WASHINGTON — Iran’s political and military elite boasted last month that
their forces shot down an American intelligence-gathering drone, a remotely piloted Navy vehicle called ScanEagle that they swiftly put on display for the Iranian news media.
Al-Alam TV, via Associated Press
An image from the Iranian station Al Alam last month
showed what was said to be an American drone the Iranians claimed to
have shot down. The craft carries off-the-shelf video equipment.
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Navy officials responded that no drones had been shot down by enemy
fire, although the Pentagon acknowledged that it had lost a small number
of ScanEagles, likely to engine malfunction, over Afghanistan and in
the Persian Gulf region. The drone that the Iranians showcased appeared
cobbled together after a crash — thus earning the nickname
“FrankenEagle” across the Navy.
Regardless, the loss was hardly an intelligence coup for Iran, since ScanEagle carries only off-the-shelf video equipment with less computing power than can be found in a smartphone.
“They could have gone to Radio Shack and captured the same ‘secret’ technology,” said Vice Adm. Mark I. Fox, the Navy’s deputy chief for operations, plans and strategy.
The minor diplomatic contretemps over the fallen drone did, however,
shine an unwanted light on the growing role of these relatively
low-cost, nearly expendable unmanned surveillance aircraft in military
operations over the Persian Gulf, as well as in North Africa and the
Horn of Africa, and in the Asia-Pacific region.
A ScanEagle flying off the deck of the destroyer Bainbridge is credited
with providing images critical to the ability of Navy SEAL snipers to
identify and kill three hijackers holding hostage the captain of the
Maersk Alabama off the coast of Africa in 2009. And a ScanEagle flying
from the destroyer Mahan provided images of Libya in the first 72 hours
of a North Africa mission by American and NATO forces in 2011 to protect
civilians and then support rebels who overthrew Col. Muammar
el-Qaddafi.
Most ScanEagles are owned and flown by contractors; some of these
private crews are even based aboard American warships. The drones are
considered an important addition in the military’s surveillance
architecture, which ranges from very costly spy satellites to
sophisticated drones like Predators and Reapers, which carry advanced
surveillance systems and can be armed with missiles, and down to the
low-tech ScanEagle.
ScanEagles fly from two Navy ships in the Persian Gulf area, the Ponce
and the Gunston Hall, both amphibious support and staging vessels; they
also fly from one ground operations center in the region established
when a ScanEagle unit serving in Iraq was withdrawn as the mission there
ended.
Since it can be launched on short notice, ScanEagle’s value is in
allowing local commanders the ability to gather close-in, live and
real-time images of an immediate target.
“Anybody who goes to sea is interested in having an understanding of the
environment in which they are operating,” Admiral Fox said. “These
low-end assets give you an ability to have a much better understanding
of what’s going on around you. Who’s in that dhow? What flag is it
flying? But we are still in an early stage of it.”
Navy officers say that adding another layer of surveillance aircraft to
the American fleet also has a deterrent effect on Iran.
“The fact that we are physically present with more and more
intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance assets — the Iranians know
we are out there watching,” said one officer familiar with ScanEagle
deployments. “We are flying in international airspace and over
international waters. But these assets give us ground truth on what
everybody is doing in the gulf.”
But the increased surveillance flights do carry a risk of provoking
Tehran at a time of increased international tensions over its disputed
nuclear program.
Last November, Iranian warplanes shot at an Air Force surveillance drone
flying over the Persian Gulf. Pentagon officials said the Predator was
in international airspace and was not hit, and that the episode prompted
a strong protest to the Iranian government. Iran said the Predator had
violated its airspace.
And in late 2011, an RQ-170 surveillance drone operated by the C.I.A.
rather than the military crashed deep inside Iranian territory while on a
mission that is believed to have been intended to map suspected nuclear
sites. That episode came to light only after Iran bragged that it had
hacked into the drone’s controls and guided it to a landing inside its
borders. American officials said the drone had crashed after a technical
malfunction.
The ScanEagle, at the low end of the surveillance technology scale, can
stay aloft for 24 hours, and at altitudes of up to 19,500 feet. It has a
tiny engine — just 1.9 horsepower — but sufficient to carry the
vehicle, four and a half feet long with a 10-foot wingspan, at a
cruising speed of 48 knots. Built by Insitu, a Boeing subsidiary, the
ScanEagle can carry a video camera with night vision and a thermal
imaging system. It is unarmed.
The Defense Department fields about 250 ScanEagles across all of the
armed forces, and the drone has logged 650,000 flight hours since it was
first tested by the military in 2004.
While it is currently aboard a half-dozen warships, Navy officers expect
that number to grow. Part of the push for ScanEagle is its relatively
low cost, only $100,000 each.
Peter W. Singer, a
senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, said the deployment of
unmanned aircraft aboard Navy warships could be as revolutionary as the
first introduction of conventional aircraft to the fleet.
“This is a game changer,” Mr. Singer said. “Using remotely piloted
vehicles in the framework of intelligence, surveillance and
reconnaissance is just the first step.”
Fitting missiles onto drones is already a proven asset for the military
and the intelligence community, and the Navy might push the abilities
even further, using drones — perhaps even jet-powered and refuel-able in
the air — to penetrate adversary air defenses for attack missions and
for jamming communications and spoofing radar, he said.
In a time of tight budgets, though, Mr. Singer warned that the
traditional flying communities in both the Navy and Air Force might push
back against development and procurement programs that might take
pilots out of the cockpit and put them in trailers to operate the
aircraft remotely.
And he noted that what truly scares the pilot community is the
possibility that technological advancements might allow future drone
missions to be preprogrammed, perhaps even fully automatic — getting rid
of a pilot altogether.
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