NYT: Russia Uses Low-Tech To Produce High-Tech Weapons
- 5.09.2022, 8:41
No Analogues.
As Russian forces fire precision-guided weapons at military and civilian targets in Ukraine, officers in Ukraine’s security service working with private analysts have collected parts of the crashed missiles. Cruise missiles are the top weapons in the Russian arsenal, but contain low-tech components. John Ismay's article in The New York Times tells about it. He made it based on the findings of the Conflict Armament Research, an independent British group that identifies weapons used in wars around the world. The research team examined the Russian materiel in July at the invitation of the Ukrainian government.
The report undercuts Moscow’s narrative of having a domestically rebuilt military that again rivals that of its Western adversaries. The weapons Russia is using to destroy Ukrainian towns and cities are often powered by Western innovation, despite sanctions imposed against Russia after it invaded Crimea in 2014.
“We saw that Russia reuses the same electronic components across multiple weapons, including their newest cruise missiles and attack helicopters, and we didn’t expect to see that,” said Damien Spleeters, an investigator for the group who contributed to the report. “Russian guided weapons are full of non-Russian technology and components, and most of the computer chips we documented were made by Western countries after 2014.” It is unclear, how Russia obtained these parts.
The investigators analyzed the remains of three types of Russian cruise missiles, including Moscow’s newest and most advanced model, the Kh-101, and its newest guided missile, the Tornado-S. All of them contained identical components marked SN-99 that on close inspection proved to be satellite navigation receivers that are critical for the missiles’ operation.
Russia’s use of the same components pointed to bottlenecks in its supply chain and that restricting the supply of SN-99 components would slow Moscow’s ability to replenish its diminishing stockpile of guided weapons. The investigators found an overall reliance of Russian engineers on certain semiconductors from specific Western manufacturers, not just in munitions but also in drones, communications equipment, helicopter avionics and other military goods.
Sharp differences between Russia’s top-shelf weapons and those that Ukrainian forces have received from the United States were revealed. The investigators were shocked by Russia’s apparent indifference to having so many weapons that an enemy could potentially reverse-engineer.
“This is late 1990s or a mid-2000s level of technology at best,” Arsenio Menendez, a NASA contractor who reverse-engineers guided weapon components as a hobby, said after examining photos of Russian military electronics. “It’s basically the equivalent of an Xbox 360 video game console, and it looks like it’s open to anyone who wants to take it apart and build their own copy of it.”
By comparison, the U.S. Defense Department has standards that military contractors must follow to make it harder for adversarial nation-states to build their own versions of captured weapons. “You can build a mesh around a computer chip that if probed will delete the contents,” Arsenio Menendez said.
The Russian navigation system resembles the open-source architecture of GPS receivers, which is not subject to federal restrictions regarding the sale and export of defense articles.
“A team of college electrical engineering majors could build this,” he said.
The mess of parts that Russia uses to build its guided weapons may also help explain why its cruise missiles are sometimes not very accurate. Errors made by nonstandard GPS units in processing satellite signals can ultimately cause a cruise missile to miss its target.