A lot of stories are floating around as to just what went wrong. One is simply operator error. That may be, but there should be an absolutely fail safe destruction circuit built into these things that will blow it up if there is no other recourse. Of course, it may have been as simple as some lieutenant who was flying this thing not wanting to hit the kill switch on one of America's most secret - and expensive - pieces of hardware because his orders were not clear as to when he was authorized to do this. That is a command-and-control problem.
A larger command-and-control problem is why orders were not immediately given to either go in and recover the drone by force, or destroy it on the ground with an air strike. Rumor has it that the President spiked this option. The President did say that we have asked for it back and "we'll see" what the Iranian response is. Right. Five guesses what their response will be. This is a command-and-control problem that can only be solved next November.
The more technical explanation is that the Iranians spoofed the GPS feed and tricked it into landing in Iran. The article below from Wired says that this is possible, but it would be difficult. www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/12/iran-drone-hack-gps/
My best guess is that this was probably a Chinese or Russian operation that was a field test of new equipment to counter our drones. They got lucky by snatching one of our newest models instead of a Predator or other older drone. Since they now have our best and brightest, they can manufacture their own after reverse-engineering it and work out new countermeasures to bring ours down. Great. Point/counterpoint is the nature of the game and we just got painfully counterpointed in a big way. Wherever the screw-ups occurred here, there is no excuse for not taking the drone out when we knew it was down in Indian Country.
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