The US Air Force on Tuesday confirmed for the first time that it is flying a stealth unmanned aircraft known as the "Beast of Kandahar," a drone spotted in photos and shrouded in secrecy.
The RQ-170 Sentinel is being developed by Lockheed Martin and is designed "to provide reconnaissance and surveillance support to forward deployed combat forces," the air force said in a brief statement.
Why we'd need to fly it there to test it makes no sense to me unless we're testing it by bumping up against (or through, I suppose) Chinese air defenses.
UPDATE: Strategypage guesses it is going through it's paces over Iran. I wouldn't think that Iran's air defense radars would be so great that they'd be a major test for such an advanced bird, but depending on where it flies it could surely photograph and map areas of interest, as well as sucking up whatever other signals it can record for later use.
