That would be Lockheed Martin, or other corporate weapons manufacturers. I’m not sure I want them to be the ones who decide whose weapons work and when.
But if by “us” you mean you and me and our l33t hacking skills, I’m all for it:
NOTICE: All your weapons, ALL WEAPONS, are ransomwared until you eliminate wealth disparity, health disparity, injustice, and clean up the god damned environment. (At which point, you may find you no longer need those weapons.)
In the meantime you may hit each other with sticks.
That may be true for some of the obsolete cold-war era relics being pressed back into service, but I’d be amazed if that’s the case for modern tanks like the T90M. But just getting the engine to turn over is only the beginning.
Even the cheapest, simplest vehicles have electronic engine control modules these days, and beyond the drive system there’s a hell of a lot of complexity going into things like the auto loader, fire control system, vision & targeting systems, etc in a modern tank.
Even so, the electronics would have to be borked in a way that Ukrainian hackers and engineers couldn’t overcome. Ukraine has its own defence industry, including tanks, so they have people with the skills to take a serious crack at reactivating remotely disabled hardware.
Probably so, but there’s still a big, big practical difference between “hey, let’s snag this tank (or other advanced weapon) that our enemy just abandoned, paint it with our flag, and use it against them!” and “hey, here’s a weapon that we might be able to get functional again if we can just get our best hackers to the front line and give them the time, materials and resources to reverse-engineer it.”
Have you ever un-borked a system with a glitch in the firmware?
I regularly work with vehicle systems that are a fraction of the complexity of a tank’s targeting system, where a small bug can send trained technicians and engineers chasing their tails for days to resolve. Now imagine that all the software and firmware was remotely overwritten and you didn’t have a copy. Writing and validating new software for a functional targeting system is a years-long endeavor.
