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.
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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.
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Oh heck yes, AFU is hunting Russian H2O trucks! ⬇️
@secretsqrl123 has sussed out the Russian potable water supply chain and it involves a thrown together bubba engineering with palletized IBC containers used by restaurants for vegetable oil.
I've been asked to post my four appearances on Paul Woodadge's @WW2TV youtube channel to X.
This was about MacArthur's "Wild Weasel" radar hunters before the term was invented.
Dr Bellamy was PhD heavy lifter here.
Section 22 Radar Hunters
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This is the story of Master Technical Sergeant Dermott H. MacDonnell and how his performance as chief radar operator for Marine Air Group 23’s (MAG-23) SCR-270 radar...
The Horseshoe Nail of Victory of the Guadalcanal Air Campaign
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...made the difference between keeping and losing daylight air superiority over Henderson Field in the darkest days of the Guadalcanal campaign.
Incendiary devices were 10 times as effective at destroying urban areas than high explosive per unit mass per the US Strategic Bombing Surveys'.
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Sending twice the warhead mass of incendiaries of a unitary explosive warhead Tomahawk for the same price is 20 times as effective and requires 10 times the air defense missile warshot or gun based ammunition to protect any target.
This trial use of 17 year olds by Putin reported by Ukraine's Center for National Resistance (CNR) closely mirrors the Hitlerjugend Division of the Waffen SS in the Normandy summer of 1944.
...in Feb/Mar 1945 was the Waffen SS using 14 year old kids.
Per the CNR Report:
"Currently, Russia is actively recruiting members of patriotic movements, in particular, the network of military education centers "Warrior" and "Yunarmiya" (Young Army). Teenagers aged 17
It tells us that Russian motor transport fleet is in worse shape than its tube artillery park.⬇️
It's a visual confirmation of a general motor transport shortage telling us why cholera outbreaks are happening to Russian troops along the Dnipro.
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Russia motor transport can't deliver enough fresh water to front trenches.
The latest @AndrewPerpetua video kill list of Russian motor transport shows three tactical trucks, four civilian cars, no Loaf/Scooby vans, one ATV and 25 motorcycles.