Trent Telenko Profile picture
Mar 24, 2022 22 tweets 7 min read Read on X
Alright folks, this is a logistical 🧵on pallets, cranes, ISO containers, and what we are _NOT_ seeing on Russian Trucks in Ukraine

Below is really good background tweet 🧵on the importance of pallets as a logistical productivity tool, since we are not seeing them in Ukraine
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and we should be seeing a whole lot of them.

Instead, we are seeing the Russian Army use two man carry break bulk boxes of mortar & artillery ammunition like this.

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Pallets are fundamental to the mechanized movement of goods in a modern economy or military.

See:
"According to an article in a 1931 railway trade magazine, three days were required to unload a boxcar containing 13,000 cases of unpalletized canned goods. When the same
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...amount of goods was loaded into the boxcar on pallets or skids, the identical task took only four hours."

Point blank, the Russian Army trucks seem to be Soviet Union in the early 1930's in terms of pallet logistical efficiency.

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poorboypallet.com/fun-facts/f/di…
Look at this Russian operational truck loss from @UAWeapons It is clear the Russians 'get' palletizing artillery rockets.

But what is missing in these photos?

Hint: mechanized logistical infrastructure has a "look" you don't see here.

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There are no D-rings to tie down that huge rocket pallet.

That is why the TOS thermobaric rocket pallet shifted off that truck & destroyed the wooden truck bed in the process.

There is something else missing on this & every other Russian truck.

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Where are the material handling cranes on Russian trucks?

Rocket launchers can pick up palletized rocket pods with their launcher (See US Army HIMARS example below) off the ground.

Not so much from a tall tactical truck bed.

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The biggest peculiarity is there are no cranes in Ukraine, and I mean that literally.

I've yet to see a single KAMAZ, URAL or ZIL cargo truck with a built in material handling crane. The US Army has 10%-15% of its 5-ton trucks fitted with cranes to help move

8/
...ammunition or other heavy objects.

The M1084 5-ton std & M1086 5-ton long wheelbase FMTV trucks have cranes to speed the unloading of MLRS rocket pods and artillery ammunition pallets for shells & propellent at ammunition supply points.

9/
Which brings up the missing Russian all terrain fork lifts.

I wrote a long tweet thread in Nov 2021 on the poisonous WW2 interservice politics in the Pacific over the logistical supply chain there involving forklifts.
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The gist of that thread was a War Dept. logistics troubleshooter showed up in the Pacific to unsnarl War Dept. supply chains and had the trouble both snarled & shot back at him.

That being Adm Nimitz & his staff disallowing the Army its concrete in it's supply ship manifests
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...to build forklift capable warehouses in the age before all terrain forklifts were invented.

Then as now senior US Navy leaders are plug ignorant & proud of it when it comes to the realities of building & operating maritime infrastructure to support naval operations.

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This 1940's era 'type A' USN micromanagement of Army concrete contributed to the artillery shell shortage that slowed the Okinawa campaign, resulting in a great deal of avoidable kamikaze damage.

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Fanbois of Nimitz can rest easy because Putin & his generals in ukraine have far exceeded anything the WW2 Central Pacific command clique ever did by way of screwing up the transportation military supplies by corruption.

Whatever monies that were supposed to go for Russian
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...Army truck cranes went to line someone's Flag rank pockets.

The reason the US Army adds cranes to its trucks is to make the entire truck fleet more productive in moving cargo with fewer vehicles. Cranes reduce the loading time per truck so more of a vehicle's work day

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...is spent on the road than standing still.

Rough order, at the 90 mile/145 km distance Russian trucks can make three round trips. US Army trucks will be able to make four, because of their crane reduced load/unload times.

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Or, the pre-war truck efficiency assumptions on how long Russian trucks load and unload are very wrong because of built-in Western assumptions on levels of Russian mechanized logistics.

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US Army has had its Palletized Load System (PLS) trucks since 1993, having produced over 8,000 to date, and half of them were bought with cranes. There is nothing like it in the Russian truck fleet in Ukraine These PLS trucks are the US Army's primary MLRS rocket transports.
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The ports of St Petersburg and Vladivostok are heavily containerized as are the Russian railroads since they transship Chinese containers to Europe.

One of my maritime shipping contacts sent this to me when I asked him about the penetration of ISO containers in the Russian
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economy:

"Containers are used almost exclusively for commercial offload in the ports. They are rarely transported into the interior. Maersk just ran a story about heading back into Russia to grab 50k containers. That is mainly those in and around the ports."
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There are huge economic multiplier effects that come to economies from full intermodal transportation.

Russians don't have them.

That means Russia's non-oil economy is much smaller than Western economists give it credit for.

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I wonder how big a Ponzi game Putin's Russian economy is playing with German banks?

22/End

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More from @TrentTelenko

Dec 17
I've been involved with three US Army FMTV reset programs.

So this newest report from Ukraine's Defense Express on the the repairability problems with Russian AFV's out of their reserves is so much fun to share with you all.

1/ Image
Defense Express pulled an article from the No. 10 issue of the Russian magazine "Material and Technical Support" on how horrid the vehicles coming out of reserve are plus problems with battle damaged reserve vehicles.

2/
en.defence-ua.com/analysis/repai…
The 2nd paragraph starts with this:

"The central takeaway from this publication is that the actual repairability of Russian tanks is 3-5 times lower than what is claimed in official manuals. This discrepancy has extended repair times for equipment by at least 15-20%."

3/
Read 12 tweets
Dec 16
Ukraine’s claims to have produced 100 Peklo (Hell) cruise missiles over the past three months.

This works out to about 1.1 Peklo a day, but manufacturing production lines don't work like that.

Peklo Manufacturing 🧵

1/
pravda.com.ua/eng/news/2024/…
The infographic figure below is a typical commercial production line curve.

Ukraine's stated production and use of the Peklo (Hell) cruise missile marks it as being on the 'start of production to market entry' ramp up part of the curve below.

2/ Image
Over two dozen Peklo were shown in this public unveiling by Ukraine, which is over 1/4 of the stated production to date.

How many were pre-production prototypes or low rate initial pilot production models isn't knowable.
3/
Read 12 tweets
Dec 15
This is Russian exceptionalism in action again.

The Putin Regime took old riverine tankers - Volgoneft 212 and Volgoneft-239 - to sea:

1/
unian.ua/world/richkovi…
"According to Andriy Klymenko , head of the Institute for Black Sea Strategic Studies , both vessels are very old and have a "river" class, which implies certain limitations.

2/
He published and commented on the relevant map, which indicates the approximate location of the tanker disaster.

"It is about 8 miles from the seaport of Taman (a transshipment port south of the Kerch Strait).

3/
Read 5 tweets
Dec 15
This was a very interesting operation by Ukraine to destroy a 'partisan immobilized' fuel train with Switchblade 600's, to burn the fuel.

The burning fuel will require that the annealed rails under the cars to be replaced to prevent derailments.

RuAF rail vulnerability🧵
1/
This will require a Russian military railway service train to be deployed to this spot for possible future Ukrainian Switchblade 600 follow up strikes.

2/
I've mentioned the vulnerability of Russian trains to Switchblade 600 back in April 2022.

A Switchblade 600 with a Javelin warhead is powerful enough to destroy the control section of a rail engine...
3/
Read 8 tweets
Dec 8
I've been thinking on what is going on to reduce Russia VKS glide bomb attacks as shown

There are many possible reasons.

Fewer Russian glide bomb drops 🧵
1/
My first thought was to wonder if:

"Are we seeing Russian supply chain problems across its PGM production base due to foreign exchange shortages?"

Russia's Shaheed clones have new and inferior Chinese servo motors.⬇️
2/
I asked around and I was pointed to Ukrainian GNSS (AKA global positioning satellite signals) Spoofing as a more likely cause of the Shaheed-136 clone failures.

Also, that would have nothing with reduced glide bomb drops.

3/
Read 8 tweets
Dec 7
In another round of very useful translation, @sambendett points out the Russians have learned that drones are how combat power is measured in the 21st century.

The Russians didn't share drone tech with the SAA at scale.

Ukraine did with the HTS starting in June 2024.
1/
So the Assad regime fell.

Had Russia sent it's 'troublesome' drone units to Syria, rather than in meat grinder infantry assaults. Things might have turned out differently.

Dmitry "Goodwin" Lysakovsky was a legendary Russian extremist who became a drone
2/
...operator in the DPR army and stayed when it became Russian. 

"Goodwin" ran cross ways of his regimental commander for calling him out for dealing drugs to his own troops on social media.
3/
Read 5 tweets

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