Comment by mattmaroon
Comment by mattmaroon 3 days ago
My other thought is that these probably came from the Iranian military, and it’s quite possible the Iranian military puts explosives in them so they can remotely detonate one that falls into enemy hands. And that Isreal simply found out about this and managed to figure out how to activate that.
This is reaching. How would this mechanism even work? If the enemy has control of a communications device then (1) they've had it and you didn't know for some time and (2) they already know how it works. There's no benefit to putting a self-destruct mechanism into such a thing, since if you know it's compromised then you just stop messaging it.
The self-destruct is pointless, because you can't even verify that it was successful and you have no actual technology to protect (unlike say, US military drones which self-destruct to protect technological details of their construction - and the US would still prefer to commit a mission to bombing a crash site to be sure if they can).
Basically you answer your own problem: the most likely outcome of a self-destruct mechanism is that it goes off accidentally against your own forces, or gets exploited - while it would deliver no actual benefit to you.
Which is to say: when analyzing an adversaries likely actions you don't start by assuming they're stupid or irrational (which is different from whether or not their overall goals might be stupid or irrational).