Comments by "MarcosElMalo2" (@MarcosElMalo2) on "Why this missile U -Turned" video.

  1. Occam’s razor tells us to go with the simplest possible answer, so I think you’re right. However, the romantic in me wants to believe that the missile was hacked, and I think there is an improbable but possible scenario, which is a hardware/firmware hack. Imagine this—the factory that builds these missiles uses CPUs and circuit boards sourced outside of Russia. However, to pocket a few extra bucks, the buying manager buys some of the CPUs at a discounted price on the black market. The provenance is unknown. The buyer assumes they are stolen from the manufacturer or some other client or vendor. He has no idea through whose hands the components have passed and doesn’t care, so long as they test OK and they work. Now imagine that some agency with the required capabilities and expertise, in some government with an adversarial relationship with Russia, inserts itself into that chain of custody. It could substitute a CPU (or whatever) that looks like the genuine component from the MFGR, but that contains hardwired instructions to misfire (or do whatever). The component is tested as normal, is used to build the missile, and voila, missile that flies back. Did this happen? Probably not. I mean, why not just have it blow up in the rack? But as Russia seeks to replenish its inventory of high tech electronic components through a “parallel market”, they are at risk of receiving hacked hardware. And due to the general level of corruption in the Russian economy, I suspect that these trade networks already existed before the sanctions and were supplying components to the Russian arms industry.
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