The electronic communications and navigation systems the West depends on are vulnerable to Russian attack.
  • nondescripthandle@lemmy.dbzer0.com
    56·
    22 days ago

    I find the threat of GPS loss to be hard to believe. Theyd have to take out 38 GPS satelites and presumably any of the other navagation satellites American allies have in orbit, and presumably theyd have to not damage their own navigation satelites in the process. I also doubt they could do that all at the same time, or quick enough that no one could respond. Im sure they have the capability, and im sure they have an idea of what the operation would have to look like but in terms of a plan that’s actionable, I have big doubts.

    • linearchaos@lemmy.worldEnglish
      134·
      21 days ago

      I wouldn’t be so quick to dismiss that threat.

      They know exactly where in the sky they are. They know what frequencies their antennas are tuned to. I’m betting burning out those transceivers would not be an impossible feat.

      I also don’t know how well they put up against really large lasers

      They’ve also been fully capable of putting s*** into space for years. I would not put it past them to have some form of combination weather/spy satellite and weapons platform out there.

      • Cosmicomical@lemmy.world
        12·
        21 days ago

        They must be aware of the concept of re-ta-lia-tion. You shoot down my satellites, I shoot down yours. Nobody wins and we are all back 40 years.

      • ZealousSealion@discuss.tchncs.de
        2·
        21 days ago

        Which they do. Not on a global scale, though.

        It is quite annoying to be Russia’s neighbours. But you can work around it. In fact, it’s not bad to train yourself to operate without GNSS. And it would be even better if the jammers decided to spontaneously combust.

      • nondescripthandle@lemmy.dbzer0.com
        38·
        22 days ago

        Where though? They just gonna fly enough jammers up into orbit to cover the entire path and all the satelites and pretend thats not going to also jam every navagation satelite including their own and China, their biggest allys? I don’t see it.

        • snooggums@midwest.socialEnglish
          28·
          22 days ago

          Jam some strategic locations, like air travel hubs or highly populated areas for the highest impact. No need to jam wide open low population areas without military targets.

            • Maggoty@lemmy.world
              41·
              21 days ago

              That’s easy you just drive the truck into the area. It’s when you turn it on that’s the issue. You’re going to meet a lot of people very fast.

            • snooggums@midwest.socialEnglish
              54·
              22 days ago

              I was just pointing out that it isn’t necessary to jam 100% of GPS to have a massive impact. The odds that Russia could pull anything off is pretty small, and jamming GPS for more than a few hours is evenless likely.

            • aubeynarf@lemmynsfw.com
              53·
              22 days ago

              The jamming equipment could be the size of a briefcase; the received signal is below the noise floor.

              Or it could be one satellite already in the air beaming to a specific area. Or a constellation of satellites already in the air who handoff coverage of a specific area. Or a hack of an existing satellite constellation command and control channel to reprogram the transmitters to cover up GPS L band.

                • aubeynarf@lemmynsfw.com
                  21·
                  21 days ago

                  I’m familiar with radio systems. You could absolutely put a 1 kW L-band jammer in a briefcase, with an effective radius of probably a couple of miles.

            • nondescripthandle@lemmy.dbzer0.com
              14·
              22 days ago

              I also just don’t see anyone in Russia deciding that were going to trigger article 5 by using a jammer on US soil. The risk reward is non existent unless they can make the whole country GPS and internet dark at the same time. Imagine that many resources going on the ground in a country as large as America. It’s basically asking Ukraine to regain any territory they had a counter invasion plan ready for.

          • nondescripthandle@lemmy.dbzer0.com
            10·
            22 days ago

            Triggering NATO collective defense so they can deploy a jammer on US soil doesn’t seem to be what they’re threatening, and they’re already been using jammers in Ukraine. So either theyre threatening to do something they can’t do or theyre threatening to do something they’re already doing, and already being countered, in a new place.

        • Boddhisatva@lemmy.world
          84·
          22 days ago

          Blowing up the GPS satellites is certainly an option and there’s not much we could do to stop them. We know that China has succesfuly tested an anti-satellite missile in 2007. I would not be surprised if Russia was working on the technology at the same time. If they can’t or don’t want to blow up the satellites, then they could perhaps launch their own jamming satellites to orbit near the existing GPS satellites would work.

          Edit: It just occurred to me that you don’t need to jam them. Just put up your own satellites that mimic the GPS satellites to throw off the calculations of anyone trying to use them. Your devices wouldn’t know which signals were legit.

          • nilloc@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
            3·
            21 days ago

            You don’t need satellites in space to shift GPS, they’ve been messing with it in war zones for years, and AWACS like planes could do it in real time anywhere they won’t get shot down.

          • Maggoty@lemmy.world
            31·
            21 days ago

            China doing it in 2007 was big news because they joined the club. The West and Russia has had the capability for decades.

          • Skua@kbin.earth
            20·
            22 days ago

            The Soviet Union proved that it was able to shoot down satellites in the 60s. The technical difficulty of hitting a satellite with a missile is not really an obstacle here

            • SkyezOpen@lemmy.world
              162·
              22 days ago

              Yeah, the Soviet union could also mass produce tanks and planes. Russia today…

              Glances at Ukraine

              Is using almost exclusively Soviet stock.

            • Buffalox@lemmy.world
              9·
              22 days ago

              It may not be a problem technology wise, but do they really have the equipment today to blow up dozens of satellites?
              I seriously doubt it, Russia isn’t the Soviet Union, they seem less capable, and corruption would probably have undermined the program even if it still existed.
              And even if they can, can they also do it without harming their own and China’s geopositioning systems?

              • Passerby6497@lemmy.worldEnglish
                5·
                21 days ago

                And even if they can, can they also do it without harming their own and China’s geopositioning systems?

                Nope, they can’t. And not only that, destroying that many satellites is almost assuredly going to trigger Kessler Syndrome and lock out space for the most part for a good long while.

          • borari@lemmy.dbzer0.com
            9·
            22 days ago

            Just put up your own satellites that mimic the GPS satellites to throw off the calculations of anyone trying to use them. Your devices wouldn’t know which signals were legit.

            Do this, then get absolutely raw dog fucked by the US (and any other competent) military, who has absolutely no issue with ground nav or weapons guidance because they all use encrypted GPS signals.

  • vegeta@lemmy.world
    74·
    22 days ago

    Maybe they could get an compromised/friendly/useful idiot/individual installed in the hightest levels of government who, either intentionally or unintentionally, would funnel secrets to them which help facilitate mass disruption?

    ohh wait…

    • Buffalox@lemmy.world
      28·
      22 days ago

      Yes, this is really like a tiny dog barking its head off, because it’s convinced it can’t be harmed.
      Russia and Putin have been embarrassing themselves for a while now.

  • Crashumbc@lemmy.worldEnglish
    26·
    21 days ago

    The same Russia that “indicated” the Ukraine special operation would take three days?

    Lol

  • Jimmycakes@lemmy.world
    10·
    20 days ago

    That’s hilarious bro this putin guy needs his own stand up special he’s probably got a million of these

  • gravitas_deficiency@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    71·
    22 days ago

    I really don’t think they have the capability, actually. They might be able to degrade the network, but I don’t think they would be able to actually physically destroy enough elements of the constellation to make it generally useless.

    Not to mention, I’d be a bit shocked if the DoD doesn’t have some backups sitting quietly (as in: not broadcasting at the moment) in geosync. After all, it’s the first rule of government spending.

  • lettruthout@lemmy.worldEnglish
    11·
    22 days ago

    In the Julia Roberts move “Leave the World Behind”, they mention a process of destroying a country. (I vaguely recall that the process was attributed to a real person.) One of the steps was to take down the internet. With lack of information chaos develops, and the country destroys itself.

    • Maggoty@lemmy.world
      11·
      21 days ago

      Not really. We had a country before the internet, we’d just fall back on that. It would be painful but very doable.

    • massive_bereavement@fedia.io
      72·
      22 days ago

      Or it begets a second renaissance where everyone get their noses away from screens (me included) and start fixing shit.

    • originalucifer@moist.catsweat.com
      12·
      22 days ago

      i feel like taking down the internet is harder than it sounds. you could easily disrupt satellite, but the world will route around this… its actually designed for it.

      they would have to poison dns or major routing points somehow.

      • snooggums@midwest.socialEnglish
        42·
        22 days ago

        Cut communication trunks to knock out the internet in wide areas should still be an option since storms cause those outages for non-wireless internet now. DDOS and other atracks can still overwhelm wireless communications.

        But honestly it is unlikely that being technically possible would be as successful in practice as a widespread attack as most places have a lot of redundancy built in because these kinds of threats have been around for decades.

    • just_another_person@lemmy.world
      53·
      22 days ago

      Have you seen what happens on the global interchange when just one cable gets interrupted? It’s absolute chaos. That’s all they want. They aren’t trying to absolutely isolate Internet from the US and it’s allies, we have all kinds of satellite backups for things like that.

      • mozz@mbin.grits.dev
        71·
        22 days ago

        I mean you are correct that things like this are a shit show if you are directly involved, but my point is that the wider world can continue fairly unimpeded. Unless they have some kind of magic backhoe that can cut every backbone cable all at once or something, I think the impact in terms of bringing the West’s telecommunications to its knees is going to be more or less nil.

        • just_another_person@lemmy.world
          61·
          22 days ago

          All they need is to send subs around and attach charges ahead of time and blow them all at once. The problem is the time constraints of figuring out exactly where the cables got cut. I believe they have somewhat solved this, but I don’t think it’s bulletproof. The chaos is really the goal though.

      • Rapidcreek@lemmy.world
        41·
        22 days ago

        Have you seen what happens on the global interchange when just one cable gets interrupted?

        I have. Usually.the network tries to route around it, with best effort delivery. This keeps the outage localized and is part of network standards. You can expect delay, though. I guess I don’t see what you’re getting at.

        • just_another_person@lemmy.world
          31·
          22 days ago

          You’re just talking about route healing. They mean to disrupt long standing communications, which doesn’t resolve itself in the same way. BGP works fine for peered connections, but not at a global scale like this. It can take many hours and lots of manual intervention to quiet things down. Do that a few times at regular intervals, and it could be days.

          • Rapidcreek@lemmy.world
            3·
            22 days ago

            I’ve worked international voice and data networks and I can’t imagine the number of points of presence they would have to hit in your dream scenario. They simply couldn’t do it without going to war, when this effort would give way to plans of survival.

            • just_another_person@lemmy.world
              1·
              21 days ago

              That’s kind of their point. They do dumb shit like to provoke and prod. They’ve been randomly jamming GOS for years for no reason, and cutting these cables as well. It’s just a flexnto let people know if it comes to that, then they might do something. It’s the same reason they run their subs just loud enough to be detected around the north seas, and then go silent.

              • Rapidcreek@lemmy.world
                1·
                21 days ago

                You don’t understand. They’re just talking shit. They are very aware of what they have to do to start a war with the west. Yet they don’t because they know that it’ll last 20 minutes.

      • mozz@mbin.grits.dev
        91·
        22 days ago

        So Ivan Sabotageovich calls up someone who works at Level3

        Says “Hey broski I want you to start announcing bogus BGP routes”

        Guy who answers the phone says “What? Why would I do that?”

        Guy on the phone says “I’ll give you rubles”

        Guy who answers the phone says my brother in Christ I make $175k per year and I will get fired and they’ll fix it in about 25 minutes anyway, sorting out and fixing stuff like this is kind of why people like me are employed here and there are a lot of us watching what happens

        Guy on the phone says I can also give you TONS of unrefined crude oil and methane, or precision aircraft parts from the 1990s

        Guy who answers says I need to go now, good luck though

        Guy on the phone says blyat as the line goes dead

  • CMDR_Horn@lemmy.world
    13·
    22 days ago

    They’re afraid to use their glide bombs in Kursk because they’re not accurate enough to avoid hitting their own friendlies and they think they can hit a satellite moving ten of thousand + miles an hour in orbit!? lol

    • borari@lemmy.dbzer0.com
      16·
      22 days ago

      For real. People talking like Russia is going to jam GPS or something, while they can’t even jam GPS or RF well enough to prevent FPV drones from slamming in to their own people. I just saw a video of a Ukrainian FPV drone taking out a Russian EW platform that’s purpose built to counter drones for fucks sake.

      Edit - oh. This statement was from Medvedev back in June. lol ok bro. How you gonna run those sub generators you need to fuck with those cables when all your diesel is currently burning off in a fucking epic conflagration? Your country is literally cooked rn.