This is a thread that will explain the implied poor Russian Army truck maintenance practices based on this photo of a Pantsir-S1 wheeled gun-missile system's right rear pair of tires below & the operational implications during the Ukrainian mud season.🧵
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For the sin of being the new guy, I was the DCMA quality auditor in charge of the US Army's FMTV "vehicle exercise program" at the contractor manufacturing them from the Mid-1990's to the mid-2000's Then we got more new guys.
Short form: Military trucks need to be...
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...turned over and moved once a month for preventative maintenance reasons.
In particular you want to exercise the central tire air inflation system (CTIS) to see if lines have leaks or had insect/vermin nests blocking the system.
CTIS Controller & CTIS diagram👇👇
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One of the biggest reasons for the repositioning, per TACOM logistic Representatives, was that direct sunlight ages truck tires.
The repositioning of Trucks in close parking prevents a lot of this sun rotting and cycling the CTIS keeps the tire sidewalls supple.
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When you leave military truck tires in one place for months on end. The side walls get rotted/brittle such that using low tire pressure setting for any appreciable distance will cause the tires to fail catastrophically via rips.
There is a huge operational level implication in this. If the Russian Army was too corrupt to exercise a Pantsir-S1. They were too corrupt to exercise the trucks & wheeled AFV's now in Ukraine.
The Russians simply cannot risk them off road during the Rasputitsa/Mud season 7/
And there is photographic evidence of this.
There are 60(+) Russian army trucks crowded & parked on this raised road bed to avoid the fate of the mud-bogged Pantsir-S1.
8/
Given the demonstrated levels of corruption in truck maintenance. There is no way in h--l that there are enough tires in the Russian army logistical system.
So their wheeled AFV/truck park is as road bound as Russian Army columns were in the 1st Russo-Finnish War. 9/
What that means is that as long as and where ever the Spring Rasputitsa is happening. The Russian Army attack front is three wheeled AFV's wide.
When the Ukrainians can block the road with ATGM destroyed vehicles. They can move down either side of the road like Fins in 1939 10/
...destroying Russian truck columns.
The Crimea is a desert and the South Ukrainian coastal areas are dryer. So we are not seeing this there.
But elsewhere the Russians have a huge problem for the next 4-to-6 weeks.
11/End
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Systematic targeting of these electrical facilities powering the railways within 200 km of Ukraine's 1991 border with Russia will logistically isolate the RuAF frontline units in Ukraine from 70% of rail supply.
This is a symptom of the Russians lacking the industrial capability to make enough 152 mm barrel liners and the lack of 152 mm barrel life in reserve artillery stocks.⬇️
This was passed on to be by a Cold War graybeard in the Summer of 2022:
"A colleague who has worked in the area told me years ago that a lot of the cited strategic reserve is mythological as they burned out barrel liners
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...on tens of thousands of tank guns and artillery pieces during the Chechen wars and ended up with massive yards full of derelict armor and guns needing deep overhauls. Gun barrels only part of this, lots of burned out engines, transmissions and wrecked suspensions.
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I did a direct message interview with Forbes Magazine journalist David Axe the first week of November 2023 about the state of the “Wizard War,” that is electronic warfare, between Ukraine and Russia.
"The Russian problem with using electronic warfare is sociological. A centralized authoritarian who picks for political loyalty for 20 years also picks for corruption and incompetence for just as long. Putin’s military has extreme levels of incompetence at every level, from top to bottom, as a result. In a centrally controlled system like Russia, the stupidity of the commander flows downhill."
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The "Canary in the Coal Mine" importance of the MT-LBVM(K) is that the MT-LB hull was built in Ukraine & all the MT-LBVM(K) were current Russian specific rebuilds.
It fact checks the quality Western intelligence on what the actual AFV stocks & loss rates of the RuAF are. 2/
It's pretty clear none of these Western intelligence outfits have never read any of Lanchester's formulas, because they completely missed the negative force generation meanings of that @verekerrichard1 MT-LBVM(K) post & thread🤦♂️