At least it wasn’t a drone with a machine gun.
Coming soon to a Guns-R-Us near you!
I don’t understand why people think this was so crazy or prone to error. The way I see it going down, Israeli intelligence probably watched this guy for a long time and knew exactky which routes he takes. So they set up a remote machine gun, maybe on several different routes.
Depending on the exact tech, this gun could have a remote operator using a tracking scope to identify the target. Once you identify the target in the aquisition scope, the object and its coordinates are fed to the automatic gun, which can now track and fire on the target autonomously.
There is already a gun available that allows absolutely untrained people to make 1000 yd sniper shots. Basically, you aim at the target, and when the crosshairs touch the target you press an ‘acquire’ button. Now the target is highlighted and tracked in the optics, so you know you picked the right one. Now when you think you have the scope on target you press the trigger, but the gun will not fire until it has calculated windage, elevation, etc. So you just slowly wave the gun around the target with the trigger pressed, , and when the barrel is in the exact right position, the gun fires. Perfect shot every time, within the limits of wind detection, etc.
I can imagine a remote machine gun with the same tech. Or, you could have a remote machine gun with an operative on a roof nearby illuminating the target with a laser designator, as they do to guide high altitude bombs into exact locations. The operator acquires the target, presses the ‘lock’ button or whatever, and now the gun starts tracking the target and fires as soon as it has a clear shot. Operator observes that the target is down, hits another button to blow up the gun, then leaves the building and fades into the crowd. The building could be half a mile away from the gun.
I imagine you could even do this autonomously with facial recognition. Put a gun near the exit of a building, and it reads the faces of the people coming out. As soon as it matches the correct face it starts tracking, and fires when it has the best solution. It could sit there for months before it has the shot. You could even design it to only fire if there were no people behind the target.
One day there could be hundreds of these things all over, just waiting to be told when to fire. Imagine a mechanical, perfectly patient sniper sitting in a nest a quarter mile away from a government building. One day you decide to assassinate X, so you send a facial recognition map of the target to the gun, and tell it to go to work. Maybe it happens a day later, or a year later. But one day the target walks out the front door, and blam.
It’s almost like a mine, except it can strike from a distance. I could imagine one of these bejng activated by a government and not firing for years, when the government that put it in doesn’t even exist any more. Lkke an unexploded mine from WWII going off today.
We have no idea what tech this assassination used, but it could have been just as reliable and sensitive to collateral damage as any other means of killing an enemy.
@Sam_Stone - I don’t know if the tech is quite there yet - but in the long term you are absolutely right, there is no reason why a human fired weapon would be inherently less prone to causing civilian damage. A computer guided machine gun could be programmed not to fire unless it is absolutely sure that it has a bead on the correct target, making this judgement call with far more accuracy than a human, and reevaluating on a millisecond by millisecond basis.
I haven’t seen anyone build a computer aimed rifle capable of that sort of precision, but it seems like the sort of accomplishment you wouldn’t trumpet, anyways.
Has Israel ever given a reason as to why it should be the only Middle Eastern nation (other than Pakistan) allowed to possess nukes - other than, “our enemies would nuke us?”
Has any nuclear power given any actual justification as to why they should have nuclear weapons but nonproliferation is still desirable?
Of course they have. But it amounts to “We’re responsible global citizens. Others are not. Besides, we’re bigger than the people complaining.”
Those aren’t good justifications, and the claim to being a “responsible global citizen” is more or less credible depending on who said it. And, as recent hisory demonstrates, is also subject to change over time.
But that’s what been said.
You also have the argument
5 (or 7-ish or …) countries with nukes is a regrettable, but well-controlled and dynamically quasi-stable situation. 40 countries with nukes on the way to 150 countries with nukes would be a chaos statistically certain to result in an Armageddon somewhere a lot sooner than later.
IOW, there’s no good answer, so pick the least bad.
Meet the Trackingpoint gun:
It even has an iPad app that duplicates the scope image so a ‘spotter’ can watch and tag a target on a remote iPad screen.
If this gun were on a simple motorized mount, you could do the whole thing remotely.
If private companies can make these for market, imagine what a government project coild come up with.
Nissan! Damn good little trucks. Got 3 of them. Would buy more if I could find them.
I am sorry - I looked this up and couldn’t find an answer. What is AQI an acronym for?
Al Qaeda in Iraq. A group of insurgents who, among other things, would occassionally ambush convoys or isolated trucks, traveling along the roads within and between major cities.
@Sam_Stone , instead of Tracking Point—which we’ve covered before in threads here—something like these autonomous networked guns is probably what you’re looking for. I still think people are cheaper and easier for this particular situation in Iran, but those Samsung guns fit what you’re talking about. And are more useful for the particular situation along the DMZ than another 2 to 4 man observation post. Smaller footprint, for one thing.
Oh. I did see this in the search results but didn’t understand you were also discussing their work in the context of ambush tactics. Thank you.