Trent Telenko Profile picture
Jan 18, 2022 15 tweets 6 min read Read on X
The RAF airlift of AT-weapons to Ukraine is now 5 x C-17 sorties.

Rough order, you can fit around 400 FGM-148 or NLAW on 463L pallets on a single C-17.
1/
NLAW's inertial guidance is accurate versus moving targets to 400 meters and stationary at twice that. It uses a 15 cm Bill style slant down tandem HEAT warhead and will beat the front slope of any Russian tank.

You can't jam it.
2/
Only active defenses can stop and NLAW. And a tank hunter team can simultaneously fire several at the same tank to saturate an active defense.

Plus NLAW can be fired indoors.

Sub-tweet thread on NLAW 👇👇👇👇
3/
So, what does 2,000 transferred NLAW in the hands of the Ukrainian Army mean?

It answers the primary need of the Ukrainians, namely, a lot of ATGM with sure kill given a fair hit on a later Generation T-72/T-80/T-90 tank.

See Phil Karber here:
4/
defence-ua.com/minds_and_idea…
And also see Phil Karber here regards providing USMC surplus Humvee TOW missile launchers and US Army surplus Bradley Fighting Vehicles to Ukraine:
5/
defence-ua.com/army_and_war/v…
The Trump and Biden Administrations have sent 120 Javelin Missile launchers and several thousand (that number is not public where I've looked) Javelin missiles since 2017.

Given there are 40 active Ukrainian battalion battle groups with another 16 in
6/
defence-blog.com/ukraine-to-rec…
...reserves. That works out to three Javelin launchers and maybe 30 (speculative guess) missiles in the BTG.

This is why Phillip Karber was calling out the need for more.

While the Javelin in small numbers has won engagements like The Battle of Debecka, IRAQ, 2003
7/
There is simply no comparison between the Russian Army of 2021 and the Iraqi Army facing the Kurdish Peshmerga Army during invasion of Iraq in 2003.
8/
weaponsandwarfare.com/2016/06/12/the…
The best a Ukrainian BTG can hope for with three Javelin launchers and 30 missiles versus a Russian regimental scale attack is 18 tank & AFV kills with a 100% loss of all three launchers & crew while being over run.
10/
Two thousand NLAW change this calculations by a lot.

Forty Ukrainian BTG now have another 50 NLAW on top of the three Javelin launchers & each NLAW missile is in a disposable launcher

An attacking Russian regiment can face a peak of 53 simultaneous sure kill if hit ATGMs.
11/
What the US Army Ft. Irwin National Training Center has shown time after time is that massed & simultaneous ATGM salvos from multiple ranges break large scale tank attacks.

The RAF airlift of 2,000 NLAW to Ukraine has given the Ukrainian Army that capability.

12/
The addition of NLAW to Javelins & existing older Ukrainian anti-tank weapons means the three Javelin launchers per BTG will survive several engagements.

BLUF: The Russian Army trying to take Eastern Ukraine now will lose 500 more tanks than before the RAF NLAW airlift.

/End
Correction: The Ukrainian Army has 26, not 16 reserve BTG.
There are now _SIX_ RAF NLAW supply flights to Ukraine.

The RAF anti-tank missile transfer flights to Ukraine proceed apace.

• • •

Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to force a refresh
 

Keep Current with Trent Telenko

Trent Telenko Profile picture

Stay in touch and get notified when new unrolls are available from this author!

Read all threads

This Thread may be Removed Anytime!

PDF

Twitter may remove this content at anytime! Save it as PDF for later use!

Try unrolling a thread yourself!

how to unroll video
  1. Follow @ThreadReaderApp to mention us!

  2. From a Twitter thread mention us with a keyword "unroll"
@threadreaderapp unroll

Practice here first or read more on our help page!

More from @TrentTelenko

Jul 19
Sadly for Grikin, the damage done to Russia's energy transport sector is already permanent.

We are ~six months from a Russian systemic economic collapse just from Ukrainian damage inflicted to date.

Russian collapse 🧵
1/7
The additional accumulated damage - beyond revisits to already damaged refineries - to the Russian power grid and POL supply chain in the next two months may speed this up to four months, to late November 2026, AKA just in Time for the US elections.

Russia lost 83 power
2/7 Image
...sub-stations since 1 July 2026 in occupied Ukraine.

Russia will have to strip its own unique power grid to replace these losses, shutting down supply in "less significant" parts of Russia.


3/7ukrinform.net/rubric-ato/414…
Read 8 tweets
Jul 11
I've been advocating that Ukraine strike Russian tugs as part of a larger campaign against Russian riverine and littoral maritime traffic since 2022.

Ukraine has delivered on all my expectations of what that would accomplish in the last five days.

Brown Water logistics🧵
1/
This is where I underscored the historical Russian use of barge logistics in WW2 as a basis for what they would be doing in occupied Ukraine

2/
This 2023 post is where I posed the question of how large Russian riverine/littoral/brown water logistical efforts were to support Russian occupation forces in southern Ukraine.
3/
Read 9 tweets
Jul 10
Given the massive Ukrainian victory in the "Battle of the Azov Sea."

We can say Ukraine has achieved “Usable Drone Air Superiority" over the Sea of Azov in exactly the way the Chinese would in the waters around, & air over, Taiwan when it invades.
🧵

1/
united24media.com/war-in-ukraine…
The "Battle of the Azov Sea" shares a lot of historical elements of both the WW2 "Battle of the Bismarck Sea" and the slaughter of Allied oil tankers in 1942 during Operation Drumbeat (Paukenschlag) and Operation Neuland.

2/ Image
Image
Image
The Battle of the Bismarck Sea was the slaughter of 12 ships of a 16 ship Imperial Japanese convoy of eight IJA freighters and eight IJN destroyers moving 6,900 IJA troops.

Tipped off by IJN seaplane deployments & radio intercepts, only 2,700 IJA troops arrived w/o weapons or ammo.
3/Image
Read 12 tweets
Jul 2
Just...no. Russia HAS BEEN "Battle of the Cities" from the very beginning...targeting hospitals as a means of destroying ethnic minorities.

This has been Russian policy for DECADES.

Ukraine retaliating for atrocity is _RECIPROCITY_ per the Laws of War, not degeneracy.
1/2
I asked @grok to document this Russian policy of atrocity at the link, excerpt:

"February 24, 2022–present (Full-scale Russian invasion): The scale escalated dramatically. As of May 2026, the WHO had verified more than 3,000 attacks on healthcare via its Surveillance System for Attacks on Health Care (SSA). A coalition of organizations (including PHR, eyeWitness, Truth Hounds, etc.) documented ~3,095 attacks, with 1,632 damaging or destroying hospitals and clinics"

x.com/i/grok?convers…
2/
I'm afraid @cdrsalamander has gotten the moral vectors in the Russo-Ukrainian war wrong.

What is degenerate here isn't RECIPROCITY.

Degeneracy here is defined as using Woke NGO Elite definitions of morality, AKA claiming AFU RECIPROCITY per the laws of war as a war crime.
3/3 Image
Read 4 tweets
Jun 30
When I've talked about the legacy of Soviet industrial gigantism (one big factory) making Putin era Russia far more vulnerable to a drone strategic bombing campaign.

This is a very good example. ⬇️

Strategic Drone Airpower🧵
1/3
I've talked about this vulnerability in a couple of previous threads. Here is a shorter one:



Putin's decades long "Russian exceptionalism" propaganda campaign, that says WW2 was won on the Eastern Front, has made Russians incapable of seeing this.

2/3
If strategic airpower was irrelevant then. So is damage from it now. 🤦‍♂️

Here is the larger in-depth thread detailing the vulnerabilities of ex-Soviet "One-Big Factory" infrastructure (AKA gigantism) Ukraine is exploiting.

3/3
Read 4 tweets
Jun 28
There is so much to object to here that I'm going to restate some basic design observations on the FP-5 to clarify how the Russian reflexive control data fed AI slop that is polluting public discussions of the FP-5.

FP-5 🧵
1/
1. The FP-5 Flamingo is about four times the launch weight of a BGM-109 Tomahawk (i.e. ~13,200 lb), and 2-3 times the range (i.e. ~1,620 nmi) while carrying twice the warhead mass (i.e. ~2,000 lb).

2/ Image
Image
Image
2. The FP-5 design concept is modelled on the USAF MGM-13 Mace GLCM as Fire Point told Ukrainian military analysts - but designed with modern technology to be extremely cheap to make (claimed 1/6 the cost of a Tomahawk - likely not counting the engine cost).

3/ Image
Read 17 tweets

Did Thread Reader help you today?

Support us! We are indie developers!


This site is made by just two indie developers on a laptop doing marketing, support and development! Read more about the story.

Become a Premium Member ($3/month or $30/year) and get exclusive features!

Become Premium

Don't want to be a Premium member but still want to support us?

Make a small donation by buying us coffee ($5) or help with server cost ($10)

Donate via Paypal

Or Donate anonymously using crypto!

Ethereum

0xfe58350B80634f60Fa6Dc149a72b4DFbc17D341E copy

Bitcoin

3ATGMxNzCUFzxpMCHL5sWSt4DVtS8UqXpi copy

Thank you for your support!

Follow Us!

:(