They knew they were gonna be attacked by drones on home soil, right? Or is it standard procedure for militaries to “camouflage” their stuff deep inside their own territory? It’s probably not very easy to cover all of these planes with tires and even some metal grids (looked very ghetto, by the way).
If Intelligence knew and couldn’t do shit there will be some heads rolling as is us usual procedure in Führers Reich.
If they knew about the attack, wouldn’t it have been easier to move the planes or stop the trucks carrying the drones? I admit the tires were weird, but may have been more to counter surveillance than to counter drone targeting. Can’t see any reason why they’d let Ukraine blow up billions in critical hardware to prove a point.
Is it possible that tires had some other function? Wind from some specific direction causing resonances on the wings and fuselage that does some harm in long term?
Moving those planes is very expensive like costing a shit ton of money, and they lose remaining flight hours on those frames.
The tires are weird. Pretty sure no capable surveillance would be bothered by it. If that were the case they’d already painted the planes that way - much cheaper and easier. The tires look like fast last minute “solutions”, not like some sophisticated plan.
Still pretty sure they knew something and maybe just couldn’t come up with better deterrents.
The tires are for shrapnel protection, they will prevent it flying as far and hopefully protect from shrapnel hitting them.
It’s not super effective but it’s kinda effective
Like the cope cages on their ground vehicles.
Probably even more so because the intent I believe it to deflect shrapnel from another explosion instead of stop a direct hit