerics, the Church. The relationship is direct and unmediated. In the Christian tradition (be it Catholic, Coptic, Nestorian, Greek, Russian or Armenian Orthodox, etc.) a duly ordained priest of a Church is required for an individual to establish a connection with God. There is a difference that is set in motion and jealously guarded by the Church and its priest between the vernacular language of the congregation and the liturgical tongue of the priesthood. That is why the Bible was always recited in Latin in Europe – so that only the initiate could understand it, and the layman would be dependent on the priest’s cryptanalysis. It took a clever fellow by the name of Martin Luther to translate the Bible into the vernacular and to say that the Vatican was *not* needed for man to have a relationship with God. Better late than never, I guess.
So that is one important distinction, which is an element in the answer to the question you raised. Another one is the whole issue of the role of religion in questions of state. I do not want to use the hackneyed “separation of Church and State” refrain, as there is no such thing as a “Church” in Islam to separate from the State (or a Mosque or Masjid endowed with an hierarchy that enjoys exclusive authority). This question is itself complicated by the differences in approach to the issue by various sub-elements of the nascent community of Moslems and their respective spirituo-temporal textures and sensibilities – modalities which later crystallized into Sunnite, Shi’ite and Kharijite, among others, each of which again splintered. The Sunnite encounter with this issue was basically to accept the authority of whomever happened to seize the reins of power and managed to hold on to them, whereas the shi’ite encounter was very different and involved belief in a cycle of 12 divinely appointed Guides or Imams, the Cycle of Imamate which followed the Cycle of Prophecy. This distinction bears on the question you asked as the Ayatollahs are in a sense successors to the Imams (the last of which is in an occulted state in an isthmus or in the interstices between this world and the next), the Greater Occultation (circa 941 CE) having ushered in a *third* cycle, the Cycle of Wilaaya(t) or Guardianship. Imam Khomeini’s actualization or institutionalization of the Wilaaya(t) or Guardianship of the Jurisconsult (faqih, or Ayatollahs, if you will) adds yet another kink into this cauldron, as it formalizes and institutionalizes this Cycle as *necessary* (in the absence of the Imam of the Age), and as such, introduces a certain mediation in that relationship.
I’m sorry to have given you a completely inadequate answer. If all I have managed to do is to give you a glimpse into a whole other world, than I will have to settle for that. It is a beautiful world, and one that requires and indeed demands that many volumes be written on it. And good work has been done and continues to be done, but alas I am not able to point you to a single source, an “Ayatollah for Dummies” as it were (with due respect!).
If you are interested, though, there are good books of general information, including The Vision of Islam by Murata and Chittick; Shi’a Islam by Momen; (The Tabatabai book massoud referred to is authoritative and is greatly aided by the excellent translation and annotation of Seyyed Hossain Nasr, but is ultimately sterile as it is written by a Shi’a scholar who was not in my opinion able to address a Western audience in anything remotely resembling a satisfactory way); No God but God by Aslan; The Formative Period of Islamic Thought by Watt; Conflicts in Islamic Jurisprudence by Coulson; and the mighty and magisterial The Succession to Muhammad by Madelung.
Wa’llahu ‘alam (And God knows [best]).
Posted by: Unknown Unknowns | Dec 19 2011 5:08 utc | 30
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