This is another crackerjack translation thread by @ChrisO_wiki on the Russian air crew killed in the Ukrainian aerial ambush on 13 May 2023.
Go read it and come back for my "trends in Russian casualties" 🧵
The Russians have eaten the human seed corn of future military power
1/
So, what do I mean by "eating the seed corn of its future military power?"
I mean the downstream effects of the death of men like Viktor Khozhainov, recently of the Military Training and Research Center (VUNTS) of the Russian Air Force.
2/
The generally accepted Western Intelligence order of battle for the Russian Army in Feb 2022 was ~400,000.
The actual body count was not over 300k due to the "ghost troop" scam.
That is 1/4 of the troops existed only on paper & Russian officers pocketed that 1/4 payroll.
3/
Everything in the Russian Army that was deployable in Feb 2022 was in the 190,000 sent into Ukraine by the end of March 2022.
Then lots of "non deployable" assets in Feb 2022 were made to be deployable through the year of 2022.
They were deployed, and then consumed.
4/
Stripping logistics for infantry replacements is standard for strained militaries. Every military did it in WW2.
Russia did it in 2022 without having enough logistics to start with.
"There are more conscripts where that came from, comrade," was the RuAF attitude.
5/
The RuAF stripped all of the training establishments, then they also stripped the academies, and finally gave all of the students junior officer commissions so they could deploy them.
>Poof<
That happened Q2/Q3, March/April, of 2022.
6/
That is when people like Viktor Khozhainov got put into an operational units, and now he has been...consumed.
Training establishments are the dragon's teeth of a military.
They sew the teeth that grow into trained manpower for tomorrow's fighting.
7/
But the Russians went far beyond that as they also stripped their research establishments.
It appears most were used up as infantry and tank/AFV crews.
The article I saw on researchers talked about a tank crew made up of officers with specialty skills sets in areas of...
8/
...science who were dropped into a tank with maybe a day of training and told to "figure it out themselves."🤯
That shows the Putin regime could not give a tinker's damn about the future of Russian military-technological power.
Only power right this second counts.
9/
The woes of the now destroyed Marine Bde at Vuhledar are another example.
Want to bet that most of these "Elite Marines" were repurposed sailors pulled off Black Sea Fleet warships?
There are reports of this happening last year to the sailor-survivors of Moskva.
10/
The Mobik units of the Russian Army collapsing on Bakhmut's flanks are the 'downstream' of the consumption of RuAF training establishment manpower like Viktor Khozhainov.
Untrained RuAF infantry in half dug muddy trenches facing Ukrainian
11/
...drone warfare tactics of veteran infantry using radios to talk to DJI drone controllers that are providing "Tinkerbell overwatch."
Overwatch which is telling Ukrainian assault troops where to throw grenades in the Russian trench system.
12/
And the 1 February 2022 the RuAF training establishment, which should have taught those Mobik troops all about Ukrainian "Tinkerbell overwatch" drone warfare, are as dead as Viktor Khozhainov.
13/
There is a name for this sort of attritional collapse in military skills.
Where each generation of new Russian troops mobilized is less skilled than the last.
14/
The thing about a "Lanchester Square Law Collapse," like any other cascading systems malfunction, is it goes "At first slowly, then ALL AT AT ONCE."
These RuAF casualty trends say what to watch for in the Ukrainian counter offensives is a RuAF collapse "ALL AT AT ONCE."
15/15
Share this Scrolly Tale with your friends.
A Scrolly Tale is a new way to read Twitter threads with a more visually immersive experience.
Discover more beautiful Scrolly Tales like this.