Iran–U.S. RQ-170 incident

On 4 December 2011, an American Lockheed Martin RQ-170 Sentinel unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) was captured by Iranian forces near the city of Kashmar in northeastern Iran. The Iranian government announced that the UAV was brought down by its cyberwarfare unit which commandeered the aircraft and safely landed it, after initial reports from Western news sources disputedly claimed that it had been "shot down". The United States government initially denied the claims but later President Obama acknowledged that the downed aircraft was a US drone and requested that Iran return it.

The government of Iran announced that the aircraft was brought down by its cyber warfare unit stationed near Kashmar and "brought down with minimum damage" They said the aircraft was detected in Iranian airspace 225 kilometers (140 mi) from the border with Afghanistan.

The government of the United States initially claimed that its forces in Afghanistan had lost control of a UAV on 4 December 2011 and that there was a possibility that this is the vehicle that crashed near Kashmar. According to unnamed U.S. officials, a U.S. UAV operated by the Central Intelligence Agency was flying on the Afghan side of the Afghanistan-Iran border when its operators lost control of the vehicle. There have been reports that "foreign officials and American experts who have been briefed on the effort" state that the crashed UAV was taking part in routine surveillance of Iranian nuclear facilities inside Iranian airspace.

The drone appeared to be largely intact, except for possible minor visible damage on its left wing. Dan Goure, an analyst at the Lexington Institute, stated the largely intact airframe ruled out the possibility of an engine or navigational malfunction: "Either this was a cyber/electronic warfare attack system that brought the system down or it was a glitch in the command-and-control system." At least one US source admitted that Iran could have interrupted the data-link and brought it to a soft landing. Some US officials stated the drone broke into three pieces during impact. They claimed that it was reassembled for display purposes and was painted by Iran to hide the damage.

The Department of Defense released a statement acknowledging that it had lost control of a UAV during the previous week, claiming that it was "flying a mission over western Afghanistan" when control was lost. The statement did not specify the model of the aircraft. The U.S. government also stated that it was still investigating the cause of the loss.

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