I see in the screenshots below from some footage of Operation Spider's Web (Ukrainians blowing up Russian airplanes with drones on 2025-06-01) that tires were placed on planes. Some people say that this is to confuse AI-assisted attacks.
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Tires on the wings of an aircraft is likely out of distribution for a training dataset. Whether or not this confuses a model depends on its ability to generalize.
The idea that it could confuse a model is sound on the face of it. That is until the enemy trains a new model containing images of airplanes with tires on the wings.
foreverska
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In the June 4th episode of The Daily from the New York Times ("Inside Operation Spider's Web") they say the following at around 7:20:
...[The Russians] put tires on the wings of planes in the hopes that - if there is an explosion at the airport - the shrapnel doesn't do damage.
They don't provide a direct source for this - it's just mentioned in passing - but the NYT is usually well researched and fact checked.
I feel like you'd need a lot more tires to be an effective shrapnel catcher, but a few other photos of Russian aircraft from Google searches show much more complete tire coverage that actually might work for that purpose.
Khrrck
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