The 9th Season of the long-running counter-terrorism drama 24 debuted only a few days ago to much fanfare.
For those unfamiliar with the concept, each 24-episode season covers 24 hours in the life of Jack Bauer, an agent within the fictional Counter Terrorist Unit, using the real time method of narration.
The most recent season takes place in London during a visit b the President of the United States. To prevent an assassination of POTUS, Bauer,with the help of a disgraced CIA agent and a hacker collective preaching free information, must confront an unseen enemy whose personal vendetta threatens to push the world to the brink of war.
So far, so Hollywood.
24 is famous for containing kernels of genuine geopolitical concern or technological capability and the first episode in the new season ended with a fantastical scene involving the remote hijacking of an unmanned aerial vehicle providing top cover to a military patrol in Kajaki Province, Afghanistan.
The pilot watches in horror as the drone, likely a General Atomics MQ-1 Predator, moves independently of his controls; arms a weapons package and delivers a strike
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The pilot watches in horror as the drone, likely a General Atomics MQ-1 Predator, moves independently of his controls; arms a weapons package and delivers a strike onto the patrol who were unaware of the targeting. The scene cuts to a Derek Yates, a British criminal hacker, who was responsible for the remote override.
Film directors and scriptwriters have often been extremely liberal with the truth regarding technological capabilities – for instance the video below shows the ridiculous Hollywood habit of enhancing photos.
However, the incident appears to be an amalgamation of two genuine incidents.
Lone Star Battalion Friendly Fire Incident
In October 2011, the Pentagon released a summary regarding the classified 381 page report into the blue-on-blue killing of Marine Staff Sgt. Jeremy Smith, 26, and Navy Hospitalman Benjamin D. Rast, 23.
The Los Angeles Times reported that -
The friendly fire deaths in April occurred at 8:51 a.m. in Helmand province after Smith and his platoon, members of a reserve unit from Houston, came under enemy fire. The platoon had split up while trying to clear a road near the crossroads town of Sangin, an area in which Marines were engaged in nearly daily combat with insurgents.
Smith, Rast and another Marine had separated from the others and had taken cover behind a hedgerow, where they were firing on insurgents in a cluster of nearby buildings. Infrared cameras on the Predator overhead had picked up heat signatures of the three men and detected muzzle flashes as they fired their weapons at insurgents.
Air Force analysts who were watching the live video in Terre Haute, Indiana, noted that the gunfire appeared aimed away from the other Marines, who were behind the three. The analysts reported that gunshots were “oriented to the west, away from friendly forces,” the Pentagon report says.
But the Predator crew didn’t realize that Smith and the two others had separated from the other Marines, and assumed they were enemy, according to the report.
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But the Predator crew didn’t realize that Smith and the two others had separated from the other Marines, and assumed they were enemy, according to the report.
The pilot radioed “time of flight 17 seconds.” A Marine at the scene suddenly radioed a warning: The missile was headed for “the wrong building.” But the Hellfire exploded on Smith’s position, killing him and Rast.
The report blames the attack on a fatal mix of poor communications, faulty assumptions and “a lack of overall common situational awareness.”
The line in bold mirrors the final few moments of the 24 episode in which the drone pilot, Lt. Chris Tanner, desperately attempts to contact the Kajaki patrol using a satellite phone to warn them they are about to be struck, but it is too little too late resulting in 4 x KIA.
RQ-170 Incident
The second incident concerns the capabilities of an external force to gain remote control of an unmanned aerial vehicle from the authorised pilots – a plot device which closely resembles the Iran–U.S. RQ-170 incident.
On 4 December 2011, an American Lockheed Martin RQ-170 Sentinel UAV was captured by Iranian forces near the city of Kashmar in north-eastern Iran. The Iranian government announced that the UAV was “brought down by its cyberwarfare unit which commandeered the aircraft and safely landed it”, after initial reports from Western news sources inaccurately claimed that it had been “shot down”.
Undated picture shows member of Iran’s revolutionary guard pointing at U.S. RQ-170 unmanned spy plane as he speaks with Hajizadeh at unknown location in Iran
Despite initial denials, President Obama, later confirmed the capture, famously asking for the return of the intelligence asset. Former U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney criticised Obama’s decisions on the drone, saying that, after the aircraft went down, the president should have ordered an airstrike within Iran.
“The right response to that would have been to go in immediately after it had gone down and destroy it. You can do that from the air … and, in effect, make it impossible for them to benefit from having captured that drone.”
The incident has garnered considerable internet speculation. A report in the Air Force Times, dated 9 December 2011, stated that
The Iranian broadcast showed apparent footage of a mostly intact RQ-170 put on public display. While the craft showed some damage, it seemed to be in remarkably good shape.
One source said the aircraft in the footage was definitely the Sentinel, a subsonic, high-altitude reconnaissance aircraft built by Lockheed Martin. The aircraft appeared to have sustained damage consistent with a wheels-up landing, he said.
Dan Goure, an analyst at the Lexington Institute said the largely intact airframe ruled out the possibility of an engine or navigational malfunction.
“Either this was a cyber/electronic warfare attack system that brought the system down or it was a glitch in the command-and-control system,” he said.
If it was a malfunction, it was a spectacular one. Not only did the aircraft lose its command link, it also failed to return to base as it was designed to do in such an eventuality, Goure said.
Aboulafia, another analyst, pronounced himself flummoxed that the RQ-170 was not programmed to self-destruct.
A Christian Science Monitor article relates an Iranian engineer’s assertion that the drone was captured by jamming both satellite and land-originated control signals to the UAV, followed up by a GPS spoofing attack that fed the UAV false GPS data to make it land in Iran at what the drone thought was its home base in Afghanistan. Stephen Trimble from Flight Global assumes UAV guidance could be targeted by 1L222 Avtobaza radar jamming and deception system supplied to Iran by Russia.
American aeronautical engineers dispute this, pointing out that as is the case with the MQ-1 Predator, the MQ-9 Reaper, and the Tomahawk, “GPS is not the primary navigation sensor for the RQ-170… The vehicle gets its flight path orders from an inertial navigation system”
Regardless of the technical veracity, the possibility of state-on-state UAV hijacking will surface periodically as the ubiquitousness of drones invade the society. Although no evidence exists of the hijacking of a remote weapons system, the sensationalised events of the 24: Live Another Day are, at first glance, grounded in a series of obscure truths.