Russia has been covering some of its fighters and bombers with tires for months. The US believes it knows exactly why

Since satellites have existed, it has become more difficult to keep some secrets. These instruments have been used for some time by some town councils to detect, for example, private swimming pools and adjust tax payments. They are also an element Key to the defense sector. Every so often, nations launch new spy satellites to gather intelligence from space. This data, as you might imagine, is private. But there’s more.

Many images captured from orbit are openly available. These resources have revealed the construction of the world’s largest amphibious assault ship by China or the planes covered with tires by Russia. There were more questions than answers about the latter. It was not clear for what purpose the country led by Vladimir Putin was placing these elements on some aircraft.

End of the mystery in sight

Russia has not provided any details about the practice, but a senior US military official has offered the most reasonable explanation. Schuyler Moore, chief technology officer at the US Central Command (CENTCOM), He explained in an interview with the Center for Strategic and International Studies that tires seek protect aircraft from enemiesbut not directly from ammunition. Let’s see.

“If you’re looking at an airplane and you put tires on the wings, all of a sudden a lot of computer vision models have trouble recognizing that it’s still an airplane,” Moore said. She added that this is where the artificial intelligence (AI) models that military systems run come into play, and updating them isn’t as easy as it might seem. Improving detection requires retraining the models with updated data.

The bomber seen in the satellite image is a Soviet-era Tu-95.

In the case of the Russian aircraft covered in tires, the captured images could be used to improve detection models. The problem arises that when the tire detection model on aircraft is active, the enemy could simply choose another item to confuse the system again, and so on. Here we should see more advanced AI systems capable of dealing with these possible changes.

Throughout the conflict, which has lasted more than two and a half years, we have seen many peculiar images. For example, Russian “turtle tanks”, armoured with metal shells designed to withstand attacks by Ukrainian drones. This practice, it should be noted, has also been carried out on the other side. Ukraine has also created structures to protect nearly $10 million Abrams tanks from Russian ammunition.

Images | Maxar | Sergey Kustov

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