Iran plans to teach hunting of alien drones in high schools

Lieutenant Commander of Basij (volunteer) Forces Brigadier General Ali Fazli announced new changes in the contents of defensive preparedness curriculum at Iranian schools, and said a section on hunting and downing of alien drones will be added to high school textbooks. “This year, we will witness changes in the contents, teachers and teaching hours of the defensive preparedness lesson," General Fazli said in the Northeastern city of Mashhad on Saturday. Fazli said any topic related to defensive preparedness will be added to the curriculum this year, "and hunting of spy drones ... is an example of this change of content”. He said that junior and senior high schools will present two-hour and three-hour weekly defense lessons this year, respectively. In February, the Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC) announced that it has hunted an alien Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) after the drone neared the IRGC's wargames zone in Southern Iran. “On the first day of Payambar-e Azam 8 (The Great Prophet 8) wargames, the IRGC’s electronic warfare systems detected signals showing that alien drones were trying to enter the country (airspace),” Spokesman of the Wargames General Hamid Sarkheili told reporters. It was not the first time that Iran hunted alien drones over the country’s airspace. Iran announced on December 4, 2012 that the IRGC Navy had hunted an American UAV over the Persian Gulf after the drone violated the country's airspace. The IRGC navy commander announced at the time that the hunted UAV was a ScanEagle drone, adding that “such drones are usually launched from large warships”. ScanEagle is a small, low-cost, long-endurance unmanned aerial vehicle built by Insitu, a subsidiary of Boeing. Capable of flying above 16,000 feet, the UAV has also demonstrated the ability to provide persistent low-altitude reconnaissance. Iran first announced in December, 2011 that its defense forces had downed a US RQ-170 drone through a sophisticated cyber attack. The drone was the first such loss by the US. American officials have described the loss of the aircraft in Iran as a setback and a fatal blow to their stealth drone program. The RQ-170 has special coatings and a batwing shape designed to help it penetrate other nations' air defenses undetected. The existence of the aircraft, which is made by Lockheed Martin, has been known since 2009, when a model was photographed at the main US airfield in Kandahar, Afghanistan.