[News] Israel's video game killing technology

[Anti-Imperialist News]

Israel's video game killing technology

Jonathan Cook, The Electronic Intifada, 13 July 2010
http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article11390.shtml


It is called Spot and Shoot. Operators sit in front of a TV monitor 
from which they can control the action with a PlayStation-style joystick.

The aim: to kill terrorists.

Played by: young women serving in the Israeli army.

Spot and Shoot, as it is called by the Israeli military, may look 
like a video game but the figures on the screen are real people -- 
Palestinians in Gaza -- who can be killed with the press of a button 
on the joystick.

The female soldiers, located far away in an operations room, are 
responsible for aiming and firing remote-controlled machine-guns 
mounted on watch-towers every few hundred meters along an electronic 
fence that surrounds Gaza.

The system is one of the latest "remote killing" devices developed by 
Israel's Rafael armaments company, the former weapons research 
division of the Israeli army and now a separate governmental firm.

According to Giora Katz, Rafael's vice-president, remote-controlled 
military hardware such as Spot and Shoot is the face of the future. 
He expects that within a decade at least a third of the machines used 
by the Israeli army to control land, air and sea will be unmanned.

The demand for such devices, the Israeli army admits, has been partly 
fueled by a combination of declining recruitment levels and a 
population less ready to risk death in combat.

Oren Berebbi, head of its technology branch, recently told an 
American newspaper: "We're trying to get to unmanned vehicles 
everywhere on the battlefield ... We can do more and more missions 
without putting a soldier at risk."

Rapid progress with the technology has raised alarm at the United 
Nations. Philip Alston, its special rapporteur on extrajudicial 
executions, warned last month of the danger that a "PlayStation 
mentality to killing" could quickly emerge.

According to analysts, however, Israel is unlikely to turn its back 
on hardware that it has been at the forefront of developing -- using 
the Occupied Palestinian Territories, and especially Gaza, as testing 
laboratories.

Remotely controlled weapons systems are in high demand from 
repressive regimes and the burgeoning homeland security industries 
around the globe.

"These systems are still in the early stages of development but there 
is a large and growing market for them," said Shlomo Brom, a retired 
general and defense analyst at the Institute of National Security 
Studies at Tel Aviv University.

The Spot and Shoot system -- officially known as Sentry Tech -- has 
mostly attracted attention in Israel because it is operated by 19- 
and 20-year-old female soldiers, making it the Israeli army's only 
weapons system operated exclusively by women.

Female soldiers are preferred to operate remote killing devices 
because of a shortage of male recruits to Israel's combat units. 
Young women can carry out missions without breaking the social taboo 
of risking their lives, said Brom.

The women are supposed to identify anyone suspicious approaching the 
fence around Gaza and, if authorized by an officer, execute them 
using their joysticks.

The Israeli army, which plans to introduce the technology along 
Israel's other confrontation lines, refuses to say how many 
Palestinians have been killed by the remotely controlled machine-guns 
in Gaza. According to the Israeli media, however, it is believed to 
be several dozen.

The system was phased-in two years ago for surveillance, but 
operators were only able to open fire with it more recently. The army 
admitted using Sentry Tech in December to kill at least two 
Palestinians several hundred meters inside the fence.

The Haaretz newspaper, which was given rare access to a Sentry Tech 
control room, quoted one soldier, Bar Keren, 20, saying: "It's very 
alluring to be the one to do this. But not everyone wants this job. 
It's no simple matter to take up a joystick like that of a Sony 
PlayStation and kill, but ultimately it's for defense."

Audio sensors on the towers mean that the women hear the shot as it 
kills the target. No woman, Haaretz reported, had failed the task of 
shooting what the army calls an "incriminated" Palestinian.

The Israeli military, which enforces a so-called "buffer zone" -- an 
unmarked no-man's land -- inside the fence that reaches as deep as 
300 metres into the tiny enclave, has been widely criticized for 
opening fire on civilians entering the closed zone.

In separate incidents in April, a 21-year-old Palestinian 
demonstrator was shot dead and a Maltese solidarity activist wounded 
when they took part in protests to plant a Palestinian flag in the 
buffer zone. The Maltese woman, Bianca Zammit, was videoing as she was hit.

It is unclear whether Spot and Shoot has been used against such demonstrations.

The Israeli army claims Sentry Tech is "revolutionary." And that will 
make its marketing potential all the greater as other armies seek out 
innovations in "remote killing" technology.

Rafael is reported to be developing a version of Sentry Tech that 
will fire long-range guided missiles.

Another piece of hardware recently developed for the Israeli army is 
the Guardium, an armored robot-car that can patrol territory at up to 
80km per hour, navigate through cities, launch "ambushes" and shoot 
at targets. It now patrols the Israeli borders with Gaza and Lebanon.

Its Israeli developers, G-Nius, have called it the world's first 
"robot soldier". It looks like a first-generation version of the 
imaginary "robot-armour" worn by soldiers in the popular recent 
sci-fi movie Avatar.

Rafael has produced the first unmanned naval patrol boat, the 
"Protector", which has been sold to Singapore's navy and is being 
heavily marketing in the US. A Rafael official, Patrick Bar-Avi, told 
the Israeli business daily Globes: "Navies worldwide are only now 
beginning to examine the possible uses of such vehicles, and the 
possibilities are endless."

But Israel is most known for its role in developing "unmanned aerial 
vehicles" -- or drones, as they have come to be known. Originally 
intended for spying, and first used by Israel over south Lebanon in 
the early 1980s, today they are increasingly being used for 
extrajudicial executions from thousands of feet in the sky.

In February Israel officially unveiled the 14 meter-long Heron TP 
drone, the largest ever. Capable of flying from Israel to Iran and 
carrying more than a ton of weapons, the Heron was tested by Israel 
in Gaza during Operation Cast Lead in winter 2008-09, when some 1,400 
Palestinians were killed.

More than 40 countries now operate drones, many of them made in 
Israel, although so far only the Israeli and US armies have deployed 
them as remote-controlled killing machines. Israeli drones are being 
widely used in Afghanistan.

Smaller drones have been sold to the German, Australian, Spanish, 
French, Russian, Indian and Canadian armies. Brazil is expected to 
use the drone to provide security for the 2014 World Cup 
championship, and the Panamanian and Salvadoran governments want them 
too, ostensibly to run counter-drug operations.

Despite its diplomatic crisis with Ankara, Israel was reported last 
month to have completed a deal selling a fleet of 10 Herons to the 
Turkish army for $185 million.

Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in Nazareth, Israel. 
His latest books are 
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0745327540/theelectronic-20>Israel 
and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the 
Middle East (Pluto Press) and 
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1848130317/theelectronic-20>Disappearing 
Palestine: Israel's Experiments in Human Despair (Zed Books). His 
website is <http://www.jkcook.net/>www.jkcook.net.

A version of this article originally appeared in 
<http://www.thenational.ae/>The National, published in Abu Dhabi.



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