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The Military

Downed Russian Fighters Said to Be Found With Basic GPS 'Taped To the Dashboards' (businessinsider.com) 406

Posted by EditorDavid from the tale-of-the-tape dept.
An anonymous reader quotes Business Insider: Wrecked Russian fighter jets are being found with rudimentary GPS receivers "taped to the dashboards" in Ukraine because their inbuilt navigation systems are so bad, the UK's defense secretary, Ben Wallace, said.... "[W]hilst Russia has large amounts of artillery and armor that they like parading, they are unable to leverage them for combined arms maneuver and just resort to mass indiscriminate barrages," he added....

Last month, Ukrainian troops paraded what they said was a Russian drone that had been covered in duct tape and fitted with a generic plastic bottle top for a fuel cap. In March, Ukrainian troops found what appeared to be Russian army bandages dating to 1978 discarded on a battlefield. In his Monday speech, Wallace said Russian vehicles "are frequently found with 1980s paper maps of Ukraine in them" and that soldiers were using "pine logs as makeshift protection on logistical trucks" and attaching "overhead 'cope cages' to their tanks."
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Downed Russian Fighters Said to Be Found With Basic GPS 'Taped To the Dashboards' More

Downed Russian Fighters Said to Be Found With Basic GPS 'Taped To the Dashboards'

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  • Russia is so technologically backward (Score:5, Funny)

    by hey! ( 33014 ) on Sunday May 15, 2022 @04:46PM (#62536712) Homepage Journal

    they haven't advanced from tape to Velcro.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by chill ( 34294 )

      This is a personal unit, so the pilot can play Pokemon Go! while flying. Gotta catch 'em all!

  • I'm not sure it matters (Score:4, Interesting)

    by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Sunday May 15, 2022 @04:51PM (#62536734)
    Putin seems to be dying of liver cancer. Doesn't matter how rich you are, that'll kill you. And when he goes they'll have an excuse to pull out.

    That said, Ukraine needs to hold up for that long. Which could easily be another 2 or 3 months. With the constant influx of weapons though they can do it.

    Meanwhile Russia is no longer a major player in the international scene. They'll be licking their wounds for 20 years.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by spth ( 5126797 )

      Have you followed the progress of the war?

      Why would Ukraine want to "hold up for that long"? In 2 to 3 months from they will have taken back all the territory Russia occupied a few years ago.

    • Putin seems to be dying of liver cancer. Doesn't matter how rich you are, that'll kill you. And when he goes they'll have an excuse to pull out.

      That said, Ukraine needs to hold up for that long. Which could easily be another 2 or 3 months...

      Why do you say 2 or 3 months? Do we know when Putin started treatment? Do we know at what stage he was diagnosed?

      Here are the stats for stage B (but knowing which stage he's at is anybody's guess):

      Without treatment, the median survival for stage B liver cancer is 16 months. With treatment, the median survival for stage B liver cancer is 20 months. To treat stage B liver cancer, you might have chemotherapy directly into the blood vessel feeding the tumour in the liver and blocking off the blood supply.
      https://www.cancerresearchuk.o... [cancerresearchuk.org]

      • Having treatment also means you're going to be in a very bad way from all the chemo, not enough energy to keep running things personally. Also it won't be state of the art chemo and treatment from the west either, it'll be home grown Russian chemo or Chinese.

    • Re:I'm not sure it matters (Score:4, Insightful)

      by franzrogar ( 3986783 ) on Sunday May 15, 2022 @05:28PM (#62536856)

      Quote: "They'll be licking their wounds for 20 years."

      20 years is not enough punishment for their acts of terrorism, war crimes, rapes, torture, executions, thieving (agricultura machines, wheat...), et cetera committed against the Ukrainian people.

    • Ukraine might even win (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Okian Warrior ( 537106 ) on Sunday May 15, 2022 @06:57PM (#62537060) Homepage Journal

      That said, Ukraine needs to hold up for that long. Which could easily be another 2 or 3 months.

      Been following the Ukraine war closely since the beginning. The top 2 websites for accurate information are Critical Threats [criticalthreats.org], and Ukrinform [ukrinform.net].

      The Ukrinform site is the official Ukrainian state feed for the war, so it's completely one-sided, but also completely accurate. I think Ukraine realized that while being the underdog, propaganda would be derided while accurate information would gain sympathy, so as a result everything posted there is strictly vetted for accuracy.

      For the first month or so, Ukrinform posted the number of "invaders killed" as maybe 5 to 20, each day depending on circumstance.

      Recently this has changed, and Ukrinform is now posting hundreds killed each day, sometimes upwards of 300. A recent posting [ukrinform.net] talks about 80 invaders destroyed in a single incident, and there's usually 3 or 4 such incidents each day.

      Basically, after a month's time the promised weapons have been filtering into Ukraine, their army has been making good use of them, and now they are on the offensive.

      The Russian army hasn't been much of a threat, either. The Critical Threats site noted this gem yesterday:

      The Ukrainian destruction of significant elements of a Russian motorized rifle brigade that tried to cross a pontoon bridge over the Siverskyi Donets River on May 11 has shocked prominent Russian milbloggers. Those bloggers have begun commenting on the incompetence of the Russian military to their hundreds of thousands of followers. The attempted river crossing showed a stunning lack of tactical sense as satellite images show (destroyed) Russian vehicles tightly bunched up at both ends of the (destroyed) bridge, clearly allowing Ukrainian artillerymen to kill hundreds and destroy scores of vehicles with concentrated strikes.

      Ukraine has been destroying Russian military hardware right-and-left, especially very expensive Russian military hardware such as jet fighters and helicopters. They have upped their game and pushed the Russians back, out of Karkiv and almost up to the original Ukraine/Russian border.

      It's looking a lot like Ukraine is going to win this war.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by sinij ( 911942 )
        Yes, analysis (both Western and Ukrainian) forecast that Russian military reserves (actual, not paper ones) are down to 5% or so. Few more weeks and they won't have any reserves to attack with. At that point Ukrainian forces will move into counter-attack.
        Also see these news sites:

        https://www.pravda.com.ua/eng/
        https://kyivindependent.com/

  • These guys have nuclear weapons. Those are very basic tech, and probably work.

    Please don't take the piss out of them, I live closer than you do.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by quonset ( 4839537 )

      I'm giving up the opportunity to use my mod points.

      These guys have nuclear weapons.

      So what? So do Great Britain and France, not to mention the U.S.

      Those are very basic tech, and probably work.

      Gotta love that clarification, 'probably'. Based on what the world is seeing of Russia's performance, or lack thereof, in Ukraine, there should be serious doubts as to the ability of Russia's nuclear weapons to work.

      Please don't take the piss out of them, I live closer than you do.

      In other words, just lay back and let

      • Giving up my points: you should be more worried about the failsafes controlling those nuclear weapons failing rather than the weapons themselves. After all, the latter can tolerate a 50% failure rate, but the former cannot tolerate a 0.000000001% failure rate.

        What if an early warning system erroneously tracks a Western aircraft near Ukraine as an inbound nuclear missile strike? What if they have the nuclear equivalent of GPSes duct-taped together in their nuclear missile silos?

        • "What if an early warning system erroneously tracks a Western aircraft near Ukraine as an inbound nuclear missile strike?"

          You probably didn't get the memo but long-range nuclear bombers went out of fashion back in the 1960s. ICBMs sort of made them redundant.

      • Pretty much no to all of that.

        >So what? So do Great Britain and France, not to mention the U.S.
        So what? The so what is, "let's be careful with diplomacy on this, and not wipe out life on the planet".

        >Gotta love that clarification, 'probably'
        I'm an engineer, not a politician. I live in the real world.

        >In other words, just lay back and let it happen
        That's your view, not mine. I'm just asking that immature comments are not spread that might cause an irrational nutjob to do something stupid in my neigh

        • that might cause an irrational nutjob to do something stupid in my neighbourhood.

          Such as invading another country just because?

      • I would bet money that some of those missiles will blow up while still in the launch tubes.

    • Pfft! Just ignore all the saber rattling. Now they're threatening Finland and Sweden for trying to join NATO. What next are they going to shake their fist at?

    • Re:Careful (Score:5, Insightful)

      by hey! ( 33014 ) on Sunday May 15, 2022 @05:54PM (#62536924) Homepage Journal

      The threshold success rate for an effective counter-value nuclear strike is exceedingly low. Leaving aside Russia's nuclear weapon stockpile, it has about 1600 nuclear warheads deployed. It's safe to say that at least half of them are aimed at the US; let's say 99% of them are lost or are duds. That'd be 8 warheads delivered. If those warheads were over US cities, they would probably cause the collapse of the US economy.

      It seems fairly likely that a lot of Russian stuff *would* fail. Putin's desire to annex Ukraine isn't just nostalgia, when the Soviet Union broke up it turns out that a lot of important Soviet stuff was in the Ukraine, like the tactical missile design bureaus in Kyiv and the strategic missile industry in Dnipro, which designed and built the R-36, the backbone of Russia's nuclear deterrent. Russia can't build any more R-36's, and it probably can't maintain it's existing arsenal. Before 2014 their R-36's were maintained by Ukraine. Who knows what state they are in now. The press has portrayed Russia's development of the RS-28 as nuclear sabre rattling, but it's really something Russia has no choice about. Given the level of corruption in Russia during the design of the RS-28, I wouldn't count on it working as well as advertised.

      Still, only a handful have to work to deliver a crippling blow.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by OzPeter ( 195038 )

        I live about 15 miles from a prime nuclear weapons target (major US weapons research lab). I'm sure a significant number of those Russian warheads are aimed in my general direction. I hope that they have fallen into disrepair, so that I only have to worry about the Chinese now /s

        • If it is any consolation, R&D places are on like the 3rd or 4th wave of attack. First two will be military and control targets - bases, known missile silos, politicians, etc.

      • The point of which being what? The Space-Based Infrared System (SBIRS) can detect a SCUD launch anywhere on Earth, and that is a *lot* less energetic than an RS-28.

        The US (And British, and French) response would be in flight and beyond recall before any of those missiles or warheads fell.

        The end result would be the annihilation of every city in Russia.

        The only way to win Nuclear war is not to play.

    • Re: Careful (Score:2, Insightful)

      by fermion ( 181285 )
      Basic is often best. Russia not only has nuclear weapons, the had an order of magnitude more weapons than the US a generation ago. The US has better rockets, but the cosmonauts still get back safely, though US astronauts says it is a wild ride. The US has the most advanced weapons, that fall to the most simplistic IED, which forces us to flee the war with out tail between our legs

      • No, the beloved leader of the DPRK has the best weapons. He can strike the world with his growing arsenal of ballistic missiles with nuclear warheads, we know it's true because he told us so.

        And let's not forget the new 'hypersonic' missiles that Russia and China have developed... they will completely defeat the West's crude trebuchetts and catapults as they hurl balls of flaming cow dung at the great (former Soviet) Russia!

        (/sarc)

    • So how close? If you were surrounded by Russian tanks, and they're indiscriminately shelling every building that seems to be housing civilians, then what? Part of the problem here is that for a very long time the west has looked away at Putin's brutality and aggression, not wanting to get involved. They had a ceasefire in Georgia that lasted one whole day until Putin threw it out, they waved a finger at him sternly after atrocities in Grozny, wrung their hands in despair as he bombed civilians in Syria,

      • China exports â500 billion in goods to the EU per year. Another $350 billion in goods to North America. Russia's trade is worth about $168 billion USD.

        There's a pretty solid reason to not upset $850 billion in trade for the sake of $168 billion. Or even better, just try to keep the status quo.

  • "Painted rustc (Score:5, Insightful)

    by RightwingNutjob ( 1302813 ) on Sunday May 15, 2022 @05:17PM (#62536816)

    This was a line uttered by a disaffected defector from the Soviet Union in a movie or tv show set in the period that I saw at some point over the last 20 years.

    And it resonated with me at the time because I lived through a short period of it in the late 80s as a small child.

    It seems the situation hasn't changed. But at least the Soviets were better about hiding their weaknesses than the Russian government is. All states and militaries seek to obfuscate their weaknesses and direct attention away from them, of course (it's just suicidal to broadcast them), and therein lies the problem.

    The Soviet Union could hide behind its propaganda wall and May Day parades without ever having to fire a single shot. And while it was quite sub-par on the inside (compared to the west) at least there was some degree of peace behind that propaganda army.

    Now Putin went and unzipped his pants to show how big a man he was and there was at best half a left nut in there. Yes it's "funny" to the extent that tens of thousands dead for no reason can be funny, but it's also more dangerous than the Cold War.

    During the Cold War, both sides were afraid of each other, and it kept the peace. Now, fewer people are afraid of Russia than there were 4 months ago. They got their feet wet and ended up putting their own blood in the water.

    I don't expect the West to start taking pot shots at them, but their other neighbors with axes to grind...now they're tempted in a way they weren't before.

    Military defeats abroad stress a regime. Democracies can weather those stresses much better than dictatorships. America is batting something like .150 in its military adventures since WW2 but we're mostly stable and our parochial tendencies and petty domestic rivalries tend to blunt the effect of failure abroad. A dictatorship that invests its entire identity in a military action that becomes a stunning embarrassment and invited more military threats...that's something that doesn't tend to survive very often.

    • The nuclear deterrence isn't really working. When Soviets were there, the pushes back and forth were in distant third world countries. After the fall of USSR, parts of NATO were still nervous about really doing much in Yugoslavia lest it provoke Russia because of nukes. Now it seems, Putin is actively doing the provoking, without worrying about "omg, NATO has nukes!"

      Part of this reasons seems to be that Putin HAS been doing a lot of poking for the last 20 years and there has been very push back in respon

  • You issue the oldest supplies for training... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by jfdavis668 ( 1414919 ) on Sunday May 15, 2022 @05:21PM (#62536832)
    And you use the newest for combat. Problem is, a lot of these Russian units didn't know they were about to go into combat. On a training range, I was once issued .50 machine gun ammo, that came in an odd ammo can. I was used to cans that opened from the small edge, and the top could be propped up to cover it as the belt fed over the lip. The cans I was issued opened to the longer side, and you had to remove the lid to fire. When we opened them, we found a little card on top that said "Repacked in 1950". The Army was still getting rid of WWII surplus ammo, since the M-2 has been around since the 1920's. Fired fine, but we would never be issued that in combat. Maybe the Russians should have told their soldiers to prepare better.

    • Re:You issue the oldest supplies for training... (Score:4, Informative)

      by quonset ( 4839537 ) on Sunday May 15, 2022 @05:42PM (#62536898)

      Maybe the Russians should have told their soldiers to prepare better.

      It's a bit difficult to prepare when you aren't told [theintercept.com] what you're supposed to do [newsweek.com].

    • Maybe the Russians should have told their soldiers to prepare better.

      Or prepared them for a fight longer than a few weeks. While we do not know the actual battle plans, everything suggests that at the highest level they did not plan for the fighting would last as long as it has. Stories of abandoned tanks due to no gas and soldiers issued only a few days of rations seems to me that this invasion was poorly planned and executed.

    • Have been taking money meant for the military equipment and pocketing it themselves. There's also strong evidence that even when the equipment gets made the oligarchs take it and sell it on.

      As usual you don't get rich spending your own money. If you want that kind of money you got to find a way to steal it

  • The more things change (Score:3)

    by aerogems ( 339274 ) on Sunday May 15, 2022 @05:29PM (#62536858)

    Some years back I remember watching a documentary about the Russian Czars, and I forget which Czar it was, but it was around the time of Napoleon IIRC. Anyway, a European power came storming in and was using the latest military tactics for the age, while Russia was still stuck in the previous century because the Russian nobility didn't see any particular need to modernize the military. So, they basically got stomped by the European forces, and if memory serves, really only "won" by throwing bodies into the meat grinder.

    Seems like the more things change, the more they stay the same with Russia. Peter the Great tried dragging the country into modernity kicking and screaming, then so did Stalin and some of the other Soviet leaders, only for Russia to once again get left behind and being trounced by a smaller country because Russia is still using WWII era tactics.

    With any luck, Putin will kick it very soon, and then maybe the next person to take power will end the decades long nightmare for the Russian people. Or the Russian people will finally have had enough and take matters into their own hands as they've done multiple times in the past with leaders who went insane. Seems like if a bunch of people stormed the Kremlin tomorrow, there wouldn't be much in the way of opposition.

  • Okay, I'm as anti-Russia on this as anyone (Score:5, Funny)

    by 93 Escort Wagon ( 326346 ) on Sunday May 15, 2022 @05:39PM (#62536890)

    But let's not take this Russia mockery to extremes.

    Let him who is without duct tape cast the first stone.

    • If the story is true, it seems to underline the duality of the Russian military where it projects military might but is also very behind on technology. One of the stories that can be confirmed is the use of cellphones by soldiers because their encrypted highly touted communications system, Era, simply did not work. And one of the reasons behind this was that Era required 3G cellphone networks to work. However, the very first thing Russia did was to destroy the Ukranian 3G networks and not replace them with

  • Take all news of this sort with a grain of salt. There has been extensive misinformation/disinformation about this conflict. This is normal in times of war.

  • What's next? Cheap, commercial GoPro cameras duct-taped to the inside of fighter-jets for some sweet YouTube upvotes?

  • If the bandages didn't degrade too much, then it's actually a waste of money to replace them with newer ones.

  • Sensitive, dual use technology (Score:3)

    by PPH ( 736903 ) on Sunday May 15, 2022 @09:06PM (#62537276)

    Who's letting the Russians get hold of duct tape?

  • They're for getting tracked vehicles (particularly tanks) unstuck from the mud. Usually when they're ready to push forward with tracked armor, they'll load them onto one of the lighter tracked vehicles like a BMP. Then if a T-72 gets stuck, they'll grab the logs and stick them under the tracks to give the tank purchase to pull itself out of the mud.

  • Roosh (Score:3)

    by Malays2 bowman ( 6656916 ) on Monday May 16, 2022 @03:32PM (#62539976)

    They also had to resort to stealing farm tractors and eating stray dogs.

      The Russian "army" is a total fucking mess, and all Putin is doing is throwing every rock he can get his hands on at the Ukraine and he does not even care what happens to his own soldiers.

      Russia was a basket case in the 1990s when Russian soldiers were selling or trading their weapons to anyone willing to buy in order to get something to eat. Imagine the same situation but 10 times worse.

      This will be extremely dangerous for the world as Russia will start selling nukes to North Korea (or maybe the underlings will) and other dangerous things to try to stay afloat as long as possible.

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