Israel-Drone: Update. Forty-eight hours into the investigation of an unmanned aircraft flying into Israeli airspace there is no confirmation who flew the drone.
Saturday morning, Israeli radar tracked the drone flying toward the coast from the Mediterranean, then over the Gaza strip and into Israel. Twenty minutes after it crossed into southern Israel, scrambled fighter jets from the Israeli Air Force shot it down.
Comment: Israelis judge that Lebanese Hezbollah operated the drone with Iranian technical assistance. This remains a hypothesis.
What is important for Readers to note is that the US has no monopoly on drones and that every enemy of the US has observed US drone operations in the past decade. In any future war, US drones will not be alone in the airspace and they will be vulnerable to countermeasures that US enemies have had more than ten years to develop.
If Hezbollah can fly drones, imagine what China can do. As for the Israeli success in shooting down a drone, compare the cost of a drone loss to that of the Israeli missile that shot it down and the cost of just scrambling a pair of Israeli fighters to shoot it down.
The point is that US and Allied forces will never again have total control of the airspace as they have had in Afghanistan and Iraq. Everybody has drones and drone counter-measures now.
See Also:
Anti-Drone Terminator Countermesasures with Mike Adams (YouTube 15:25)
Dolphin: Their Drones, Our Drones, and EMP Rays
Health Ranger's intelligence analysis of military drones: payloads, countermeasures and more
Mini-Me: End of the Delusional UAV Era
Robots and Drones [Electromagnetic Pulse – EMP – Countermeasures]
