The drone could have been recovered by commandos or destroyed by air strike if we had known where it was before the Iranians found it, and if we had time to organize and mount the operation before they got to it, and if it was close to the border. That's a lot of ifs, and a lot of things that could go wrong with relatively little payoff if they didn't.

Whether that would have been a good idea is something else again. But that's highly unlikely, the drone WAS lost, after all. We probably didn't even know which side of the border it was on when we lost contact with it. We may not even have known until after the Iranians announced they had it.

However, Obama's failure to recover or destroy the drone are already being trotted out as examples of his indecisiveness (or is it 'appeasement') by people who haven't any better clue as to what actually happened than we do.

Losing the drone was a tough break, but its part of the price of doing business in that kind of espionage. Politically or militarily, there wasn't much we could do after the operator lost control of it. It was, no pun intended, out of our hands.