US Navy sailors train with a DIVE-LD unmanned underwater vehicle (UUV) in December 2024. Iran recently captured a DIVE-LD drone from the United States in the Persian Gulf, and has announced that it plans to reverse-engineer it for Iranian use. (US Navy)

Iran Plans to Copy a Captured US Drone. It Wouldn’t Be the First Time.

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History is replete with examples of nations capturing military technology from their enemies, then quickly reverse-engineering it for their own use.

Officials in Washington are understandably vexed after Iran announced that it had captured a United States military “Dive-LD” underwater drone near the Strait of Hormuz this month. The seizure could provide Tehran with an opportunity to study and then reverse-engineer the platform—even as Anduril, the drone’s maker, attempted to downplay how much data could really be garnered from the purloined vessel, the Military Times reported.

Iran’s drone program has benefited from past captured technologies. In December 2011, Iran’s cyberwarfare unit, then in its relative infancy, successfully used satellite jamming and GPS spoofing to trick an American RQ-170 Sentinel stealth drone into landing inside Iran. The incident was a propaganda coup for Tehran and an embarrassment for the administration of President Barack Obama, who publicly asked the Iranian government to return the drone to no avail. (It is thought that Russia may have supplied Iran with the necessary technology to bring down the drone, though this is unconfirmed.)

After the capture, Iran claimed it had reverse-engineered the drone and built its own copies. Although few of these copies were ever seen, at least one was apparently destroyed earlier this year during US airstrikes on Iran, according to The Aviationist.

The capture of the sea drone could further enhance Tehran’s drone capabilities.

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© The National Interest