Oh, I am sure they will find lots of ways to do nasty things, and our glorious leaders will always be a few steps, or leaps, behind. They consider them just dumb ragheads, when there are some really smart folks there, just as in all groups. Never write off someone as stupid just because it suits your perceptions. Imagine if something like that had some range, against commercial aircraft, or even if used against a large substation, it could fry a large chunk of grid.

I have seen on You Tube some inventors and experimenters developing such devices. Your correct that such devices could be scaled up with very little expendenture of money. I just wonder what happens the next time the Iranians use it again.

Yes, they would, one would wonder why something along those lines is not used to act as a check and balance. Too much faith in their single technology. And a lack of capability to ask "What if". I find that is true in business as well, single answer solutions are all that are authorized, more is too much work.

Gyroscopic guidance systems with sufficient accuracy for short missions have been around for quite a while. General aviation autopilots had small gyro units incorporated, and those small aircraft are always cramped for space and weight, so a modified aircraft autopilot should work just fine for even Zodiacs.

Doc, you are correct about the sinals, as I understand it. They explain it with Garmin GPS trackers, as to why you can only get 100" accuracy with them, vice the 10 or 5 foot mil spec. I remember MITRE from my time on 640/Tridents. I would occasionally hang out in MCC with the MT's. I would say you could fit a mini sins on anything 500 tonsor bigger, but these guys were on a swift boat type thing. Barely enough room for the fishing poles...and some .50 cals.

The mini-SINS should still be housed easily on all but the smallest U.S. Navy vessels, and I think would be an independent smart check system for GPS. It's been a while since I worked with the DSCS satellites that house GPS, but I recall that there were two separate signals; one for commercial use, and one secure, higher accuracy system for military use. I know there was some protest over signal denial at the time, and some were pushing for just one, high accuracy signal. Either the supposed secure signal isn't so secure, or the switch to a single signal has left the system with a big vulnerability There's no fixing stupid.

At one time, American contractors were incredibly innovative. The original Polaris SLBM control system, called the Missile Instrument Test and Readiness Equipment (MITRE) was lifted from an electromechanical controller used to manage the Pepsi bottling plant. My father was the Lockheed tech who redesigned MITRE for fit and thermal issues, which got him an engineer's position. That ingenuity and common sense seems to be a tragic deficiency in the industry today.

Here's a concept that I haven't heard anyone mention: What if the capture of these two patrol boats wasn't at all about what is being portrayed? While I was watching the news reports and looking at the pictures released of the sailors in total submission, humiliated,apologizing for their mistakes, and saying how benevolent and merciful their captors were,I'm thinking that "there's something wrong with this picture". Then it came to me. Assuming that the Navy isn't totally incompetent and unable to rescue these two boats there's another explanation why the boats and sailors were captured and then released.

In a word it's called "Jizya", and it's a word that all Americans should learn and understand. A rough definition is extortion, a poll tax, ransom or tribute. I recently heard a woman describe how she and her family had lived in the middle east and were required to pay a "road tax" every year. After they had paid the tax an Arab friend of hers told her that it wasn't a tax for roads, it was Jizya. Jizya isn't new, Thomas Jefferson sent the country to war with the Barbary Pirates, refusing to pay ransom (Jizya) for ships and sailors the Muslims captured. In recent years a good example would be the ships and vessels captured in the Indian Ocean with the crews and cargos held for ransom (Jizya). As details of this incident leak out, where no one really knows what happened, then, it's admitted the State Department called the Iranians and told them where the boats were because they were "disabled", then the missile incident with the Navy ships, something just doesn't add up. Also consider: The Iranians violated the missile agreement and were about to have new sanctions put on them. They need something to "save face", get the possibility of sanctions removed and prove that they are a major power in the area and no one was going to "bully" them. What did the US do? To get the personnel back as well as the equipment, it paid the money that was held in frozen accounts plus 1.7 billion in interest (Jizya), released 7 Iranian Americans held in prison for helping Iran violate the sanctions, also released some prisoners from Guantanamo, maybe turned over a 'high value' ISIS commander and then apologized for violating Iranian waters. Could this be considered Jizya? I'll let you decide.

Muhammad established that people of other religions have to pay a poll tax to Muslims called the Jizya, as a reminder of their inferior status. There's an air of submission and humiliation involved with it.
From the Quran: (9:29) "Fight those who believe not in Allah nor the Last Day, nor hold the forbidden which hath been forbidden by Allah and his messenger, nor acknowledge the Religion of Truth (even if they are) of the People of the Book, until they pay the Jizya in willing submission, and feel themselves subdued."
From the Hadith and Suri:
Muslim (19:4294) " If they refuse to accept Islam, demand from them the Jizya. If they agree to pay, accept it from them and hold off your hands. If they refuse to pay the tax, seek Allah's' help and fight them."
Bukhari (53:386) "Our prophet, the messenger of our Lord, has ordered us to fight you till you worship Allah alone or give Jizya (tribute) and our Prophet has informed us that our Lord says: Whoever amongst us is killed (martyred) shall go to Paradise to lead such a luxurious life as he has never seen, and whoever amongst us remain alive, shall become your master."
Ishaq (956 & 962): "He who withholds the Jizya is an enemy of Allah and His apostle."-- The words of Muhammad.
From an Islamic Scholar: "The honor of Islam lies in insulting the unbelief and the unbelievers (Kafirs). One who respects Kafirs dishonors Muslims. The real purpose of levying the Jizya on them is to humiliate them and remain terrified and trembling."-- "Islamic Jihad"- Shaykh Ahmed Sirhindi.

The State Department is 'spinning' this as a win-win for all parties, but if you listen or read the accounts from the Iranian side they are clearly describing this as a utter defeat and humiliation for the U.S.

Remember; Thomas Jefferson went to war with Islam because he read the Quran and understood Jizya. I think this Administration understands the Quran too, only it is willing to pay the Jizya. The American people just don't have a clue as to what Jizya is or understand it.

I will close with this: "If you know the enemy and know yourself you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If ignorant both of your enemy and yourself, you are certain to be in peril."-- Sun Tzu "The Art of War"
Also: "Those that fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it. Those that fail to learn from history CORRECTLY are simply doomed."

Yep...:)

Doc, even the small
mini SINs were the size of a closet, and weighed in at a few thousand pounds, and took a lot of cooling and power. I am sure some similar system could be created but our current regime (both military and political) are unable to do something simple like that as any new item must cost billiona and take 10 years to develop as well as have a built in 50% cost over-run. SINS on a boomer were incrediblyy accurate, the mini sins only slightly less. GPS offers a lightweight system, but obviously their transmission system is the weak link. Best solution at this point would be a modification to software to alter the signal characteristics and harden the hacking capability.

Formidable is just a relative term. What some people have done in their garages for 100.00 takes a 5 year multi billion dollar Pentagon project. That is the real issue with our military. If the Iranian assertion that they brought down the drone by taking it over by jamming it's signal and then misdirecting it's GPS, then they have trashed most of the militarys work of the last 15 years. ne would think they have someone who's only job is to try to trash their projects just to catch these thing, much like software companies hiring hackers to hack their code. But our geniuses in the halls of power are too smart to think that way. You can build an emp generator for less tha 100 that will kill any car built in the last 20 years within 50 yards or so, whats to stop someone from simply scaling up and applying the same logic to other weaknesses like GPS?

Indeed, that is basically what has been said all along. This whole situation is just like so many others, it just fades into the wallpaper and will never be resolved. Benghazi used to be the poster boy of lies and misdirection, and this may have taken it's place, but no one was hurt, but easily could have been.

That's true

Iran isn't Obama's enemy, we are.

The following might be of interest to anyone here in the Gulch regarding the above statement:
"Compared to a normal wave, a time-reversed wave has startlingly different weapon capabilities.
Such a wave precisely retraces the path of the ordinary wave that stimulated it to be formed. So it possesses an "invisible wire" through space, back to the original position of whatever emitted its stimulus wave.
Further, the time-reversed wave continually converges upon its invisible "back- tracking" path. It does not diverge and spread its energy, in contradistinction to normal waves.
Using several simple schemes (particularly pumped 4-wave mixing), extremely large amplification of the time-reversed (TR) wave can be cheaply and readily accomplished.
A startling weapons capability therefore emerges when amplified TR waves are generated in response to received signals from a distant target:
(1) If any signal at all can be received from a distant target, a return TR signal of extreme power can be delivered directly to that target Almost all of the transmitted TR signal energy will arrive at and in the distant target, even through a highly nonlinear medium or under scattering conditions. Hardly any of the energy will be lost enroute. If the target is fast-moving, a "lead correction" signal can be calculated and added to steer the return path.
(2) Since real-time holography can readily be accomplished using TR waves - and without first making holograms, geometrical forms (balls, shapes, hemispherical shells, etc) of energy can be created readily by interferometry (crossed beam techniques). Since the TR wave carriers do not disperse with distance, these interference energy forms can be assembled by crossed TR wave beams at great distances-even hundreds of thousands of miles. The energy appearing in such a distantly created energy form is limited only by the amount one cares to put in at the amplified transmitting end.
Thus the radar itself now becomes a powerful, all-around weapon. With a TR wave adjunct, once the radar receives a return signal from a target, an extremely powerful TR wave pulse can be generated, and all the energy in that pulse can be unerringly returned to the distant target from which the return was received.
Even a passive (receive only) radar may be used together with a TR wave adjunct to accomplish the same directed energy destruction of the distant target emitting the signals received by the radar.
Radio receiver-transmitters may also employ simple TR wave adjuncts to provide a large number of communications jammers and "directed energy weapons," capable of jamming and/or destroying enemy radio transmitters at appreciable distances."
This is a Google lookup I did base on my scant knowledge of Radar and logical deduction. I believe the Iranians are now a formitable enemy. I hope the Pentagon doesn't have their heads in the sand and bring it to the attention of the idiot Prez. He will probably do nothing.

They've known about this vulnerability for years--for nearly twenty years, in fact. Cf. Tomorrow Never Dies, with Pierce Brosnan, Jonathan Pryce, Michelle Yeoh, Teri Hatcher, Ricky Jay, Goetz Otto, Judi Dench, et al.; EON Productions, 1997. The villain-in-chief in that piece used precisely this method to set Britain and China in deadly hate the one against the other (to paraphrase Shakespeare). Only the quick thinking of two secret agents, one from each country, prevents World War Three.

There is so much wrong with the administration's version of what happened, the whole thing stinks like the Benghazi story. First they don't know what happened, then Louie Ghomert on FOX admits that the State Department said they called the Iranians and gave them the location of the boats. There are reports (from the Iranians) that they fired the missiles at the carrier task force to keep them from intervening. Supposedly this was recent, but reports have it placed back in December. Then there are reports that the U.S. was transferring a "high value" ISIS commander from Qatar to Bahrain. Will we get the truth? Probably not. This administration are masters at "misdirection". One thing I' pretty sure of is that a disabled GPS wouldn't have been the cause for those two boats being so close to Farsi Island. They were 'manned' not on autopilot and the stretch of water they were in is not that wide shore to shore. The boat commanders could have seen visually if they were in Iranian waters. Just sayin'- there's something wrong with this picture.

Sounds like the Navy should consider using their old Ship's Inertial Navigation System (SINS), with GPS as backup. SINS was accurate enough to rely on for mission execution by the "boomers" to deliver precision strike small nukes on target. GPS systems are small, efficient, and require no expert maintenance, but as the article notes, can be spoofed. Anyone interested in learning about the history of precision guidance systems should read MacKenzie's "Inventing Accuracy."

Jamming GPS would not be that difficult. All you have to do is send a conflicting signal on the GPS frequencies, hopefully with a high gain directional antenna. This would achieve what is termed "capture effect." Spoofing location would be a bit more difficult, but certainly not impossible for a smart organization. I heard through the news (so take it with a pound or two of salt) that the only things taken were the sim cards out of the satellite phones. Is this a big deal? Probably, since this may give the Iranians a lot of intel.

This incident smells like three day old fish.
Just study the map, study the boat capabilities and then the training of the men aboard them. There is no way this was accidental unless the guys were totally incompetent. And they are not.

Spoofing signals have a source and they can be traced assuming you know that is what is going on. This is a major problem with GPS especially when it is part of a weapons system. There are coding techniques that can be used to discriminate between authentic and bogus signals but they are not foolproof. These systems should be equipped with a back up inertial reference unit that cannot be jammed by external sources. If there is a discrepancy between the GPS and the IRU countermeasures should be automatically invoked.

Never underestimate an enemy. Sure sounds like our country did with Iran. They probably could do worse things to us in terms of infrastructure damage inside the usa

Obama is a socialist Muslim. I have concluded. His actions are very consistent with this

Let's contemplate this. Whether it was a bona fide military technological weakness that Iran has figured out how to exploit, or if it was the U.S. testing Iran's reaction -- do we REALLY want our govt to openly admit EITHER of those scenarios ?!

I suggest that the deeper problem is that from "I guess those shovel-ready projects weren't quite shovel-ready" to " If you like your doctor you can keep your doctor. Period." Americans have reached the nadir of trust in our federal government's honesty or competence, so that when things happen that the public cannot be told about we citizens just don't trust that what our govt is doing is in our best interest or even more broadly, in the best interest of our country overall. That is a very sad and dire condition in which to be.

I agree with Ron Paul, we should not even be in the mid east and then there would be no problem. The US needs to mind its own business, which it is not doing any too well, rather than interfere in foreign disputes.