This is a quick thread on Russian plans, maps, and trucks.🧵
We are going to start with Ukraine & explain. 1/
Most people have no clue as to how truely large Ukraine is. So, to cure that, I have gone to the thetruesize.com appin order to educate people.
In this case by laying the US state of Texas over Ukraine. The Texas-Louisiana border to El Paso is roughly the distance 2/
between Ukraine's Russian & Polish borders.
The distance of Kyiv from the Belarus border to be about that of the Oklahoma border to Dallas, Texas.
The tip of Crimea to the Ukraine-Belarus border is roughly from Brownsville Tx to the Red River border w/Oklahoma. 3/
Driving from Texarkana on the N.E. tip of Texas to El Paso at the western tip is 814 miles & 12 hours 13 min. non-stop on US interstates with a 75 mph speed limit
There was no way the Russian trucks like this were going to make it from Belarus to Kyiv 4/
Putin's generals thought it would take 3 days to overthrow the Ukraine government and 12 more days for the 190,000 troops to occupy the entire country of 43 million people, twice that of Texas.
That is one Russian conscript per 266 Ukrainians & 3.1 sq. km 6/
This plan assumed the Ukrainian military would put up a token resistance and the newly installed Puppet government would arrange the surrender of Ukraine's army of 250,000 men and 45,000 man territorial defense force without any weapons or soldiers going insurgent. 7/
Nor do those armed Ukrainian numbers include the six annual conscript classes that filled up that 250,000 man army in the eight years of fighting in the Donbas.
Assuming 1/2 of 250,000 x six, that is 730,000 combat veterans who would take great exception to Russia's puppet 8/
Assuming only a perfect plan for the Ukrainian Army, territorials plus Russians faced only 150,000 of those conscript classes. Russian & puppet forces would only outnumber them 3.2 to one in a popular insurgency.
That isn't enough to win.
9/
See these #'s
"However, when facing broadly popular insurgencies, counterinsurgents lost every time they possessed a force ratio advantage of 5-1 or less, failed half the time with odds between 6-1 and 10-1,
...but succeeded three-quarters of the time when outnumbering the insurgents by 10-1 or more."
Short form:
Putin lost the moment he decided to invade Ukraine.
Russia has no political or military options to achieve successful war termination. 11/
The only agents in this war with the power to achieve war termination in Ukraine is the Ukrainian people.
Not the Ukrainian government
The people.
Ukraine is engaged in a national people's war against a Kleptocratic potentate. 12/
The Ukrainian people's terms are "We want the Russians gone, all our lands back and even then we will still keep fighting Russia while Putin is in power."
No Ukrainian government can force them to settle for anything less. 13/
Since Putin's 15-day plan has failed & Ukraine's military is fighting. Lets turn to another map that represents the reality on the Ground in Ukraine.
Ukraine is big.
So big that we have a lot of space between conventional armed formations like the WW2 N. African campaign. 14/
There are more armed Ukrainians than Russians in Ukraine.
While the Russians are fighting conventional Ukrainian Army unit for cities and choke points.
The Ukrainian territorials are fulfilling a role much like the colonial militia of the American revolution.
They are
15/
...filling the the space between armed units and destroying Russian Army truck convoys in the 21st century like the Colonial militia destroyed British army foraging parties around Philadelphia in the 18th century & impelled then to retreat or starve.
President Zelensky claimed on Mar 9, 2022 that more Russian equipment has been captured than Ukrainian equipment lost in the campaign to date, and thus all Ukrainian losses have been covered in operational units by Russian AFV trophies, especially MBTs.
/19
Contrafactual Short form:
Ukraine is winning the vehicular firepower war of attrition with Russia because it has trained & combat experienced reserves from its previous conscript classes to fill those tractor captured Russian AFV's.
Long conventional war favors Ukraine.
20/End
PS.
Yes, the thread turned out to be long, not short.
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Remember all the professionally incompetent yo-yo naval officers & hangers on claiming FPV drones were not a threat to naval warships in 2023 WHEN I TOLD THEM THEY WOULD BE?
Reality just kicked them one and all in the 'nads...
I told these professionally incompetent US navalists accounts on X/Twitter in 2023 that both containerized drones and FPV drones were a deadly threat to every naval vessel on the water they were ignoring to their crew's peril.
We need to have a talk about Russian military corruption and its effects on the Russo-Ukrainian War.
It's kind of like these sun-rotted missile truck tires that make my reputation on Twitter.
Corruption happens slowly, then all at once.
Corruption🧵 1/
The Russian Army issued a "live off the land" order in early March 2022 resulted in lots of Russian enlisted stealing outside the line of sight of Russian junior officers.
This hollowed out discipline the RuAF "Professional Volunteers" in early 2022.
More information has come out on the FP-5 Flamingo which gives insights io both the systems and production engineering involved for low cost production.
I'm going to use the WW2 F6F Hellcat & M4 Sherman as examples of Ukrainian FP-5 design choices.
The FP-5 GLCM production photos released today shows what looks like a combination of carbon fiber composite, molded thermoplastics, and sheet metal.
Cruciform tail controls are all moving.
Wings are attached before launch like a 1960s USAF MGM-1 Matador. 2/
The FP-5 Transporter Erector Launch (TEL) trailer looks like a new custom build.
Iryna Terekh, head of production at Fire Point, stated to the AP that "Fire Point is producing roughly one Flamingo per day, and by October they hope to build capacity to make seven per day."
...With a similar configuration, drag will not be dominated by lift induced wing drag but will form drag which is typical for 500 knots air speed jets and missiles with low aspect ratio wings.
2/
...So a rule of thumb estimate is that you will need around 4 x the thrust of a Tomahawk F107-WR-402 700 lbf (3.1 kN) engine for an FP-5 Flamingo GLCM.
3/
Slowly, with a lot of notice, Trump is morphing into Pres. Biden
This territorial concession malarkey is exactly what the Biden Administration was playing games with in Nov 2021 via an op-ed by Samuel Charap of RAND in the Nov 19, 2021 Politico.
That Op-Ed advocated, in effect, that the US abandon Ukraine to Russia in exchange for other concessions by Russia, greenlighting Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
It was understood in Nov. 2021 era DC that Charap...