> Sure, let's intentionally omit locks from equipment that is designed not to fall into enemy hands.
Slow down there with the sarcasm and think about the actual requirements or use-cases first. Your average operable military vehicle is in one of three situations:
1. Actively occupied or guarded from theft by current owners/operators with guns who will not tolerate strangers getting close.
2. Parked somewhere in the middle of a whole bunch of people who are generally guarding the whole area, and those people may need to be able to operate it very quickly.
3. In some long-term storage which is well-fenced, under surveillance, guarded by people with guns, and typically very far from both overt enemies and opportunistic thieves.
So there's already an access control system tuned to a particular set of needs... and one of those needs includes "using it to escape from something dangerous even if the prior-driver and everything in their pockets got vaporized."
How many tanks and materiel did Ukrainians take from the Russians? On October 2022 it was an estimated 453 Russian tanks. I guess 1, 2, 3 don't work that well in battle
So what? None of that wall-spaghetti supports an argument for keyed ignition locks as the solution. It's not like those Russian troops had just stepped away to get coffee.
If anything, it suggests other things like:
1. Russia shouldn't have tried a desperate blitzkreig through muddy terrain.
2. The Russian military should have had better policies/equipment to destroy or scuttle the ofabandoned tanks.
3. Russian tank-drivers should have had better training so that they didn't get their vehicles stuck in embarrassing ways.
Plus it's not like the opposing force will be a bunch of joyriding delinquents: Even if you completely remove your abandoned truck's steering-wheel and pedals, your way out, they've got mechanics and tools and factories, they can just fit their own. Truly denying them any valuable salvage is actually a lot of work/damage.
No fucking key is going to stop them from finding that tank in a field, towing it back to a farm behind friendly lines, and bypassing the fucking lock using a fucking hammer or a soldering iron.
An opposing military capable of leading the Russian military to abandon their tanks would also have the capability of defeating a kill switch once they have unhindered physical access to it.
Scuttling has been a common military practice, for literally millennia. This practice is unrelated to the presence of any locks on the vehicle. Militaries are equipped with explosives and weapons and can perform these actions without them being built into the vehicle. The reason this did not happen is not due to the construction of their vehicles, it is because they did not take action to do so. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scuttling
The automated self-destruct countdowns you have seen in movies and TV shows are used for dramatic effect. In reality, it is cheaper, more reliable, and safer to scuttle a manned vehicle manually.
Forget the suspensefully-narrated self destruct sequences, why has the Pentagon not invested in plot armour for every soldier? Make sure the uniforms aren't red and they can only die near series finales.
Slow down there with the sarcasm and think about the actual requirements or use-cases first. Your average operable military vehicle is in one of three situations:
1. Actively occupied or guarded from theft by current owners/operators with guns who will not tolerate strangers getting close.
2. Parked somewhere in the middle of a whole bunch of people who are generally guarding the whole area, and those people may need to be able to operate it very quickly.
3. In some long-term storage which is well-fenced, under surveillance, guarded by people with guns, and typically very far from both overt enemies and opportunistic thieves.
So there's already an access control system tuned to a particular set of needs... and one of those needs includes "using it to escape from something dangerous even if the prior-driver and everything in their pockets got vaporized."