Thread by @TrentTelenko

Alright, one more Russo-Ukraine War casualty rate thread🧵

This one is to deal with a specific criticism of my 5 June 2022 posts that WW2 casualty rates are in no way representative of what Russia is suffering in Ukraine.


1/

There is a point to that "WW2 isn't representative" criticism, but it doesn't cut the way people making that argument think.

Casualty rates are a function of the type of combat fought and the medical support available. The reality about Russia's Army in Ukraine is that it

2/

...has the highest AFV to soldier ratio of any combat force fighting on this scale...ever.

This wasn't by design.

It was a downstream consequence of "Ghost Troop" corruption, a grift where Russian commanders pocket the payroll for soldiers not present in their unit.

3/

,@KofmanMichael recently explained in an a @WarOnTheRocks podcast that the average Russian Motor Rifle unit BMP or BTR infantry vehicle that should have 7 squad dismounts has deployed to Ukraine with 2-to-3.

4/

This means a Motor rifle platoon of 3 vehicles has a squad, a Company of 10 vehicles has a platoon, a Battalion has a company and a regiment has a understrength battalion of dismounted infantry.

Worse, since they are not well trained or know other vehicle's dismounts well.

5/

Russian Motor Rifle infantry tend to be "death before dismount" when they run into Ukrainian anti-tank weapons the first few times before the (fewer & fewer) survivors learn.

It takes training that current Russian Motor Rifle infantry never got to break this newbie habit.

6/

So the casualty loss rate model for most Russian Motor Rifle infantry lost to date in Ukraine is that for tank and other armored fighting vehicle crews rather than dismounted infantry.

There are several things that flow from this observation.
7/

First, there are not that many studies of armored warfare vehicle crew casualty rates that are both unclassified and on-line.

I've WW2, 1973 Arab-Israeli War IDF tank crew, and a Mar/Apr 2022 mortality & morbidity in AFV's article data to work with.

8/

Second, the use of drones for accurately applying indirect artillery fire on AFV's requires some idea of how vulnerable Russian armored vehicles are to it.

Fortunately, an article describing such test results from a 2002 issue of the US Field Artillery Journal is available.
9/

The WW2 document is a Jan 1946 British Army report on 333 destroyed British and Canadian tanks with 769 crew casualties, covering a 24 Mar 1945 to 5 May 1945 period, for light, cruiser & infantry tanks in 19 tank regiments assaulting into Germany.

10/

The report was very thorough and did things like categorize causes of vehicles destroyed, tank crew size (median crew was 5), average casualties by cause, which was AP for guns, H.C. for shaped charge and mines.

H.C. losses from panzerfausts, (37.5%) was a rude surprise.
11/

If anything, Armored Warfare since WW2 got worse as far as casualty rates are concerned.

Post WW2 for tank designs of the late 1960's through early 1970's generation, which all current Russian tanks designs (from T-62 thru T-90) originate were 'glass cannons' versus

12/

...shaped charges of 4.7-in/120mm or larger dia. & APFSDS in terms of protecting the crew starting in the early 1970's.

This fact arrived with 🔥 in the IDF's tank crew casualty data from the 1973 Arab-Israeli War.

During the entire war; Israel lost 407 tanks (365 in the
13/

... Sinai, 42 in the Golan), with a further 656 damaged. Tank crew losses in the Sinai alone were 1,450 (32%) KIA & 3,143 (68%) WIA; this is equivalent to 1,148 tanks with four-man crews.

From the crew casualties, we can infer that IDF tanks were knocked out an average of

14/

... 3.1 times before finally being declared an 'irrecoverable loss' (in Soviet parlance).

Effectively at the end of the fighting in 1973, the Israelis were running out of men to crew their tanks, rather than tanks themselves, by the end of the war.

15/

What this did was write a "AFV Design Memo" to the effect that any penetration of a fighting vehicles' armor envelope will deliver more energy that will find much more energetic volume/weight of propellent & explosives than a WW2 tank with a 75mm/76mm gun.

This required a
16/

...vehicle redesign to channel the energy of the more energetic volume/weight of propellent & explosives away from the crew when detonated.

It is with this IDF data that the M-1 Abrams was designed with ammo
17/

...separate from the crew behind armored doors for crew survivability. (See XM-1 design priority clip👇)

Meanwhile the Soviets blamed the high 1973 AFV loss rates on poor Arab tactics & training rather than on their basic design priority of cheapness over crew survivability
18/

The Soviets didn't get the "AFV Redesign Memo" until the Afghan War of the 1980's, but the economic collapse of the USSR and decades of loss of funding stopped any fundamental AFV redesign from 1st principles separating crew from ammo until the T-15 Armata of the 2010's.

19/

This is when Mar 2022 "Leak/Hack" data of Russian casualties w/a ratio of 2 to 3 (37% KIA & 63% WIA) comes into the analysis.

It looked like that 1973 IDF Sinai tank crew casualty split up thread of 32% KIA, 68% WIA, but 5% worse in terms of KIA.

20/

This is where "Review of Military Casualties in Modern Conflicts" corroborates the collapse by corruption of the Russian Army casualty evacuation system - based on the Belarus Mar 2022 civilian medical data showing KIA/MIA ratio of 1:1.6 in 🧵👇


21/

...can be used to extrapolated from Table III that the average Russian casualty reaches a field hospital 24 hours after he is wounded.

And this Ukraine medivac performance is much worse than in the invasion of Chechnya, see Table II.

22/

One more thing that is difference between Ukraine in 2022 & WW2 is the orders of magnitude increase in observed indirect fire both in the amount & reach tens of kilometers into the tactical depth of a battlefield.

Given known GPS coordinates of the gun & targets from drones.
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You can often achieve first round accuracy that can kill even a T-72 tank.

It simply took practice and the unique Ukrainian Gis Arta artillery C3I system to put this capability together in large scale.

24/

Major Duram in his 2002 FAJ article "Who Says Dumb Artillery Rounds Can't Kill Armor?" dropped eight figures detailing the 1988 US Army lethality testing on various AFV's including clockwise a M-113 variant, a Bradley, a T-72 & a BMP.
25/

And in figures 5-thru-8 a T-72, a Grad launcher hit by cluster munitions, a Direct hit on a T-72, and a T-72 near miss.

These figures look very much like photos out of Ukraine with one significant difference.

There was no on-board ammo.
26/

This was a "Fair Test" of 155mm artillery shell lethality with no confounding factors.

Ammo status was variable, so it was excluded.

In hindsight, this was a missed opportunity both for the US Artillery branch as an institution and for senior US Army leaders making

27/

...procurement decisions for the last 20 years.

The reality of the Ukraine war will "fill in" both the missing medical mortality & morbidity data on armored warfare and make the 1988 US Army test data incredibly relevant going forward.

28/

The one certainty that can be pulled from the documents this thread reviewed is that Russia is taking worse than WW2 casualty rates for both men and equipment.

29/End