Russia’s Use of Car Tires on Top of Military Jets Finally Explained
Reduce fragmentation damage, confuse infrared imagers, or just the newest Russian fashion statement hitting the tarmac. Now we know!
Last fall, many defense analysts, myself included, pondered the wisdom of Russia putting car tires on the fuselage of their expensive military aircraft.
Russia was first observed using tires to help shield Tu-95 and Tu-160 bombers at the Engels-2 Air Base from attack in the fall of 2023.
At the time, Ukraine had been having great success hitting Russian aircraft parked on the ramps at Russian air bases using long-range drones.
Right about that time, in September, Ukraine has also recently retooled its Neptune cruise missile, (normally used as an anti-ship weapon), to strike targets on land.
I imagine the Russian conversation happening like this:
Russian Army General Valery Gerasimov sits at his desk in Moscow in deep concentration as he works on the newest New York Times crossword puzzle.
Suddenly, his aide runs into the room.
“General! The Ukrainians have modified their Neptune anti-ship cruise missile to hit targets on land! They have a range of 300 kilometers! And their long-range drones are wreaking havoc on our cargo aircraft.”
General Gerasimov stands and walks over to his window overlooking western Moscow.
After a long silence, the aide speaks up, “Your orders, General?”
To which General Gerasimov finally responds… “Yes, thank you, Pasha. It’s time. Initiate Operation Michelin.”
All joking aside, I speculated why Russia would go to these extreme force protection measures when many companies manufacture portable aircraft hangers. These rigid structures can be assembled in as little as an hour and can, at a minimum, provide some protection against Ukrainian drones.
It’s better than having your $5 million aircraft sitting exposed on the ramp and better than piling tires on the wings.
I will admit that I praise Ukrainian battlefield ingenuity but mock the Russians when they attempt to implement unique fixes. But here’s why:
The size and budget of the Russian military are several orders of magnitude larger than Ukraine’s – with a military this big, these fixes should never be needed in the first place. Only through gross mismanagement of resources do the Russians find themselves in their current predicament.
So, what purposes might the tires serve?
Last fall, I speculated that they could help minimize fragmentation damage to the airframes, but based on the satellite images, they appear to be leaving the fuselage and tail sections completely exposed.
This might provide some incremental protection against explosive Ukrainian drones, but against a Neptune missile’s payload, the tires would be essentially worthless.
I also suggested that the tires might be meant to reduce the thermal signatures of these aircraft as they’re sitting on the ramps, but again, rubber can get hotter than aluminum in direct sunlight so if anything, a tire-adorned aircraft will radiate more heat — at least during the day.
Now, we have new information…
Schuyler Moore, US Central Command’s (CENTCOM) first-ever Chief Technology Officer, mentioned the Russian use of tires to disrupt incoming attacks during a broader live-streamed roundtable talk on artificial intelligence (AI) that the Center for Strategic & International Studies (CSIS) think tank hosted this week.
Interestingly, she said, “A sort of classic unclassified example that exists is like a picture of a plane from the top, and you’re looking for a plane, and then if you put tires on top of the wings, all of a sudden, a lot of computer vision models have difficulty identifying that that’s a plane.”
Ah, okay, so she’s referring to the fact that some weapons, Neptune included, use imaging infrared seekers to find their targets in the terminal stages of flight.
These munitions essentially have an image-matching seeker that looks for potential targets by cross-referencing what it sees against its pre-loaded data library of Russian planes.
Presumably, the Russians believed that these tires would confuse these munitions – at least, that’s what CENTCOM’s CTO believes.
Whether the tires would actually work to confuse an imaging infrared seeker is a bit of an open question. The seeker strongly relies on high-quality simulated imagery of target and countermeasure signatures.
This means the camera sensor needs to be high resolution, but also means that the image processing in the onboard computer needs to do its job well.
Here’s a great visualization from the conference paper “Key considerations in infrared simulations of the missile-aircraft engagement” by Maria Susanna Willers. [Unclassified version]
What probably would work to confuse these sensors is another tactic that Russia used around the same time – painting silhouettes of aircraft on the tarmac at air bases.
Still, the downsides of throwing tires on the wings of multi-million-dollar aircraft seem like an extreme solution to a very narrow problem – like cutting off your head because you have a cold virus.
Ask any sheet metal fabricator who works in the Air Force and they will tell you that planes are not tanks – planes are fragile, lightweight things where tossing a tire on the wing could damage control surfaces and cause a host of other issues.
But I also think it’s useful if we zoom out and ask the question of why Russia would need to take the steps of painting fake planes on the ground and putting tires on aircraft: Where are their air defense assets meant to protect airfields?
Western Russia was once the most heavily guarded airspace on the planet. It’s telling that Ukraine can even get through at all – and force Russia into taking these seemingly desperate steps.
Personally, I kind of like the “tire look.” I think the Russians should throw tires on everything.
Maybe this way, they wouldn’t be losing so many armored vehicles.
Finally, it’s worth circling back to what Schuyler Moore was discussing in her roundtable. Specifically, she was making the case for increased AI capabilities in some of these modern munition systems.
Could AI-assisted image processing help determine when a Russian aircraft is playing hide and seek beneath some tires? I certainly hope so, or all this AI hype has been severely overblown.
Especially since the tires form the rough outline of the shape of an aircraft.
That’s all for today. The cat-and-mouse game continues.
Слава Україні!
at first I thought you meant they were replacing their actual aircraft tires with them, lol
That was legitimately fascinating, but also funny. Well done.