U.S. Failed to Stop Drone Attack Because of Identification Mixup | Hacker News Reader

U.S. Failed to Stop Drone Attack Because of Identification Mixup

wsj.com

41 pointsmfiguiere31 comments

I'm surprised that drones; the ones that return to base, not the suicide ones; don't have any kind of IFF. Maybe the next generation will since the US won't be the only ones with them, and their adversaries will be fielding similar if not outright copies of US designs.

https://archive.is/c1T9I

It won't surprise me of the drone was an Iranian copy of the RQ-170 Sentinel. Same radar signature and the I guess the base air defense system (Gepard afaik) said a friendly inbound.

If it’s the standard defense they have used since the Iraq war, it’s a variant of the Phalanx system used on AEGIS ships (CIWS). Not a Gepard.

The true cause for this attack success was US failure to mitigate security risk from Iran already 20 years ago when there was a good change for it. Current US administration has unfortunately made the situation even worse.

So your solution is boots on the ground and regime change? it's gone so well in the past it definitely will in the future. /s

Maybe instead the US should honor their commitments which would include the Iran Nuclear deal that was scrapped for no reason 5 years ago.

I don't believe it to be a good idea. Biden has flirted with Iran with deadly consequences.

I'm not going to speculate how good it would to attempt regime change right now but there was a very good opportunity for it when Iran had unrest and they came to a genius idea to murder around 15000 arrested people.

The best opportunity would have been of course when US had sizable military formations on both sides of Iran border. On top of it it would have very likely limited large number of civilian causalities in Iraq due to reduced activity of Iran backed terrorist cells.

Despite the odd angle used throughout all the western media propaganda. It was an Iraqi group not Iranian group. The constant push to frame this as "USA vs. Iran" by calling it an Iran-backed group, instead of an Iraqi group, or be specific and state that it was "Islamic Resistance in Iraq" is just befuddling. It's like if the media was covering the current crisis in Palestine/Israel, while never mentioning Israel and instead writing headlines like "USA-backed group bombs hospital in Gaza".

As for why this Iraqi group is able to attack USA, it's likely much more to do with the 13 year old failed US Invasion of Iraq than anything to do with Iran. But It feels like USA is embarrassed enough about that whole thing that they have decided to just ignore that Iraq exists and instead consider this to be an attack all along the Jordan-Iran border, which for anyone geographically interested is just as long as the border between USA and France.

This is normal for US foreign policy thinking. No official enemy has any agency except a few top-tier foreign adversaries, who are all madmen trying to take over the world. If anyone has a grievance with the US it's because Iran or Russia or China told them to because we're so great what else could the reason be? We literally had Nancy Pelosi claiming that people who call for a ceasefire in Gaza are puppets of Putin.

This is so true. US foreign policy thinking is like a bad parody of Hollywood movies.

Is the claim the IRI isn’t materially backed by the IRGC invalid?

In large part she was probably not wrong given that a lot of calls for ceasefire and in support of genocide of Jews come indeed from Russian troll accounts.

I find it very odd that Americans seem to not be able to understand how a highly nationalist people may object to them staying past their welcome date and seek to attack them on their own accord, and that most of these groups existed well before acquiring Iranian funding.

Most Iraqis still remember tragedies like the Mahmudiyah massacre. The government of the time took them into account and promised to have American bases closed, but reneged. I think you can see how events like that being rampant might drive people to fight, even a generation later.

> It was an Iraqi group not Iranian group

…backed by Iran.

The attacks are attributed to Iran because the Iraqi militias that launched them are IRGC assets, in the same way that no security agency anywhere in the western would refer to Hezbollah as "a Lebanese militia". The chatter in mideast analyst Twitter (representative sample: Rasha Al Aqeedi, Oz Katerji, Nadwa Dawsari) mostly seems to be people dunking on Iran for trying to claim it wasn't behind the attack.

The sense I get is that this is looked at somewhat as Avon Barksdale had given all his crews orders to shoot any members of the Stansfield Organization on sight, and, after a bunch of bloody shootings, tried to claim "oh, I didn't order any of those attacks specifically". That argument wouldn't hold up in court, where the standard of evidence is relatively high; it definitely doesn't stand up in the court of USCENTCOM, where the standard of evidence is probably mostly vibes.

USA invaded Iraq in 2003, going on 21 years ago...

Seems to be an attack vector that they weren't prepared and/or trained sufficiently for.

I imagine that if you see it come in slightly BEFORE the expected drone, you'd be confused. Which one is the real McCoy, especially if they have the same signature on the radar. You don't want to shoot down the wrong one.

> You don't want to shoot down the wrong one.

This is the great thing about drones. If you're not 100% certain it's friendly, there's no actual harm in shooting it down other than a small* hit to the budget. And I suspect going forward, that'll be a new military policy. If unsure, bring it down.

* Small in relative terms to the military's budget. Not so small to me, and an average, working-class pawn.

There's also the concern of collateral damage: falling debris/shrapnel from the interception, if CIWS/CRAM were used you have all those rounds returning to the ground somewhere downrange, UXO if using proximity rounds and they don't self destruct properly, and so on.

The CRAM has self-destructing rounds.

"One major difference between the land- and sea-based variants is the choice of ammunition. Whereas naval Phalanx systems fire tungsten armor-piercing rounds, the C-RAM uses the 20–mm HEIT-SD (High-Explosive Incendiary Tracer, Self-Destruct) ammunition, originally developed for the M163 Vulcan Air Defense System.These rounds explode if they impact a target, but if they miss they self-destruct on tracer burnout, greatly reducing the risk of collateral damage from misses." [0][1]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phalanx_CIWS [1] https://asiatimes.com/2020/03/centurion-c-ram-the-solution-t...

Neat! Not foolproof surely but better than the alternative.

Given that the ex gratia payment per falsely killed Arab is generally less than $5k, sometimes less than $200, often nothing, I'm sure that's even less of a concern.

I suspect that the small hit to the budget would be treated as a career-ending gaffe for Lieutenant John Doe

I thought all military planes must have a Identification Friend or Foe protocol, where the signal will be encrypted and the approach is kind of a challenge-response, which should be fool-proof, isn’t it? So how come that they could not know which were which?

Yikes. More than likely this was intentional planning by the attacker.

Also implies a certain level of sophistication, since it was able to track the drone. It seems unlikely to have been radar, but perhaps an ability to follow radio signal?

Visual?

I would think that considering everything going on in the region that they probably have many drones in constant operation, simply making a coincidence more likely.

Edit: But I don't think they've released nearly enough information for us to make a good guess; for example, knowing the flight trajectories is important, did this drone shadow the US one, or were they just in the same area?

IRGC advisors no doubt.

extremely likely. it was an attack with 1 drone right? normally they would send a swarm

"Hoist with his own petard"

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