Officials with the Iranian Revolutionary Guard have reportedly started work to begin training high school students to target drones flying overhead, according to an Iranian newspaper.
Gen. Ali Fazli, a leader of the paramilitary unit, told the paper the military will incorporate the lessons into "Defensive Readiness" sections of the "civil defense" courses taught at high schools.
Iran notably shot down an RQ-170 in 2011 revealing the secretive U.S. drone to the world. The government has also claimed to have shot down a U.S. Scan Eagle drone.
Iran leaders had said they'd use the RQ-170 and the Scan Eagle to help develop their own fleet of drones as tensions continue to grow between the U.S. and Iran. Of course, the Iranian industrial base is far behind the U.S. in terms of drone development.
However, the international market is starting to catch up to the drones flown by the U.S. military as seen at the AUVSI conference hosted last week in Washington D.C.
The U.S. military has recognized that it's drones will not operate with impunity the way they have in Iraq and Afghanistan. Now, Iranian high school students probably have not made it too high on their threat matrix.
But the methods of bringing down the drones are the ones that U.S. military leaders most fear -- hacking into the operations system. Pentagon officials have long said the link between drone and operator is considered one of the most vulnerable aspects of the system.
