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People keep wanting to chalk this up to Russian incompetence. But I feel like a far more likely explanation is electronic sabotage. Planes are complex electroni
by darawk 5y ago
People keep wanting to chalk this up to Russian incompetence. But I feel like a far more likely explanation is electronic sabotage. Planes are complex electronic, connected instruments. They rely heavily on computers and electronic sensors.
As fun as it is to dunk on the Russians for their incompetence here, it seems far more likely to me that it's a sign of the profound competence of the US/NATO at electronic warfare. IMO this explanation accounts for at least half of what's being chalked up to "logistics" failures on the Russian's part.
- TMWNN 5y ago>As fun as it is to dunk on the Russians for their incompetence here, it seems far more likely to me that it's a sign of the profound competence of the US/NATO at electronic warfare. As much as I'd like to believe that US Wild Weasel aircraft orbiting outside Ukraine are capable of zapping Russian aircraft inside Ukraine and Russia itself, this does not seem likely.
- darawk 5y agoYou could be right, but if you acknowledge that it's possible in principle to do this, why wouldn't we be investing heavily in it? Being able to ground an enemy's air force without appearing to fight them would be an incredibly powerful capability. I think there are a lot of reasons to believe it should be possible, and if it's possible, every reason to believe it would be invested in. I certainly don't have any evidence to prove it though, so its certainly reasonable to disagree.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- jonstewart 5y agoAny evidence?
- darawk 5y agoNo evidence, just intuition.
- _moof 5y agoAny firsthand experience in military aviation to guide that intuition?
- darawk 5y agoNo, but some firsthand experience in the cyber-security industry, and enough knowledge of how planes work to know its possible in principle. At least, assuming there are bugs in the onboard software, which i've no doubt there are. EDIT: Planes are absorbing a tremendous amount of input from their environment at all times, both digital and analog. That input is, in many cases, being processed by software. Just to articulate the model a little further.
- _moof 5y agoI'm an avionics engineer with commercial flight ops experience and I'm extremely skeptical of this hypothesis.
- Kostchei 5y agoAustralia has had over the horizon radar for decades. Maybe there is a 2020+ version that is sufficiently fine grained to use for training to the target.
- darawk 5y agoYou very well could be right. It just seems to me that the surface area is large, and the value of exploitation is high. Anything from targeting sensors on the plane with lasers, to exploiting ground stations / satellites / IFF systems, to interdicting component supply chains and inserting remotely triggerable flaws. These are just the things that hit my particular mind immediately, but i'm sure there are many other possibilities. Keep in mind that military aircraft have tons of specialized systems on them that civillian aircraft do not. And further, that countries would be willing to spend, literally, billions of dollars to build systems that could exploit flaws like this. So even for quite exotic ideas like say, designing ground objects with exotic shapes that have radar signatures that trigger flaws in onboard processing software, or whatever. I'm just making things up here, but there are undoubtedly teams of physicists, avionics experts and cybersecurity experts tasked with studying this, even if just to ensure our systems are not vulnerable to it. It's possible that all that has come to nothing, but it would not surprise me if it hasn't.