Military wants Iran to return downed drone – pretty please.

Military wants Iran to return downed drone
By Dave Majumdar – Staff writer – Marine Corp Times – Dec 12, 2011

The government is asking Iran to return the Lockheed Martin-built RQ-170 Sentinel UAV that was recently downed over that country.

“We’ve asked for it back. We’ll see how the Iranians respond,” President Obama said Monday during a news conference at the White House with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.

Obama’s statement is the first official confirmation that the stealthy high-altitude spy plane had been captured by Iran. Earlier, the Pentagon had only officially acknowledged that an unmanned aircraft of an unspecified type was missing over western Afghanistan.

Iranian officials have already stated that they will not return the captured aircraft and have promised to reverse-engineer the jet’s technology.

“I hope he said please,” said analyst Dan Goure of the Lexington Institute in Arlington, Va., referring to Obama’s statement. “I can’t quite see that happening.”

Richard Aboulafia, vice president of analysis at Teal Group, mirrored those comments.

“Good luck with that,” he said. “I think I read this really bad plot line in a cheap novel a few years ago. Life imitating art, or something like that.”

Goure said that there is no chance that Iran will return the Sentinel to the U.S. Nor does Obama have any legal grounds to ask for such a return.

“I’m a little puzzled as to why he even bothered,” he said.

Goure said the U.S. had a right to complain when the technical research ship Pueblo was captured by North Korea in 1968 or when a Chinese fighter collided with a Navy EP-3 Aries spy plane in international airspace in 2001. But the more recent episode is different.

“Nobody has argued that it didn’t go down inside their airspace,” he said.

Retired Air Force Lt. Gen. Jack Rives, a former judge advocate general, said that the U.S. was within its rights to ask for the return of the RQ-170 if the aircraft accidentally strayed into Iranian territory.

“We’re not at war with the Iranians,” Rives said. “When we’re in our current conditions with them, this was an accident, it was a malfunction, the plane went down, it was our plane, there is no question over that. So it’s just a common sense request under international law.”

He said Iran has an obligation to return the aircraft, assuming it was operating in either international airspace or western Afghanistan with the consent of that nation’s leadership. …more