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

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...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.

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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

Apr 27
The effectiveness of drones is directly affected by the electronic warfare competence of the drone users.

The fact that the US Army defenestrated every EW practitioner in the 2000's and has compete "EW virgins" as flag rank leadership means it will fail with mass casualties in its first major drone war combat.
1/3
A US Army serious about drone warfare would:

- Rebuild the full EW enterprise with organic division-level EW battalions and real exercises.

- Embed EW jamming into all combat branches (not MI-only).

- Shift to gun/autocannon dominant combined-arms counter-drone doctrine.

2/3
- Require FAA drone pilot + Ham radio licenses for flag ranks to build drone domain literacy.

None of these four reforms will happen until after US Army soldiers are deep in both defeat and buckets of blood.

3/3
Read 4 tweets
Apr 26
It is extremely unlikely that this shooter acted alone given the following:

1. Reports are the guns were cached disassembled in a black bag, in a room outside the secured Secret Service perimeter.

2. The room the guns were cached in didn't have television surveillance.

🧵
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3. The shooter arrived at the hotel the day before the event.😯

4. TSA rules require firearms to be transported in checked baggage, unloaded, and locked in a hard-sided container, declared to the airline at check-in.

2/
5. Local DC law requires firearms in vehicles to be inaccessible from the passenger compartment and unloaded.

6. Washington DC is not a "safe passage" jurisdiction for non-residents without a license. The shooter lacked this license.

3/
Read 10 tweets
Apr 14
USN flag ranks & their staffers have been fighting the idea of distant economic blockade of China tooth an nail as a response to China invading Taiwan for 30 years.

They really don't want a recent precedent of a successful blockade...

1/3
...to prevent their Carrier fleet Pickett's charge into the South China Sea.

Specifically distant blockade as a strategy against China makes having/regaining 100 Cold War era

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...frigates and destroyer tenders supporting them on distant blockade stations outside the 2nd Island chain, "budget relevant" for a military strategy of conducting three years of blockade enforcement.

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Read 4 tweets
Apr 14
The high death rate of Russian troops due to a lack of casualty evacuation was highly visible in March-September 2022.

I've documented this consistently, repeatedly and at great technical depth.

Russia Strong "slopaganda" has buried it over and over.

1/
I was calling out two dead for every three Russian wounded in Sept 2022 as the more realistic Russian casualty ratio in Ukraine because it was taking more than 24 hours to get to the equivalent of a battalion aid station.

2/3
I asked @grok to summarize my receipts on Russian casualty ratios since February 2022, which are clipped below:

3/3 Image
Read 4 tweets
Apr 1
This fact:

"Oil revenue collapsed to roughly 5% of the national budget, down from 32% the prior year. Taxes increased over 60%. Food prices climbed at least 50%. ATMs across major cities are running out of cash."

Underlines a major point of mine. 🧵

1/
Since Clausewitz, the West recognized "war as an extension of politics."

The corollary of that is "politics is an extension of money."

Iran doesn't have any money, thanks to hyper-inflation and now an 84% reduction in oil revenue.

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The failed January 2026 Iranian uprising kicked off because hyperinflation caused massive food insecurity that required the mass murder of 30,000 (+) Iranian protestors to suppress.

The 12-day war and the current one have made Iranian hyper-inflation far worse.

3/
Read 6 tweets
Mar 31
Not for US aircraft. ⬇⬇️

Hardened aircraft shelters are against the secular budget religion of US flying service flag ranks.

Not that other Western air forces are any better.

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The Chief of Air Staff RAAF 12 months ago gave a lecture trashing HAS as a bad idea and how "dispersal is better."

Dispersal didn't help USAF E-3G's in Saudi Arabia because they had nowhere to disperse too.

Places like Italy are politically off limits.
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The RAAF CoS appeared to believe that every HAS was like the cheapest Iraqi HAS that we could crack with a single BLU-109/B, not the serious HAS needing multiple BLU-109/B down the same hole.

All of China's HAS built since 1991 are of the 2nd variety or are 'super-hardened' deep tunnels.

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Read 4 tweets

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