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 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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The one of the previous drawing is of a captured decoy from Roi island in March 1944.
Roi was subject to several IJN air raids using this decoy, as USS New Mexico reported its effects 14 Feb 1944, later reported in a Section 22 Current Statement dated 3 April 1944. 2/
Somehow the report in General Douglas MacArthur's Section 22 radar hunters current statement was scrubbed from all the Feb-March 1944 period after action reports and war diaries of USS New Mexico I've checked.
There is an tragi-comic story behind this Russian foreign ministry claim.
The Russian use the term "direct participation" because of a lie by Chancellor Scholz a year ago when he claimed the computer system used to program the Taurus missiles... 1/
The CO of the top scoring Buk [Nato designation SA-11 Gadfly] battery in the PSU did an interview ~2 years ago (early 2023).
He said they used their own Mavic drones to check that their camouflage and
Zoltan Dani & A2/AD doctrine🧵 1/
...that their battery concealment was good enough to fool Russian drones.
So, the PSU does a drone quality assurance check on its camo during the "hide" phase of the hide-shoot-scoot cycle, AKA you have to survive in order to have the opportunity to shoot enough to become the highest scoring SAM battery.
In contrast, the Russian VKS parks their missile TELARs in the middle of a field to get maximum obstacle clearance and range. Then they are shocked when hit by deep strike assault drone or GMLRS rocket.
In 2005, the Strategypage -dot- com web site had the following on the downing of an F-117 over Serbia.
These tactic are the heart of Ukrainian IADS doctrine.
---
How to Take Down an F-117
November 21, 2005: The Serbian battery commander, whose missiles downed an American F-16, and, most impressively, an F-117, in 1999, has retired, as a colonel, and revealed many of the techniques he used to achieve all this. Colonel Dani Zoltan, in 1999, commanded the 3rd battery of the 250th Missile Brigade. He had search and control radars, as well as a TV tracking unit.
1/
The battery had four quad launchers for the 21 foot long, 880 pound SA-3 missiles. The SA-3 entered service in 1961 and, while it had undergone some upgrades, was considered a minor threat to NATO aircraft. Zoltan was an example of how an imaginative and energetic leader can make a big difference. While Zoltan’s peers and superiors were pretty demoralized with the electronic countermeasures NATO (especially American) aircraft used to support their bombing missions, he believed he could still turn his ancient missiles into lethal weapons
2/
The list of measures he took, and the results he got, should be warning to any who believe that superior technology alone will provide a decisive edge in combat. People still make a big difference. In addition to shooting down two aircraft, Zoltan’s battery caused dozens of others to abort their bombing missions to escape his unexpectedly accurate missiles. This is how he did it.
The problem for this USN-Taiwan "hellscape strategy" is it's obsolete given that the Chinese have access to Russia's newest generation of FPV interceptor drones to counter it, via using China's "5 times bigger than the rest of the world combined" drone industry & sea militia.