U.S. Patrols Near Iran Will Not Stop Due to Drone Shoot-Down

By David Axe,The National Interest

Iran’s destruction of a U.S. Navy Global Hawk surveillance drone over the Strait of Hormuz on June 20, 2019 shouldn’t deter U.S. forces from monitoring the strategic waterway, officials said.

Retired U.S. Air Force general David Deptula, dean of the Air Force Association’s Mitchell Institute, toldAir Force magazine he would put an additional Global Hawk “in the exact same track.” “We certainly don’t want to be cowed,” Deptula said.

Northrop built four Broad-Area Maritime Surveillance-Demonstrator drones, based on the Global Hawk platform, for the Navy starting in 2008. The Navy has stationed two of them in the United Arab Emirates for operational use as it prepares to deploy the full MQ-4C naval version of the Global Hawk starting in late 2019.

While it can fly as high as 65,000 feet, beyond the reach of many air-defense systems, the BAMS-D is subsonic and lacks stealth features, making it vulnerable to the most powerful surface-to-air missiles. Iranian forces claimed they used a version of the Buk M1  road-mobile SAM to shoot down the BAMS-D. The IRGC also possesses Russian-made S-300 air-defense systems.

Air Force chief of staff Gen. David Goldfein on June 26, 2019 told Air Force that American military aircraft would continue patrolling the Persian Gulf. “He doesn’t expect to significantly change the combination of assets in the region, noting it’s his job to pull together combat options for Pres. Donald Trump, if needed,” Air Force explained.

“We continue to fly where we need to be, when we need to be there, as we do in all scenarios,” Goldfein said. “This is a conversation we could have anywhere in terms of international air space. … We continue to protect those global commons for everyone and we continue to operate where we need to operate.”

Deptula said the Pentagon must modernize its “geriatric air force with systems that have been designed to operate against high-threat capabilities like stealth fighters, bombers and [intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance] aircraft.”