Tehran tracked, captured, studied, copied RQ-170

That said, it's pretty tragic to lose a modern drone intact. There is a lot to be learned even if the learning can't be directly translated into a clone.

Stealth worked well against radar systems lacking the computing horsepower needed to filter an aircraft out of the noise. Military hardware lags far behind the capabilities of consumer hardware since the rate of progression has been so rapid while military projects are planned over decades but if systems from 1998 are capable of tracking the latest in stealth technology the next few years will be the bookend of the stealth era.

Personally, I think the future will be an environment where swarms of small drones are thrown against these advanced radar systems in an effort to overwhelm their tracking capability. It'll be an updated strategy along the lines of Baldwin's "the bomber will always get through" ideology. The difference is that drones don't cost lives so the weak point of WWII era bombing strategy won't be of any concern. The winning side will be the one that can afford to keep throwing 1,000 drones at every mission.

Iran is full of clever people, in spite of the impression that we get of them in the West as backwards and 'religious idiots' (which is mostly propaganda and would qualify tons of people in the West just as easily). The Mullahs have many faces, they're anything but dumb and they are quite capable of enlisting the help of science when it suits their goals. The fact that they abuse Islam to control their population and to violate human rights on many levels does not detract from any of that.

plus we are the great satan so anytime they triumph over us its a victory for their leadership, let alone the proof they need to rightly claim we are doing what they claim we do

It'd be like saying: oh look I stole an Intel processor, and was able to figure out how it works. Now all I need is to build a fab and a global supply chain so I can churn out thirty million of them. Or hey, I know how PageRank works, Google better watch out.

While I don't think it is necessarily a good thing they have this technology, when has either been threatening to the US (recently)? I get Russia blames everything on America and they aren't exactly friendly to Americans when traveling there (yet there sure are a lot us there) but as actual military threats - I've either completely missed the story or it doesn't exist.

Personally, I'm more worried about the determined Pakistani dad who lost his wife and children in one of our adventures which completely missed the target.

Drones are a tempting way to "do something" when doing nothing, or doing less, might be wiser.

The West, maybe.

Not if you're living in a Middle Eastern country, with oppressive rulers kept in power by US funds, forcing the country to sell its oil resources cheaply.

Not if you're living in Eastern Ukraine, where the US toppled an elected government to install a government that is hostile to your people. http://www.presstv.com/detail/2014/03/25/355978/nuke-8-milli... You could pretty much tell her attitude to them by the way she suggested the 8 million ethnic Russians living in Eastern Ukraine should be nuked.

Not if you're living in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Iran. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9RC1Mepk_Sw#t=79 All countries where the U.S. has sought to destroy domestic, independent, public institutions if and when they arise.

If you're living in an African country where the U.S. has previously tried to destabilize your government, and where China instead have offered to build infrastructure for your country, you might not be so sad that the US has lost a drone, which it was probably using for spying purposes.

If the world was Panem, then U.S. is the Capitol, and its closest allies are the Capitol's adjacent districts.

Of course, you're probably from the U.S., if not, then probably, U.K or Australia, or N.Z. Of course you'd have something to lose if the US will some day not be able to police the world.

EDIT: What's the downvote for? A lack of citations?

In the book 1984 -- which has far more similarities to today's reality than I am comfortable with -- the Oceanians are utterly and completely convinced that their side is the good side. Throughout the book there are various hints that this is in fact not the case. But the Oceanian government's control on information, combined with people's cognitive dissonance, prevents the truth from being realized. And the few who do realize it are imprisoned, tortured and converted (or killed).

What would today's world be like if China and/or Russia were the dominant power? The answer is that no one knows. No one can know. It's like asking, "what would the world be like if Hitler had won?" That alternate universe was created so long ago that it is simply not possible to conceive of.

It is silly to look at today's China and Russia and conclude that they would continue their current practices and ideologies after becoming dominant world-powers, since said practices and ideologies are very likely what is preventing that from happening. It is also possible that there will be a reversal of roles, with them becoming "good" and the USA becoming a tyrannical, fascist state. I'd say there is a scary amount of indication that the latter is very likely, actually.

The world will move on, as it always has. Today's politics and militaries will be as obsolete in a few hundred years as this drone will be in a decade.

You know who misses the old world order? Whoever was in power back then. Even after their entire population has been renewed by death and birth, broken empires are nostalgic. Those they policed, however, mostly enjoy their museums.

If China supplants the U.S. as the world's preeminent superpower only a small percentage of the world's populations will really notice. Ask yourselves this: If the U.S. was such a great brother to the world, why is that world so eager to deal with "the dreaded communist enemy"? China and Russia are both countries with dubious records in many respects, but the U.S. has behaved badly enough that the devil the world knows is no more appealing than the devils they do not know. Russia and China are probably torturing their prisoners, just as the U.S. is, but are they eavesdropping on every single conversation of entire nations? Are they trying to reforge the internet so that their corporations can make a few more bucks? Are they pressuring other nations to enact draconian anti-piracy laws that stifle innovation?

I'm not anti-American. The U.S. has explored more of space than any other nation. The U.S. is the world's longest surviving democracy, even if that democracy has been perverted into a plutocracy. Despite how the country is run and the dubious quality of its own students, the U.S.'s post-secondary academic institutions are still second to none, largely because they attract the world's best and brightest. However, the notion that U.S. control of the world is a fundamentally good thing is ridiculous, and it's past time even americans dropped it. Quite frankly, americans have squandered the gifts of their forefathers and desperately need to earn their place in the world again. The U.S. simply has not been a beacon to the world for a good long time.

The US empire, like any other empire before them will be replaced by something else.

Of course you are American, by the mere fact of being born there your have privileges over people born in the rest of the world.

For example, any time you have problems you print money,money that thanks to petrodollars and US military the rest of the world have to buy by force. You export inflation to the rest of the world.

So instead of you suffering for your own abuses, you make suffer the rest of the world. Every new QE(Quantitative Easing) makes people from Egypt go from 30% of the population not being able to buy the basics to 70% and so on.

The rest of the world is not happy, and of course they plan to replace the petrodollar as soon as they can, to replace the "Exorbitant Privilege".

Of course as an American you believe this is fantastic, but put yourself into someone else in the world skin just for 5 minutes or so. People that work much harder than Americans but live way worse, people that speak at least two languages(most Americans barely speak one), engineers, physics PhDs, whatever, and you will start seeing another picture.

Material science requires far more technical and scientific expertise along with significant investment in production and the coatings and alloys are key to proper stealth but just having a capable drone will be enough to give Iran powerful reconnaissance capability even if we have the advantage in detecting their design.

One does not break the crypto, rather the (ALWAYS) buggy implementation.

Yes. But they probably weren't properly encrypted.

Experts don't even necessarily agree about what "properly encrypted" even means. There are so many things that can go wrong in any implementation.

If we are talking about recorded data, it's less clear. The imagery data may be encrypted to provide access control after the drives are removed from the plane and handed somewhere else. In which case, there's little reason the drone wouldn't have the decrypt keys.

You could encrypt the data with a public key and store it so that the drone itself can't read it. About the only reason to do this would be to ensure if it was captured, the target wouldn't see what was on it. I'd suspect the way the military planed to handle that eventuality, however, would use on an exothermic random number generator (a.k.a. a self destruct mechanism/ explosive charge) rather than encryption. There's a lot of way more sensitive thing on the aircraft than just what it took pictures of that you need to destroy.

It would be entirely impossible for them to decrypt a "properly encrypted" hard drive even if they did have any supercomputer possible for humans to build with current or near-future technology.

Not quite. The Tu-4 was a very close copy of the B-29, but the sheet metal the Soviets had available was slightly thicker (and thus heavier)than American sheet metal, which required some engineering to work around.

The Russians kept the "Ramp Tramp" in spite of American protests, along with three other B-29s that landed on Soviet territory (two made similar emergency landings in Vladivostok and the other crash landed in Siberia). The Tupolov aircraft manufacturer examined the B-29s in minute detail and copied them almost exactly (a fairly remarkable engineering feat). The resulting plane was designated TU-4 (NATO code name BULL). The TU-4 remained the Soviet Union's primary long-range bomber until about 1955 when it was phased out in favor of newer types. Several TU-4s were transferred to the Communist Chinese Air Force in the mid-1950s and continued to serve for many more years.

Source: SOVIET UNION IMPOUNDS AND COPIES B-29 http://www.nationalmuseum.af.mil/factsheets/factsheet.asp?id...