[time-nuts] "The GPS navigation is the weakest point,"

[ed breya]

My guess is that the drone was on one mission out of many over Iran, 
and one of these scenarios occurred:

1. It had a major internal failure and auto-landed or crashed, and 
was then spotted and grabbed.

2. There was operator error or guidance failure, causing same result.

3. The Iranians finally spotted one and managed to shoot it down - or 
do enough damage to force a landing.

4. It was an inside job - a mole or a hacker taking over from the 
control end, or maybe messing with it enough to crash it.

5. The Iranians did as claimed - managed to interfere with it or 
spoof it to land. If so, I think the know-how and equipment would 
likely have come from Russia or China, who would have likely been 
working on this type of thing since the advent of GPS.

Scenarios 4 and 5 are the scariest. What about cruise missiles? This 
is all sounding like a movie plot.

I wonder the following questions:

Shouldn't these and other possibilities have been considered all 
along, and various countermeasures worked out?

Do these drones have self-destruct capability?

Don't they also have plenty of video and sensing and other real-time 
data linked back to base that would confirm proper guidance and 
operation? At some point there must have been some indication that 
all was not well.

Ed