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

Jul 2
Just...no. Russia HAS BEEN "Battle of the Cities" from the very beginning...targeting hospitals as a means of destroying ethnic minorities.

This has been Russian policy for DECADES.

Ukraine retaliating for atrocity is _RECIPROCITY_ per the Laws of War, not degeneracy.
1/2
I asked @grok to document this Russian policy of atrocity at the link, excerpt:

"February 24, 2022–present (Full-scale Russian invasion): The scale escalated dramatically. As of May 2026, the WHO had verified more than 3,000 attacks on healthcare via its Surveillance System for Attacks on Health Care (SSA). A coalition of organizations (including PHR, eyeWitness, Truth Hounds, etc.) documented ~3,095 attacks, with 1,632 damaging or destroying hospitals and clinics"

x.com/i/grok?convers…
2/
I'm afraid @cdrsalamander has gotten the moral vectors in the Russo-Ukrainian war wrong.

What is degenerate here isn't RECIPROCITY.

Degeneracy here is defined as using Woke NGO Elite definitions of morality, AKA claiming AFU RECIPROCITY per the laws of war as a war crime.
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Read 4 tweets
Jun 30
When I've talked about the legacy of Soviet industrial gigantism (one big factory) making Putin era Russia far more vulnerable to a drone strategic bombing campaign.

This is a very good example. ⬇️

Strategic Drone Airpower🧵
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I've talked about this vulnerability in a couple of previous threads. Here is a shorter one:



Putin's decades long "Russian exceptionalism" propaganda campaign, that says WW2 was won on the Eastern Front, has made Russians incapable of seeing this.

2/3
If strategic airpower was irrelevant then. So is damage from it now. 🤦‍♂️

Here is the larger in-depth thread detailing the vulnerabilities of ex-Soviet "One-Big Factory" infrastructure (AKA gigantism) Ukraine is exploiting.

3/3
Read 4 tweets
Jun 28
There is so much to object to here that I'm going to restate some basic design observations on the FP-5 to clarify how the Russian reflexive control data fed AI slop that is polluting public discussions of the FP-5.

FP-5 🧵
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1. The FP-5 Flamingo is about four times the launch weight of a BGM-109 Tomahawk (i.e. ~13,200 lb), and 2-3 times the range (i.e. ~1,620 nmi) while carrying twice the warhead mass (i.e. ~2,000 lb).

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2. The FP-5 design concept is modelled on the USAF MGM-13 Mace GLCM as Fire Point told Ukrainian military analysts - but designed with modern technology to be extremely cheap to make (claimed 1/6 the cost of a Tomahawk - likely not counting the engine cost).

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Read 17 tweets
Jun 23
It's time to revisit how 992 Ukrainian drones and 10 small cruise missiles were used to saturate Russia's Moscow air defenses.

There was a lot of technology, technique & tactics involved.

Drone War 🧵
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The first thing that needs to be pointed out is that in 2026 Ukraine has not only replicated, but likely exceeded, the 2018 capabilities of the USAF's Stand-off Munitions Activity Center (SMAC) at at Barksdale AFB.

I've mentioned this before ⬇️
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In 2018 a Dallas chapter of the Association of Old Crows gave an award to SMAC & we got an open source brief of what they did to earn the award.

These guys do the evasive routing for integrated cross-service standoff munition attack profiles.

3/
Read 14 tweets
Jun 19
The BLUF of every missile based integrated air defense is the number of missiles and launcher reload times are known.

Winning a saturation attack against one is simple arithmetic, total all the defending missiles, then +10 more drones above that number.
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Electronic warfare is always a "saving throw" with an expiration date for the defense.

Plus no one in the world, since 1989, has invested in enough mobile guns for robust AA-combined arms to screw up the simple arithmetic of a saturation drone/missile attacks.

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Russia burned out Ukraine's considerable stocks of 5V55 SAMs (~3,300 rounds), 9M83 SAMs (~1,000) and 9M38 SAMs (~800) by repeat saturation attacks.

Ukraine returns the favor. This is not that difficult to grasp.

Saturation attacks were central to legacy Soviet doctrine.
3/
Read 5 tweets
Jun 18
We have just seen over Moscow today - with Ukrainian drones - the Russo-Ukrainian War's version of the RAF’s first 1,000-bomber raid of World War II, codenamed Operation Millennium, which took place on the night of May 30–31, 1942.

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Operation Millennium, marked the first tactical deployment of the RAF "bomber stream".

That is, the tactic of flying a dense, tightly timed formation along a narrow corridor to overwhelm German radar networks and anti-aircraft defenses of the Kammhuber line.
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When I look at the design of the air defense rings around Moscow.🧐⬇️

I can't help but think Ukraine used a 2026 "Drone Stream' to saturate one sector of these ring defenses like the RAF did to the Kammhuber line.

3/3
Read 4 tweets

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