Sort of off topic but the war in Ukraine has brought to my attention that we actually fire missiles with giant miles-long extension cords. Missiles. With extension cords.
Never heard about wire-controlled torpedoes before, but indeed this makes total sense. Radio waves don't travel far in water. There are quite some spectacular systems built to contact submarines underwater [1] operating in 3-300Hz radio frequencies but antennas are kilometers long consuming megawatts. Wired-controlled torpedoes would be able to easily get target guidance from the submarine. Since torpedoes don't move fast (unlike missiles) un-spooling and long distance wires should not be a problem (wires can have neutral buoyancy).
The key words are "still being used", wire guided missiles are actually an old technology. Israel suffered from Russian Saggers fired by Egyptians in 1972, a missile produced in 1963 and it wasn't the first.
Luckily, I am involved in RC aircraft. If my 5mm, $15 ELRS receiver can do 13 km without breaking a sweat, imagine what military-grade technology can do.
TOW missiles date back to 60s-70s, so I don't think they had access to tech that good at the time; for more modern efforts the Javelin (from the 90s) has equivalent range and no wires.
That makes sense, thanks. Isn't the Javelin unguided (or self-guided), though? This means it doesn't need wires not because communication with it is wireless, but because it doesn't need to communicate at all.
They seem to work quite effectively, I've never seen a TOW fail. Downside is you need to maintain visual guidance of the missile through it's whole flight path.
Russia has controlled a substantial portion of the Donbas for 8 years and has simply let it rot. There's no investment or utilization of that industry.
It also reduces supply of many resources (for example noble gases since Ukraine is the world's biggest exporter and Russia is the second), leading to higher prices which Russia would profit from (neon prices went up 600% around 2014). In the current situation, they also didn't expect to have to wage a year or longer war or deal with crippling Western sanctions.
It also wasn't officially Russian territory. They were still playing the game of "these are separatists that just want to join Russia", so it wouldn't make sense to invest anything in what's really been an active warzone for 8 years. Officially annexing Donbas was probably always the long-term plan from the beginning, but for some reason that turned into "fuck it, let's take Ukraine instead".
Those are wire-guided missiles, usually used to destroy tanks and other armed vehicles. The length of the wire is just few kilometers. The wire is needed to actually tell the rocket where to steer [1].
More modern approach to anti-tank missiles are those with lasers being used for highlighting the target [2], while the missile has a battery and a camera to find the spot. The other approach is to do on-the-fly image recognition [3].
Edit: interesting fact: DART space craft sent by NASA to hit an asteroid used a missile derived technology to recognize the image and steer itself into the target, since direct control from Earth was not possible due to communication lag [4] (also try googling "dart mission" to see google's doodle on the topic).
