[Taggart] Anybody got a SIM card? Somebody’s gotta go back and get a shitload a’ SIM cards.[/Taggart]
That was cool, thanks. Those things are badass and get great footage to boot.
How difficult is it to a target with those drone-dropped anti vehicle weapons? RKG 1600? There are unguided, right? I don’t know at what altitude the drones operate (<200’?) but it seems accounting for wind drift would be a problem. I saw a video where it looks like three were dropped on one target and while all three seemed to come very close, its was hard to tell if any of them actually hit the vehicle. With a small shaped charge wouldn’t a direct hit be necessary?
No, they fire laser-guided smart munitions.
Aren’t cell phone calls encrypted these days?
Thousands of feet. At 200 feet they might as well blow themselves up. Even a Russian could hit that.
I believe 4G networks are customarily encrypted but older modes aren’t necessarily, and I have my doubts a civilian encryption will stop a reasonably good EW-capable nation.
Broadcasting in the clear is also just the first of many idiotic things soldiers do. They simply transmit for too long, too - a very common issue with cell phone usage in the field in particular - and react slowly and poorly to jamming.
I think you might be talking about different weapon systems and drones. The TB2 is a purpose-built military drone that uses precision guided munitions; from what I’ve been able to dig up the RKG 1600 is a modified RKG-3 anti-tank hand grenade that is being used with small, commercial drones. I hadn’t heard of them before now.
This is the Ukrainian RKG-1600, an adapted RKG-3 anti-armour hand grenade with added tails and delayed arming for use with UAS.
In 2020, Kiev Arsenal developed a simple drone bomb by attaching aerodynamic fins to the Soviet-era RKG-3 anti-tank grenade and is called the RKG-1600.
This was demonstrated in a military exercise and said to be able to hit a target a meter across from an altitude of 300 meters high, enough for the drone to be virtually invisible and inaudible.
The RKG-1600 grenades are apparently produced using 3D printed parts.
ETA: Apparently unguided?
Ukrainian Mayak Plant enterprise has developed a more professional approach to convert RKG-3 hand grenade into bomblet for drones – an unguided RKG-1600 ammunition.
I’m talking about the Bayraktar TB2s.
The TB2’s primary weapon is the UMTAS anti-armor missile. which is the Turkish equivalent of the USA’s Hellfire. Like Hellfire, it was originally designed for use from attack helicopters, as a result of which they are about the same size, look quite a bit alike, and have broadly similar capabilities.
In case anyone notices there seem to be weapons with two different-looking “noses” here, you’re right. The missiles on the top rack are the laser guided “L-UMTAS” variant; the ones on the bottom are the fire-and-forget IR version.
I wonder how many missiles Ukraine has; I suspect they’re going through them pretty quick.
4G systems are aren’t encrypted end-to-end, just between the user and base station, so anyone with access to the base station has access to the unencrypted data. Of course, you can use additional applications that will encrypt communications peer-to-peer as described upthread, but that means that everyone needs to be using that same app and have the necessary authentication keys, which given the ad hoc nature of use is probably not happening. In addition, if you know that a certain operator is an adversary, you don’t actually have to decrypt the signal to locate them; you just need to have their credentials. And I’m morally certain that NSA, GCHQ, and other signals intelligence agencies of NATO member nations are capable of decrypting these signals in near-real time and providing that information back to Ukrainian Special Forces.
Communications discipline is only second to light discipline in terms of importance on the operational security on the battlefield, and is violated by everyone from privates to generals with abandoned because nobody thinks it actually applies to them. Besides, you’re a Russian soldier stuck in a ditch, cut off from your leadership and supplies, being shot at by some unseen sniper, no way to go forward and nowhere to go back. What else is there to do than call someone up and loudly curse for backup and air support that you know probably isn’t coming?
Stranger
Which is hardly relevant, in itself, to the Russians: There’s no sneaking in with columns of tanks and other vehicles, especially not in flat country like Ukraine. It’s only relevant if you know that one particular vehicle in the column is more valuable than others, such as because it contains a general. And that, you only learn after you decrypt the transmissions.
Wasn’t this an issue in some war in the past? Only the commanders’ tanks had big antennas on them so everyone started shooting at tanks with the big antennas on them?
Not necessarily; you can deduce the importance of a potential target by their location and frequency of calls from various sources in proximity to maneuvers. And even if you can’t decrypt those communications, if you can correlate them with other messages sent in the open between individual soldiers you can work up a pattern. Hence, @RickJay’s criticism of the poor communications security of troops because it takes only a few leaks to give enough information to form a good picture of your opponent’s plans and intentions.
Stranger
Oh, no, I disagree. It’s not second. It’s first. After all, light discipline only matters at night; a lack of radio discipline will kill you 24/7. Light discipline is a line of sight thing; radio discipline can result in people very far away figuring out what you’re doing and how best to murder you. Soldiers are, in my experience, usually pretty good at light discipline, and officers and NCOs will shit on you if you’re not; they are NOT good at radio discipline. (This is, I suspect, because light discipline is straightforward and it’s immediately, perceptually obvious when you don’t obey it, whereas radio discipline is kind of abstract.)
The amount we could divine from the other side’s use of the EM spectrum was truly staggering, and you don’t even need to unencrypt or listen to the words to figure most of it out. Transmitter and wavelength types and characteristics, locations, and usage patterns give you all the clues you need to know to map out formations from the army level down to the company or even platoon, and often ascertain their intentions with a fair degree of accuracy. The worse your adversary’s radio discipline the faster you can sort it out. And in professional armies it’s often not great. In the Russian army it’s probably terrible.
Well, hey, if the sniper already knows where you are, giving your location away on the radio isn’t going to make the situation any worse.
Where EW intelligence assets really make hay is at the operational level. It’s between companies and brigades and all points in between that you see a lot of different kinds of transmitters; not just tactical and operation VHF radio in the combat net frequency range (or whatever Russia calls their CNF) and strategic HF comms, but air defense radars, artillery ranging and counterbattery radars, EW assets like jammers, and so on. Various types, patterns, and signal strengths can be reliably assigned to different sizes and types of formations, and with a map and an understanding of your enemy’s structure and typical order of battle, you can translate your known transmitter types into reliable unit sizes and types. With even a little bit of supporting intel from other sources - HUMINT seems to be pouring in in the case of Ukraine, but you’ve also got other stuff, I loved aerial photos - it’s really not hard to sketch out.
Of course, a clever enemy can deceive you. Germany was famously hoodwinked in 1944 on both fronts. I do not get the sense the Russians sent to conquer Ukraine are the most clever army ever assembled.
Fair enough. My training is more in tactical shooting where light discipline is crucial and comm discipline doesn’t really come into it.
If (as it appears) they are using the same Soviet-era doctrine that Saddam’s Iraqi Army was trained in, how could they lose?
Stranger
It’s surprising how much information can be unintentionally given away. From what I’ve read, during WW2 allied forces gleaned a lot of information from encoded German transmissions of morse code just based on the specific rhythms used by the sender, i.e. the sender’s “fist”:
In addition, individual operators differ slightly, for example, using slightly longer or shorter dahs or gaps, perhaps only for particular characters. This is called their “fist”, and experienced operators can recognize specific individuals by it alone.
Once you know specific German radio telegraph operators by their fist, you can start to piece together important information just by knowing who is sending messages from where.
Specific habits of word choice are often another giveaway of identity. Think of how idiosyncratic our writing styles are here on the 'Dope, apply that same concept to wartime communications, and you get the idea.
Thinking about this, it seems a bit like data mining.
I read somewhere that one thing that seems to be lacking is what is called “unity of command”.
This means that apparently there’s no ONE commander for the offensive, and instead the various high level Russian generals are competing with each other and acting independently.
That sort of clusterf**k could explain why they seem to be so shambolic.
This was the case in the early part of Barbarossa in WWII, the Reds did not trust ordinary soldiers with radios, only command tanks with Commissars The Germans quickly learned if you took out the enemy command tank, the rest of their command were utterly helpless, you didn’t even need to kill them.
Initially the Russians put fake aerials on all their tanks, and IIRC ended up allowing all their armour access to radios.