A few days ago, the US made an urgent request to the Lebanese government seeking steps to locate and return an undetonated GBU-39 guided bomb launched by the Israelis in Beirut last week. The bomb was used by Israeli Air Force during the assassination of Hezbollah's chief of staff, Haitham Ali al-Tabtabai. Israel's military has killed al-Tabtabai in an air strike on the southern suburbs of the Lebanese capital, Beirut.
However, one of the munitions failed to detonate and fell in a suburb of the capital.
The reason behind the unusual request is the US fear that the bomb will be intercepted by China or Russia, which could copy its technology. Lebanon has not yet issued an official response.
The GBU-39 is a high-precision glide bomb produced by the American company Boeing and is equipped with a highly effective warhead.
Boeing has produced about 20,000 such kits to date, which the United States has sold only to countries close to it, such as Italy, the Netherlands, Australia, and Saudi Arabia, and in a special ground-launched version, also to Ukraine. In the Air Force, the bomb is called "Sharp Hail" and is used by all Israeli fighter jets.
The US fears that its electronic architecture, or composite materials worth billions of dollars in research and development, could end up in the hands of its adversaries, threatening the US's dominance in technology.
The danger is even more if the weapon ends up in the hands of Hezbollah or its Iranian advisers. This means they could ramp up adversarial research into counter-precision systems, thereby threatening the US's upper hand in GPS-guided weapon survivability.
This, however, isn’t the first time that the US raced against time to salvage its technology from reaching the hands of Russia and China. Three years ago, the US raced to salvage an F-35C fighter jet from the bottom of the South China Sea after it crashed on an aircraft carrier and plunged overboard. Fearing that China would retrieve the technology, the US’s classified technology and reverse-engineer it. However, China at that time rubbished the claim, stating it had an interest in its aircraft.
However, in 2001, a US EP-3 aircraft had to make an emergency landing on China’s Hainan Island after a collision. Though China returned both the crew 10 days later, its military stripped and examined the EP-3’s highly classified equipment and intelligence materials over several months.
