If the drone had "self destructed" the Iranians would have taken the cadaver of a two year old killed in a traffic accident and photographed it among the wreckage. I cannot believe that anyone in the U.S. military would ever have conceived of building a drone like this without assuming that some of them would fall into unfriendly hands. I cannot believe that the response to the loss was improvised by the U.S. military. They must have been fully prepared for this eventuality and accepted it as one of the costs or risks of such an operation.
Going all hellfire and sending in troops and warplanes after a pilotless drone negates the value of a pilotless drone.
Rigging the thing to self destruct is a two edged sword. Besides the cost and weight associated with the self destruct mechanisms, you have the problem of handling and maintenance, plus inadvertent and unnecessary losses associated with false alarms. While the current situation is far from ideal, I think it is about the best we can hope for and actually shows our advantages.
I agree whole heartedly “Lonesome” and I just cant believe with all of our technology and computer knowledge, you’d think they could have come up with a 1960’s version of “Mission Impossibles “ melting self destruct cassette tape decks, pens, radios? or whatever. Whereby no one is killed except maybe the idiots picking the drone up and getting goo all over their hands. I was in Naval Intelligence 30 years ago and some technologies we we had then did not become public until a good twenty years later...makes me wonder...I’m so perplexed about all of this.
Ordinarily that would be true, but in this case the drone wasn't far over the border. They should have taken the opportunity -- in this case -- to obliterate it. We spend 100's of millions developing prototype craft like this and we don't take the opportunity to safeguard the technology for a little while longer? Now it will be cheaply reverse-engineered and be used against us.