RUTHFULLY YOURS

Despite President Barack Obama and Secretary John Kerry’s enthusiasm in pushing a nuclear weapons agreement with Iran—an agreement a majority of lawmakers and Americans oppose—the Deputy Commander of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps, Brigadier General Hossein Salami. boasted to the government-funded Fars News Agency that his military has created advanced unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) technology.

Gen. Salami claimed that the UAVs, commonly called “drones,” are capable flying 3,000 kilometers—or 1,864 miles—to conduct stealth reconnaissance or to take part in combat missions, according to the Iranian news media on Wednesday.

The report quotes Gen. Salami as saying, “Any U.S. airbase whose airplanes can reach the Iranian airspace as well as their aircraft carriers can be targeted by Iran’s unique high precision striking ballistic missiles and drones.” The general’s language is an indication that the Iranian government has intensified its threat against the United States and Israel, nations they refer to as “the big Satan and the little Satan.”

“[In addition,] the IRGC… has a unique ballistic missile that no one else, [except] perhaps Russia and the US, has; and intercepting this missile is almost impossible,” Salami said in an interview with the state-run TV news agency.

An Israeli report confirms that the Iranians are building a fleet of “suicide kamikaze drones,” which they are likely to provide to terrorists in keeping with Iran’s reputation as being the world’s leading facilitator of terrorism. What concerns Israel—and being kept quiet by U.S. officials and news media—is the prospect of Iranian intelligence and military officers providing schematics and other documents for the assembling of these high-tech weapons to its terrorist allies especially Hamas in the Gaza Strip and Hezbollah in Lebanon, both of which are a thorn in the side of Israel.

“While the drones are not a threat to the United States, unless the Hezbollah members in Latin America are given units, the Israelis are worried about both Hamas and Hezbollah being capable of surreptitiously entering Israel’s airspace to conduct attacks on civilians,” said former counterterrorism unit commander, Lt. James M. Kantros. “The Israeli first responders—police, fire, emergency medical techs—will need to upgrade their training for responding to drone attacks by Iran or its proxies,” Kantros added.

The report, which liberally borrows from the U.S. Army’s Foreign Military Studies Office at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, claims that nothing produced by Iran’s overt military weapons programs has experienced as much development as Iranian unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs).

Ten-years ago Iran’s UAVs were largely for showpieces for parades and photo opportunities. But today the Iranian government boasts widespread use of drones, employed not only by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps the country’s elite troops, but also by their regular army, the regular and elite IRGC navy, and the regular and special IRGC air forces.

According to Israel’s media, Hamas and Hezbollah have already been deploying drones that have flown over Israel. But those drones were spies-in-the-skies and failed to cause death or damage. In a February 2015 speech, the regular army’s General Abdolrahim Moussavi outlined the army’s growing use of drones, with emphasis on suicide or kamikaze drones, according to the U.S. Army report.

“While it is easy to dismiss the idea of a suicide drone as more symbolic than real in an age of cruise missiles and precise Predators, utilizing suicide drones is an asymmetric strategy which both allows Iran to compete on an uneven playing field and poses a risk by allowing operators to pick and choose targets of opportunity over a drone’s multi-hour flight duration,” the report noted.