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Iran Shoots Down Strategic U.S. Drone – Is Ready For War – Puts “Maximum Pressure” On Trump – Updated
Updated below
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Early this morning Iranian air defense shot down a U.S. high altitude reconnaissance drone:
DUBAI (Reuters) – Iran’s elite Revolutionary Guards have shot down a U.S. “spy” drone in the southern province of Hormozgan, which is on the Gulf, the Guards’ news website Sepah News said on Thursday.
State news agency IRNA carried the same report, identifying the drone as an RQ-4 Global Hawk.
“It was shot down when it entered Iran’s airspace near the Kouhmobarak district in the south,” the Guards’ website added.
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A later statement by the IRGC detailed the incident:
The American UAV took off from an US base in the south of the Persian Gulf at 00:14 am today morning and contrary to aviation laws, it shut off all of its introduction equipment and proceeded from the Strait of Hormuz to Chabahar with complete secrecy.
The unmanned aircraft while returning to the west of the region towards the Strait of Hormuz, violated the territorial integrity of the Islamic Republic of Iran, and start collecting information and spying.
At 4:55 am, when the aggressive UAV entered our country’s territory, it was targeted by the IRGC air force and was shot down.
The U.S. says that the drone was a MQ-4C Triton, the navy variant of the Global Hawk type that is specialized on Broad Area Maritime Surveillance (BAMS). It claims that the drone was in international airspace when Iran's Revolutionary Guard shot it down.
(Interestingly no MQ-4C is supposed to be in the Middle East. The deployment must have been secret. Update: This specific drone seems to have arrived in Qatar only five days ago. Additional details are discussed here. /update)
Global Hawk type drone – bigger
The incident is another piece of evidence that Trump's "maximum pressure" campaign against Iran now works against him.
Trump allegedly told his staff to stop talking up war on Iran:
Two senior officials and three other individuals with direct knowledge of the administration’s strategy in the region tell The Daily Beast that the president has asked officials to tone down their heated rhetoric on Iran …
Trump does not want to open a military conflict with Iran. But he is already waging a brutal economic war against Iran and the country is pushing back. Trump wants negotiations with Iran without first lifting his sanctions against it. Iran rejects that.
It no longer matters what Trump wants. Iran has achieved escalation dominance. It can cause a myriad of incidents that force Trump to react. He can either launch a hot war and thereby risk his reelection bid, or he can cut back on the sanctions that hurt the Iranian people. If he does not do either, more pinpricks will follow and will over time become more costly.
Abas Aslani @AbasAslani – 7:29 UTC · 20 Jun 2019
#Iran's #IRGC commander Salami: Shooting down the US drone had a clear & strong message i.e. we'll react strongly against any assault to the country. Borders are our red line. We are not after a war with any country, but we are ready for war. Message of today's incident was clear.
The loss of the Global Hawk drone is significant. These huge birds, with a wingspan larger than a Boeing 737, are considered strategic assets. They were built as replacements for the infamous U-2 spy planes. They carry highly classified sensors and cost more than $120 million a piece.
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This loss can certainly be attributed to Iran. But to blame Iran for it the U.S. will have to prove that its drone did not enter Iranian air space. Only two days ago the Federal Aviation Authority issued a warning for aircraft flying in the area.
U.S. drones have violated Iran's sovereign airspace many times. In 2011 Iran acquired a stealthy RQ-170 drone which had flown in from Afghanistan by manipulating its command signals. In 2012 Iran took down another U.S. drone, a Boeing Scan Eagle, that had flown in from the Persian Gulf. Many other U.S. drones were shot down over Iranian territory:
In January [2011], Iran said it had shot down two conventional (nonstealth) drones, and in July, Iran showed Russian experts several US drones – including one that had been watching over the underground uranium enrichment facility at Fordo, near the holy city of Qom.
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Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta told Fox News on Dec. 13 that the US will "absolutely" continue the drone campaign over Iran, looking for evidence of any nuclear weapons work. But the stakes are higher for such surveillance, now that Iran can apparently disrupt the work of US drones.
The Persian cats are by now well trained in anti-drone measures.
Persian cats train to take down RQ-170 drones
Photo via Thomas Erdbrink – bigger
How will Trump react to this incident? President John Bolton will demand military action against Iran as revenge for the shoot down. He will surely also press for sending more troops to the Middle East.
Trump may again play down the incident, like he recently did with the tanker attack which he called "very minor". But the war hawks in the media and Congress, and Iran, will put more pressure on him. More incidents would surely follow.
Trump has a way out. He could issue sanction waivers to allow China, Japan, South Korea, India and others to again import Iranian oil. It would take the "maximum" out of his now failed "maximum pressure" campaign and could be a way to move towards negotiations.
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Update 2:00 PM
The Pentagon just held a very short press conference. Via telephone Lt General Joseph T. Guastella from the U.S. Central Command made a very short statement. No questions were allowed.
He said that the drone was in international airspace at high altitude and "34 kilometer from the nearest point of the Iranian coast" when it was shot down.
That is trickery, or if you will trigonometry.
High altitude means that the drone flew at a height of around 60,000+ feet or 20 kilometer. It it would have flown directly over the Iranian coastline it would have been "20 kilometer from the nearest point of the Iranian coast".
The 34 kilometers is the length of the hypotenuse AC of the right-angled triangle. The hight is the opposite AB. What we have to find is the length of the adjacent BC.
? = square root of ( 34 x 34 – 20 x 20) = 27.5 kilometer
National maritime zones and national air zone are measured in nautical miles: 27km / 1.852 = 14.85 nautical miles.
The length of the adjacent BC, i.e. the legal distance of the drone to the Iranian coast, was 14.85 miles. That is at least according to the CentCom talking head.
Iran's national maritime zone, which equals the national airspace limit, is 12 nautical miles from its coast. The U.S. navy claims that its drone was a tiny bit further away.
This map was shown during the Pentagon briefing.
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Now compare it with this map that shows the maritime borders of Iran, Oman and the UAE in the Straits of Hormuz.
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There is no international airspace in the tightest, northern part of the Straits of Hormuz. There is only the national airspace of Iran and Oman. If what the CentCom map shows is the correct location of the drone, which had come from the south, it was in the mid of a blind alley of international airspace flying towards its end.
The drone was the RQ-4N BAMS-D. The D stands for "development". It was the U.S. navy owned prototype of the new MQ-4C Triton type of the Global Hawk that is currently built. The RQ-4N was unique. It used an old Global Hawk frame packed with new electronic equipment. It was used as the test bed for the gigantic data hoover that the Triton will be. But it was also a piece of equipment that was hard to maintain and that had served its purpose. The first of the new drones will be delivered this summer. The RQ-4N was arguably expendable.
The Iranian IRGC says that the drone had switched off its transponder shortly after take off. A look at the usual live air traffic sites confirms that the drone was not tracked by the civil aviation systems which monitor transponder signals.
The U.S. airforce, which each day flies reconnaissance missions near potentially hostile countries, always keeps its transponders on. The transponder signal demonstrates that it has no hostile intent. It prevents accidental air defense engagements. It also allows it to prove that it stays outside of foreign national airspace.
The U.S. has threatened Iran with war and regime change for some 40 years. There is currently a crisis caused by Trumps violation of the nuclear deal with Iran. If the CentCom claim is correct the Navy drone flew extremely near to Iran's border, seconds away from entering it, in a way that Iran had reason to interpret as hostile. Iran released a video that supposedly shows the shoot down.
Iran says that the drone entered Iranian airspace. I find that to be likely correct. CentCom is not known for telling the truth and the list of proven hostile drone entries into Iranian air space is quite long.
Trump just held a press conference in the Oval Office. He seemed to play down (vid) the event. He emphasized that the drone was unmanned. He said he had "a big, big feeling" that "someone made a mistake", that "some Iranian general probably made a mistake". That means that he does not accuse the government of Iran of the shoot down, but some lowly grunt who "might have made a mistake."
That statement gives him room to avoid a large retaliation.
Someone made a mistake? So what.
@7 Uncle Tungsten
…there is a deep zionist state in fierce battle with a deep oligarch state and the twain will never meet…
It’s all in the Big-Jew family, and that’s Trump’s primary identity. The twain do indeed meet. Trump loves and serves both banksters and Zionists, but he loves Zionists a bit more. If we are to believe what Trump’s late elder brother Frederick Christ Trump Jr, who joined a Jewish fraternity at Lehigh. told his frat brothers, his father, in crypsis as a Christian under the name of Frederick Christ Trump Sr, was actually a Jew. Trump Sr was such a confirmed supporter of Jewish causes including support to religious institutions in Israel that it was widely assumed he was a Jew. In the presumed service of the Jewish community, Trump Sr was the local head of the Bayside KKK. (The clipping from the NYT about Trump Sr’s arrest as the local KKK head briefly appeared during the campaign and then was immediately dropped by a supposedly hostile media.) This was a typically Jewish-crypsis undertaking, one of several such cases nationwide, and understandable because the KKK was set up to counter Jewish carpetbaggers. Trump’s mother was at least nominally a Scot Presbyterian, but it was plain as day during Trump’s campaign that he knows nothing about Christianity. My guess would be that this ‘shiksa’ converted — like Jacob Rothschild’s mother, but secretly, to keep her husband’s secret. Two and maybe all three of Trump’s wives are Jews, and four and maybe all five of his children are halachically Jewish, including Ivanka. As a born Jew her ‘conversion’ to Judaism to marry Kushner was a farce, to fool heritage American Christians.
Trump’s main inheritance from his father is his drive to be the biggest macher of Jewish history, under crypsis. The Israelis are already comparing him to Queen Esther, in whose honor Purim is the yearly celebration of goy genocide. There is already a town in stolen Golan to be named for him.
From day one, Trump has been at the complete service of the Big Jews, with barely a gesture to heritage American Christians.
His extreme favoritism towards Zionists has been his undoing. Banksters, through the mouthpiece of Rothschild’s Economist, fought at length against his planned disavowal of the Iran nuclear deal. They knew what the risks are. Trump seriously overestimated his own intelligence and his power. Now he realizes he’s in a total mess. There is a danger of setting off the implosion of financial derivatives. That would destroy the world economy. And as Bernhard says, Iran holds the trump cards.
Trump made a provocative statement the other day, to ABC’s Stephanopoulos, saying (once again, like his dogwhistle in South Carolina on 17th February 2016) that he knows who brought down the World Trade Center, and it wasn’t the Iraqis.
Of course he knows. His dear friends Giuliani and Silverstein must have clued him in. On the evening of 9/11 Trump said, on TV, that given the way the light aluminum shell of an airplane would normally interact at high speed with a mass of structural steel, there had to have been bombs involved. That immediately put paid to the hijacker tale. Wise guy Trump needed to be clued in by his friends. And he must have been because by day two he was singing the official story, of steel skyscrapers brought down by melting from burning kerosene, and he’s stuck to it ever since.
Trump’s purpose in bringing up 9/11 is not, of course, to hang his friends Giuliani and Silverstein. Since it must be to relieve the pressure of Iran, Trump seems to have in mind betrayal of the Saudis (cf Uncle Tungsten’s “Sunni butchers”)…or, if he’s truly desperate, the Israelis — who, after all, are the main 9/11 culprits, as Bollyn has amply shown.
Trump is the sort of guy who, if he can’t be the biggest macher of Jewish history, will settle for being a winner some other way. Any other way? Maybe that’s the art of the deal. Anyway, someone is worried. The ABC video has disappeared from the internet.
Posted by: sarz | Jun 21 2019 13:28 utc | 256
Thank you so much Nuff Sed for confirming my estimation of the very advanced state of the Iranian missile programs. It would be interesting to know just how much about the large Iranian progress in this area US military intelleginece is actually aware of. Certainly there has been a tendency in the past for all American sources to downplay the sophistication of the Iranian missile program, indeed even to assert, totally irresponsibly, that it presents no real threat to a potential American attack on the country. Such an assessment would have been foolish even fifteen years ago, but to assume such a thing today is the very height of folly.
Surely there must be those within US military intelligence who DO understand the real nature and capacity of the Iranian missile systems and who are arguing for restraint. [Indeed, one indication of this would be the reluctance of the US Navy to send any of its valuable aircraft carriers into the Persian Gulf itself, and to instead station them far off the Iranian coast in the distant reaches of the Gulf of Oman.] But whether the REAL dangers posed by the latest Iranian missile defenses is also fully understood by those hubris-saturated neocon crazies around Trump, or by him himself, is far from obvious. Thus it may well be that they will, like the stunted cognitive children they are, “need to learn it the hard way”; the political, if not also military, consequences of which will be disastrous for their dubious cause.
You also mention that: “2. We do indeed have hypersonic ground to sea missiles. They are called the Noor, and go at a speed of several Machs and feature end-phase maneuvers,” and “3. We also have multiple warhead ballistic missiles which also cannot be defended against by sitting duck aircraft carriers.” If these claims are true, and I have no reason to doubt that they are since it is at least obvious that Iranian engineers have been working on such weapons for several years now, and certainly the country has had every incentive to expedite their development of such missiles by the last decade and a half of continuous sabre-rattling by the US, then one can only conclude that Iran already has TWO BETTER DETERENTS to US aggression than any nuclear weapon would afford them. It would be almost impossible for the Iranians to utilize a nuclear strike on an American naval fleet, both because the US might retailiate in kind, and because the political costs of such a nuclear first strike would haunt Iran for decades to come.
On the other hand, should Iran merely be forced to respond to a barrage of cruise missiles or any other types of missiles from the American fleet, a rapid response via the state of the art Iranian missiles would no doubt be able, should such be sought, to send the entire US fleet to the bottom of the sea, and that without even the need for much in the way of explosive force since any object flying at hypersonic speed has so much momentum as to hit its target with roughly five times the force of a rifle bullet. And, of course, the US Navy currently has NO defense against incoming missiles coming in at over Mach three, so they would indeed be just “sitting ducks” to either the new conventional hypersonic or the multiple warhead weapons of the Iranians.
Thus, at least from a purely military perspective, any successful attack on Iran by the US Navy is simply impossible. Unfortunately, such a bitter fact doesn’t seem to be informing US strategy up until now as each day seems to see new aggressive and bellicose accusations and a ratcheting up of tensions. Indeed, we may well be reaching the point where the Iranians, for all of their diplomatic discretion and forebearance up until now, switch to a new policy which, in American slang, we might denominate the “OK, idiots, bring it on!” policy. For the good of Iran, the US and the world, let us all hope that it doesn’t come to that, even if it is already on the verge of doing so!
Posted by: Billosky | Jun 21 2019 14:16 utc | 258
@Noirette 264
Thanks for the interesting views, Noirette. You are French, I’m assuming? Here are some responses:
“So explain me this (a nice Frenchism) why did the US invade and decimate Iraq, thereby throwing the role of dominant power in the ‘region’ to Iran? Notably at present – in Syria?”
Those who engineered the invasion of Iraq expected that it would soon be stabilized under US control and could then be used as a platform for follow-on regime-change operations against Syria and especially Iran. This was certainly the Likud leadership’s expectation. In the event, however, the US was never successful in stabilizing Iraq or of convincing the new Shia majority (and the PUK Kurdish faction) to come anywhere near to supporting action against Iran. So the answer to your question is that the “plan” failed in execution. The Saudis, of course, were totally opposed to the invasion, having a much better appreciation of the risks involved. The decision of the US to invade is a good measure of the relative influence of Israel and Saudi Arabia. Israel favored it (and its partisans in the US, highly overlapped with the neoconservatives, pushed it.) Saudi was opposed. Who won out?
“Why is the US allied with KSA, agreed its influence is exagerated, as you point out, yes – surely the most Arab of Arab territories along one vague definition, thus an Isr. enemy (though that is today not the case as we know) leaving aside past history, Ibn Saud – Roosevelt?”
While we don’t consume much Saudi oil ourselves, the petrodollar link between Saudi oil production and US financial hegemony is central to US global power. That has been the basis for the US-Saudi alliance since the 1970s.
“How come this a-hem plucky little country with an ethnic definition has not really managed much – yes of course merciless killing of Palestinians and taking their lands, etc. – but not legitimacy, acceptance, approval, on the world stage, happiness (whatever that is for its citizens), growth (of some kind, image, economic, etc.) and expansion, which might even be territorial without the gun.”
Actually, I think Israelis are pretty happy and have an increasingly bloated and narcissistic self-image. Israel has indeed expanded gradually but continually since 1917–and since 1946 with US backing. They are on the verge of annexing much of the West Bank. But since Israel is predicated on Jewish supremacism and their implicit superiority over Arabs and, by implication, everyone else, there is no way to make them popular or liked by the rest of the world. That’s why the US has to resort continually to military force to impose it on the region and the world. But I’m not sure I entirely understand your question…
“How come the most powerful country in the world ever, the USA (say so for the mo) has not been able to achieve anything stable for its no. 1. love, ally, a minuscule postage stamp country, Israel? After more than 60 years? This makes no sense whatsoever.”
Well, in point of fact, all the Arab countries that have tried to prevent Jews from taking control of Palestine have been resoundingly defeated and are now mostly basket cases themselves. But the natural hostility of the region to Israel is such that there is no real way for the US to win permanent stability that normalizes the existence of Israel. Even in terms of Israel’s “allies” in the region, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, UAE and Jordan, there is no love at the popular level. It’s all anti-Iran strategizing by the fearful and inept Saudis and Emiratis and mere obedience to those on the dole–Egypt and Jordan.
So how would you answer your own questions, and what is your overall perception of the US-Israel relationship?
Posted by: Oscar Peterson | Jun 21 2019 16:36 utc | 262
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