Israel’s Remote Machine Gun Assassination - Powered by Satellite, Enhanced by AI
On November 27 of 2020, top Iranian nuclear scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh was driving in a convoy of vehicles. Although he was reportedly advised to take precautions against attack and assassination, he was driving himself in an unarmored vehicle on this day. As he drove, a burst of machine gun fire rang out. Bullets hit the windshield directly in front of Fakhrizadeh, striking him at least once in the shoulder while leaving every other occupant of the car untouched. Fakhrizadeh stopped the car, opened the car door, and crouched behind it for cover. The next burst of bullets punched through the car door, with 3 striking the scientist’s spine and killing him. As the convoy had stopped behind him, the first armed guard rushed to Fakhrizadeh ready to engage the shooter, but unable to find any assailant. The whole event took less than 60 seconds and 15 bullets. Shortly after, a pickup truck parked on the side of the road exploded as the plan came to a close. The shooter responsible had long since left the country, and in fact had remotely controlled the gun via satellite from over 1,000 miles away.
As early as December of 2020, reports that the scientist had been killed by a satellite-controlled machine gun were treated with skepticism. It didn’t help that initial reports had reported a gun battle with multiple assailants and witnesses reporting multiple casualties. But a new report from New York Times claims to corroborate the claims after extensive interviews with officials knowledgeable of or directly involved in the affair.
The gun in question was a 7.62mm belt fed machine gun known as the FN MAG, which may be better known to some by its US designation as the M240 machine gun. The machine gun was cradled in a remotely operated mount and optical system, which has been described as similar to the Sentinel 20 Remote Weapon Station manufactured by Escribano. It’s likely also similar to the CROWS, or Common Remotely Operated Weapon System, used by the US military which can mount a number of weapons including M240 machine guns.
The weapon and its mount, which weighed more than a ton altogether, had been designed to fit within the bed of a Nissan Zamyad, a truck produced locally under license which would be common in the area. Due to the size and weight of the system, it was broken down into its smallest possible components and smuggled into the country piece by piece, where it would be reassembled when the time was right.
As part of a remotely operated weapon system, this setup would have had impressive technological advantages to begin with. In addition to fine motor control, it would have been equipped with a range of environmental and positioning sensors including thermal vision, a laser range finder, and an onboard ballistic calculator to predict the path of the bullet to automatically correct. The fact that Fakhrizadeh’s wife was unharmed while sitting in the passenger seat has also led to speculation that the onboard cameras may have been using facial recognition software to create shoot/no-shoot parameters or at least to enable positive recognition.
But, even with all of these advantages, there were a number of uncontrolled variables which even the most knowledgeable and skilled shooter could not have corrected for on their own. The weapon was remotely controlled by satellite, with an estimated latency of 1.6 seconds. That may not sound like much, but with a target driving a vehicle, this lag time alone would have been enough to make the shot impossible. Additionally, although most remote weapons systems have a shock-absorbing mount to account for the recoil of the weapon, the firing of the machine gun would produce a rocking motion which would have affected the point of impact of every continuous shot.
This is where AI comes in. It’s reported that a custom software solution was built which would learn to account not only for the lag time to the controller’s eyes, but for the recoil and motion of the truck during the firing cycle. This would have its limitations of course, but the target being in a moving vehicle would have helped in at least one way. Assuming nothing happened in the 1.6 second lag time that caused the driver to speed up or stop suddenly, it’s likely that a driver would be maintaining a fairly consistent speed, creating a constant variable which the software could use to calculate the lead of the shot.
It all literally sounds like something out of a sci-fi movie, in fact minus the AI it sounds very much like some of the events in the 2007 movie Shooter. But, almost all of the technology needed to pull off a shooting like this is widely available with manufactured components ready to go. Remote weapons systems of many kinds are already in widespread use. Optics with built-in ballistics calculators and fire control systems have been commercially available for years, such as TrackingPoint scopes which were featured as far back as 2014 allowing shooters to make incredible hits without even having to physically look behind a scope. All that was missing to make a high-tech assassination such as this possible was the AI program to compensate for the challenges of controlling the platform remotely.
It seems that everything went to plan and the platform operated as intended, except for one detail. Remember in the beginning when I said that the pickup truck exploded shortly after the shooting? The explosion was part of the plan, but it didn’t necessarily have the intended effect. The explosion was meant to tear apart the truck and the weapon system to the point that nothing useful could be learned about it. It’s reported that, instead, the force of the explosion ejected the entirety of the mounted gun system some distance from the truck, where it was recovered. Although it was damaged to the point of being completely inoperable, it was intact enough that the method of operation could be gleaned from the leftover components.
Remote assassinations are nothing new, to the point that assassinations by unmanned aerial drone are pretty much expected in today’s world. But there are significant factors in deploying a drone strike, including the high profile of a drone and the possibility of being intercepted by anti-air missiles. Although small arms don’t have the same reach as a drone, they have the advantage of portability and concealability where they can be smuggled into a target location much more easily. Now that the feasibility of the concept has been proven, there are some that worry that these techniques will become ever more pervasive in the fields of security and intelligence, and could drastically change the methods of defending against them.
Of course, once a technology is proven useful, innovation in the field hardly stops. If we consider this Mark 1 of AI-enhanced remotely operated weapons, what comes next? An FN MAG is not a small gun nor is its mounting system, but if concealability dictated, who’s to say a smaller model couldn’t be dreamed up? If a close-range attack is the demand, a much smaller system could probably be built around a compact rifle or even a submachine gun and concealed in something much smaller than a truck bed. What if the goal hadn’t been an assassination with no others harmed but instead a targeted mass casualty attack? And of course, the big question with AI: autonomy. As far as we know in this case, even if facial recognition was employed, a human still had to identify the target and ultimately pull the trigger, so to speak. But I think there’s another kind of mutually assured destruction waiting in the wings; the one where the computer is given not just the technology to operate but the autonomy to decide to on its own.
As a rule I’m not typically someone to believe any tool is inherently good or bad. There are certainly arguments to be made for the development of remotely operated and AI-enhanced weapons; for instance, there are clear advantages for self-defense installations which could save lives from attacks. But even weapons built with good intentions have a tendency to be co-opted by those without, and bringing these capabilities into public awareness by starting with a high profile assassination doesn’t seem to be a great start down that path. As the technology advances and becomes more widely accessible, I worry we’ll come to see it used in a way that will make dystopian sci-fi scenes seem tame.
But that’s just my opinion, let me know what you think about remotely operated weapons, AI targeting control, or anything else covered in the video in the comments section. All comments are encouraged, but please keep them civil between one another. Until next time, it’s been a pleasure as always. Thank you.
