Trent Telenko Profile picture
Mar 21, 2022 11 tweets 6 min read Read on X
This is a truck logistics history🧵that will point back to my "Russian truck fleet is junk in 6-to-8 weeks from operational attrition" startment.

These KamAZ trucks are the newest generation available to Russia.
kamazexport.com
1/
This is a ZIL-131HV truck.

Production of all versions of the ZIL military truck at the Moscow plant ended in 1990.

It is 2022. You are seeing a lot of these in Ukraine.👇
2/
autoweekvirtualgreencarshow.com/the-best-sovie…
You see a couple of dead ZIL trucks with this dead Russian Object 640 Black Eagle tank prototype in these Ukrainian battle damage assessment photos.
3/
reddit.com/r/TankPorn/com…
A 32-to-40 year old, 150 HP engined, Zil truck in a Russian military with no tradition of NCO preventive maintenance is a marginal "bookkeeping" asset at best.

4/
Every war or military conflict since trucks were invented has seen far more trucks go down to operational attrition than combat.

It is easy, one internet search away, real life facts like this that tell me those screaming for "Data" are trolls playing "denial games" w/history
5/
All a good preventive maintenance program with lots of spare parts can do in combat is slow this process down.

The WW2 Red Ball Express ended when the truck fleet fell apart.
6/
historynet.com/red-ball-expre…
The 90 hp Studebaker, Dodge & Chevy trucks of the Red Ball Express had every spare part 1940's Detroit could make over 2-years sitting for them in England.

7/
The 150hp Zil & 300 hp KamAz Trucks in Ukraine simply don't.

The Zil's are just as overloaded as the Kamaz trucks with 1/2 the horsepower trying to keep up on bad Ukrainian roads.

They are redlined/overheated "Zombie Trucks driving."
8/
There is one other thing the Red Ball Express had that Russian trucks in ukraine do not...a supply of gravel to repair roads.

US Army Corps of Engineers dug gravel pits right off the Normandy beaches to provide the trucks of what became Red Ball Express road repair gravel
9/
... before it was needed.

It is the small details that a logistical staff officer, with a stubby pencil and ledger paper spent hours grinding out in the UK, that made the Red Ball Express' success happen.

And what the trucks of the Russian Army in Ukraine lack today.

10/end
Statement, not startment, darn it!!!

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More from @TrentTelenko

Dec 19
Let us be clear what has happened here.

Ukraine has a drone armed merchant raider lose in the Mediterranean hunting Russian shadow tankers.

Upshot: There will be more elsewhere on the world's oceans in the near future effecting maritime trade.

2025 Merchant Armed Raider 🧵
1/
@grok answered the following questions for me:

" Please summarize the pre-World War 1 to 1942 career of merchant armed raiders and compare that data to Ukraine's recent drone attack in the Mediterranean with a drone armed commercial vessel."

2/ Image
Image
Image
This is @grok's final summary:

"In essence, Ukraine's approach modernizes the raider concept—swapping guns for drones and merchant disguises for stealthy launches— but lacks the historical volume due to the conflict's constraints.

3/
Read 11 tweets
Dec 11
US Ground force flag ranks deny this 2025 reality 🤡⬇️

"The Ukraine war has exposed a large and increasing gap between Western reconnaissance doctrine and modern conventional battlefield reality.
1/3
In Donetsk, reconnaissance operators face constant drone surveillance, electromagnetic degradation, and hyper-local combat conditions that invalidate long-held assumptions about stealth and standoff intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR).

2/3
This article contends that NATO must, with urgency, reform its reconnaissance doctrine, training, and force structure to survive and efficiently operate in a drone-saturated battlefield."

Upton Sinclair reports:
3/3 Image
Read 4 tweets
Dec 9
I said this about the US Navy in 2023 (⬇️)

....and the institutional failures on display in the USS Truman CVBG Red Sea deployment proved me correct in 2025.

1/2
Every competent USN surface officer knows in their gut an anti-aircraft cruiser should not be operating with downed identification friend or foe (IFF) and Link-16 data link with no E-2 Hawkeye AEW support.

2/
news.usni.org/2025/12/04/inv…
Those officers know in their guts that radar skin paints alone from their ship's SPY-1 will be borderline for high tempo engagements...

...but this is not the first time this kind of problem occurred:

3/
twz.com/air/how-uss-ge…
Read 6 tweets
Nov 16
Just...listen...to this video clip with your eyes closed.

The predominant sound isn't artillery.
It isn't assault rifles.

It is the scream of drone rotors coming close, punctuated with the explosion of the drone upon impact.

1/3
That sound drama isn't World War One or any "medium intensity" conflict since 1918.

It is the sound of how 21st century Peer-to-Peer conflict is fought.

A conflict Western ground militaries are obsolescent in equipment to face.

2/3
That Russo-Ukraine War video is a soundscape US Army National Training Centers are too obsolete/incapable of replicating, because US Army flag ranks are allergic to training with high densities of small/cheap/many FPV drones.

3/3 Image
Read 4 tweets
Nov 10
WW2 is calling again with Ukraine developing Drone version of SHORAN.

_SH_ort
_RA_nge
_N_avigation

1/
SHORAN was a WW2 blind bombing system using two radio stations and an electromechanical computer.

In 1938 an RCA engineer named Stuart William Seeley, while attempting to remove "ghost" signals from an experimental television system, discovered he could measure distances
2/ Image
...by time differences in radio reception.

Instead of building a radar unit with this discovery, he proposed using this technique for precision ground-based radio beacon navigation bombing aid.

3/ Image
Read 12 tweets
Oct 29
One the DCMA quality inspectors on my team worked at an EMALS contractor in Texas.

I can't say more than the Chinese tested their EMALS at subsystem level (unlike the USN) with the knowledge the four catapults needed to be independent of each other for operations,

EMALS🧵
1/5
...based on how the USN f--ked up their EMALS design.

That is, when any single EMALS catapult on the Ford class goes down for any reason. They all can't be used.

2/5
As strategypage dot com put it in 2019:

"EMALS proved less reliable than the older steam catapult, more labor intensive to operate, put more stress on launched aircraft than expected and due to a basic design flaw if one EMALS catapult becomes inoperable,

3/5
Read 5 tweets

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