From: imbibe@mindspring.com   
      
   How Russia Uses Low Tech in Its High-Tech Weapons   
   By John Ismay, Sept. 4, 2022, NY Times   
      
   “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.”   
      
   How Russia obtained these parts is unclear. Mr. Spleeters is asking the   
   manufacturers of the semiconductors how their goods ended up in Russian   
   weapons, whether through legitimate transactions or straw-man purchases set up   
   to skirt the sanctions.   
      
   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 rocket, the Tornado-S. All of them contained   
   identical components marked SN-99    
   that on close inspection, the team said, proved to be satellite navigation   
   receivers that are critical for the missiles’ operation.   
      
   Mr. Spleeters said that 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.   
      
   “If you want to have effective control and make sure that the Russians   
   can’t get their hands on them, you need to know what the Russians need and   
   what they use,” Mr. Spleeters said. “Then it’s important to know how   
   they got it — what networks?   
    What suppliers did they use?”   
      
   The investigators found an overall reliance by Russian engineers on certain   
   semiconductors from specific Western manufacturers, not just in munitions but   
   also in surveillance drones, communications equipment, helicopter avionics and   
   other military goods.   
      
   “Over time, the Russians kept going back to the same manufacturers,” Mr.   
   Spleeters said. “Once you know that, it gets easier to target those   
   networks.”   
      
   “Looking at the computer chips in the same positions across multiple circuit   
   boards, they were always made by the same manufacturers,” he said.   
   “You’d have different dates of production, but always the same   
   manufacturer.”   
      
   The report also revealed sharp differences between Russia’s top-shelf   
   weapons and those that Ukrainian forces have received from the United States.   
      
   Warring parties often examine captured military hardware for intelligence   
   value. But the investigators said they were shocked by Russia’s apparent   
   indifference to having so many weapons that an adversary 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 taken by   
   the researchers. “   
   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.   
      
   To protect this operational knowledge, which the Pentagon refers to with the   
   anodyne term “critical program information,” military directives require   
   the use of anti-tampering technologies meant to secure the lines of computer   
   code and instructions    
   that tell a weapon how to find its target.   
      
   Publicly released Pentagon directives provide only an outline of the   
   program’s scope and requirements, and further details are classified.   
   Military officials declined to discuss any anti-tampering technologies that   
   the Defense Department may require.   
      
   “You can build a mesh around a computer chip that if probed will delete the   
   contents,” Mr. Menendez said, adding that such protections were used in   
   commercial goods like credit card readers to reduce theft and fraud.   
      
   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, he said.   
      
   “A team of college electrical engineering majors could build this,” he   
   said.   
      
   The hodgepodge of parts that Russia uses to build its guided weapons may also   
   help explain why its cruise missiles are sometimes not very accurate, Mr.   
   Menendez said.   
      
   Errors made by nonstandard GPS units in processing satellite signals can   
   ultimately cause a cruise missile to miss its target by a wide margin.   
      
   The Russian approach to weapons electronics appears to be “if you can’t   
   keep up, steal the tech and do your best with it,” Mr. Menendez said.   
      
   https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/04/us/politics/russia-missiles-ukraine.html   
      
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