No Substance to Reports of Drone Sightings Over Diego Garcia
Reports on social media indicated that a drone had been sighted over the fuel tank farm on Diego Garcia last week. The Maritime Executive has not been able to find any supporting information for those claims.
The Naval Support Facility on Diego Garcia remains an important support in depth for ongoing Central Command operations targeting Iran, particularly since the Strait of Hormuz has become contested ground, as it is no longer feasible operationally for U.S. naval assets to access logistic and resupply facilities within the Gulf. Recent threats by Donald Trump to attack Oman and also to seize Omani territorial waters in the Strait of Hormuz, which could see the United States attacking Omani units in which UK service personnel are embedded, may also have created a climate in which it will be difficult for U.S. naval assets to conduct replenishment at Duqm and other Omani ports, as they have done in the past. Hence, reach-back to Diego Garcia is now of greater importance.
The initial drone sighting on August 7 was attributed to an unverified social media user posting on an unofficial site supposedly serving enlisted USAF service personnel. The account’s history shows no evidence of the poster being present on Diego Garcia, and the posting appears to have been an attempt to start a rumor. The British Ministry of Defence or U.S. Pacific Command sources gave “neither confirm nor deny” responses to reports of the drone sighting.
Nor has any Iranian IRGC-associated social media or website carried any claim about having mounted a drone operation over Diego Garcia. Such sites have been quick in the past to exploit fake news stories.
There has been speculation that Iran might seek to target Diego Garcia, and in March Iran claimed to have fired two ballistic missiles at Diego Garcia, probably from the area of Chah Bahar. Neither of the two candidate missiles to have been used, the Khoramshahr-4 nor the two-stage Qam-100, has the necessary 2,500-mile range to reach Diego Garcia with a meaningful warhead. One of the missiles was apparently intercepted shortly after launch, and the other fell well short. Iran’s naval platform from which it might have launched drones or missiles, from shorter range, such as the IRGC Navy’s Shahid Mahdavi (110-3) or Shahid Bagheri (110-4) or the regular Navy’s IRINS Makran (K441), are all resting on the bottom off Bandar Abbas, and other possible launch platforms might have difficulty slipping past the U.S. naval blockade. Only a long-range drone, with inertial navigation inaccurate at that range, could pose a realistic threat.
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In the meantime, activity on Diego Garcia as seen on August 8 and 15 looks routine, with no extra aircraft on the South Pan, with the possibility that a 135-150 meter warship departed the lagoon between the two overflights.
Since the standing up of a new Prime Minister in the UK on July 20, there has been no indication of how the UK intends to proceed with its deal with Mauritius to surrender sovereignty of the Chagos Archipelago, given that legislation to underwrite the deal in Parliament failed to complete before the end of the last parliamentary session. Pro-surrender government officials have said the deal will proceed, but no parliamentary time has been allocated to resurrect the legislation. In the meantime, Mauritius is seeking to expand its Exclusive Economic Zone to cover the archipelago by registering a claim with the United Nations Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf, and the new Foreign Secretary Red Miliband has expressed his support for the deal in the past.
