Alright Ladies & Gentlemen, we are going to have a round of "Mud, Blood & Truck Medical Supply Chains" as we look at the casualty implications of the break down of Russian Truck Logistics in Ukraine. 🧵
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First, I'm going to pull some modern warfare casualty ratios from the book UNDERSTANDING WAR.
20 out of 100 troops hit in combat are killed IMMEDIATELY
Modern late 20th-early 21st century war w/tanks artillery and planes has a death to casualty ratio of 1-to-4.
This requires modern trauma care, which is "non-trivial." It requires a supply chain with fresh whole blood & hemostatic dressings. sciencedirect.com/topics/nursing… 3/
The following link and text are a deep dive into Trauma care from the CDC's "Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report" (MMWR)
Injury Prevention, Violence Prevention, and Trauma Care: Building the Scientific Base
Supplements
October 7, 2011 / 60(04);78-85 cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/m… 4/
For the 15 of 100 who are seriously injured, getting to a medical facility in 1 hour is critical to increase survival from a less than 5 of 15 to 12 of 15.
The contested air situation in Ukraine means there are little to no helicopter medical evacuation available. 5/
The corruption of the Russian is such that there are going to be few/no Hemostatic Dressings in the Russian combat medical system, no safe areas & few trucks to evacuate Russian frontline casualties to Belarus or Russia. 6/
This means that Russian casualties in Ukraine are much closer to a 1-to-3 ratio than 1-to-4 most military analysts are using.
That is, less than 5 of the 15 seriously wounded Russians are surviving because they are not getting to modern medical trauma care in time.
7/End
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Guns rule in the age of drones, but the "muffin top" Burke class DDG's are so top heavy with the SLQ-32(V)7 Surface Electronic Warfare Improvement Program (SEWIP) installation that the idea of adding 76mm or 57mm autocannons is insane from the metacentric height POV.
I've been posting about the inertia of Russian civil infrastructure industrial disinvestment for some time regarding Russian railways and it's foreign bearings.
The key tell going forward is triage.
This western part problem also applies to Russian Coal fired power plants 1/
...and we are seeing triage there now that will apply to Russian railways later.
Non-Russian core populations areas of Russia have been cut off from modernization and restoration of thermal power plants due to a lack of Western parts.
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There are grave implications in that for the electrified Trans-Siberian railway.
Russian railways are already seeing repair trains derail on the journey to go fix derailments.
...continue for years even if the fighting stops tomorrow.
The rundown of Russian stocks of western railway bearing will continue for years because the specialty steel supply chain feeding western bearing manufacturers has shut down unused capacity after 3-years of war.
2/
It will take years to "turn on" the specialty steel pipeline to even begin to make new bearings for the Russian railways.
Compounding the matter is the extreme age of the Russian rolling stock fleet of 1.1 million freight cars/wagons at the beginning of the war.
Brian Iselin on medium -dot- com has a very nice final article in a series of three on how the loss of oil income is killing Russian shell production.
This is a figure from that article:
1/3
This opening paragraph is killer:
"Russia’s military machine doesn’t run on patriotism. It runs on petrodollars. Look at this chart and understand what you’re seeing: the death spiral of an empire, measured in dollars per barrel.
2/3
...When Urals crude crossed below $50 in April 2025, the Kremlin didn’t just lose money. Rather it lost the mathematical possibility of sustaining its war."
3/3
This @GrandpaRoy2 translation 🧵by a Russian blogger transmits his lament that RuAF flag ranks and big contractors keep seeing FPV drones as a temporary fad awaiting a technological magic bullet that will restore mobility to the battlefield. 1/
Yet the real issue is the civilian electronic of FPV drones are so cheap and effective that salvaged RPG grenades turn them into swarms of weapons as deadly as ATGM's, but far more maneuverable.
Swarms of FPV's are 21st century machine guns for 20th century tanks & SP guns.
2/
These Russian flag ranks and their defense contractors sound nothing so much as the WW1 Horse Cavalry Generals on the Western Front. Who pretended machine guns, barbed wire and artillery didn't make their mobile 19th century way of war obsolete. 3/3