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
1/
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.

2/
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
3/
...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.

4/
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.

5/

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.

6/
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.

7/
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.
10/
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
11/
...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.

12/
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.

13/
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
14/
...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

15/
...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.

16/
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.

17/
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.
18/
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
19/
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."
20/
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.

21/
I wonder how big a Ponzi game Putin's Russian economy is playing with German banks?

22/End

• • •

Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to force a refresh
 

Keep Current with Trent Telenko

Trent Telenko Profile picture

Stay in touch and get notified when new unrolls are available from this author!

Read all threads

This Thread may be Removed Anytime!

PDF

Twitter may remove this content at anytime! Save it as PDF for later use!

Try unrolling a thread yourself!

how to unroll video
  1. Follow @ThreadReaderApp to mention us!

  2. From a Twitter thread mention us with a keyword "unroll"
@threadreaderapp unroll

Practice here first or read more on our help page!

More from @TrentTelenko

May 13
Finally!

Accounts watching the Russo-Ukrainian War have been utterly confused as to why Ukraine and Russia simply refused to use barbed wire.

1/
This one of my long threads on the lack of barbed wire from 2023.

4/
Read 7 tweets
May 13
This Ukrainian video shared by @bayraktar_1love makes clear it wasn't US Patriots on German mobile launchers that nailed a Backfire bomber and a pair of A-50 AEW radar planes.

It was a Ukrainian 1960's era S-200 (Nato SA-5) SAM.

A Victory Lap🧵
1/
What that video showed was the remote control feature for the S-200's 5P72 launchers.

This Soviet PVO scheme allowed S-200 batteries to put the 5P72 launcher near the front lines and keep the 5N62 Square Pair illuminating target radar 100 km behind it,

2/ Image
Image
...out of range of NATO tactical ballistic missiles.

A lot of "expert" X accounts in Feb 2024 were saying that this video showed a Patriot engagement or Russian friendly fire engagement.

The A-50 countermeasures pattern was inconsistent with both.

3/
Read 15 tweets
May 11
Actually, I disagree with @wretchardthecat below.

The question to be asking is "which military power is it more cost effective to have a cease fire?"

Strangely enough, a 30 day ceasefire favors Ukraine far more than Russia, because drones.

1/
The most important grand strategy scale decision of this conflict has been Ukraine's move to mass produce multi-copter drones, Propeller assault (OWA) drones, jet drone-missiles and increasing numbers of military spare parts via masses of 3D/AM printers.

2/
Ukraine is making 4 million drones a year including over 30,000 long range OWA drones and 3,000 "Drone-missiles" of three models a year.

That's over
33K small drones
2,500 OWA drones, and
250 Drone-missiles per month.

3/
Read 6 tweets
May 11
I have a copy of Solly Zuckerman's book mentioned in the thread below and I can confirm it's applicability to the Russo-Ukrainian War for the Ukrainian cause.

1/
To date, no strategic bombing campaign has been analyzed by serious historians as to how the targeting decisions for the various strategic bombing campaigns against Germany, Japan, North Korea, and North Vietnam/Laos/Cambodia were done.

2/
To quote the late Pierre Sprey:

"...strategic bombing targeting in every one of those campaigns was done by highly centralized, highly bureaucratized committees--and every one of those committees

3/
Read 17 tweets
May 6
This is Grok analysis of one of my X threads is a good example of why farming out your thinking/analysis to AI is a really bad idea.

Grok accurately reflects a highly flawed US National Security consensus about small drones.😱

A Grok vs Drone Reality🧵

x.com/i/grok/share/B…
Grok focused on Ukrainian drone capabilities to the exclusion of actual fielded Chinese drone capability and literally eight decades old aviation technology like conformal fuel tanks which have also been applied to cruise missiles in the Chinese technological base for 20 years
2/ Image
The Chinese Sunflower-200 is it's clone of the Iranian Shahed-136. It appeared at Russia's Armiya-2023 show and in 2025 combat in Sudan.

The China Defense website says it has a 3.2-meter length, 2.5-meter wingspan, a flight speed of 160-220 km per hour with a maximum take-off weight of 175 kilograms, a combat payload of 40 kilograms and can fly up to 2000 kilometers.
x.com/clashreport/st…
3/Image
Image
Read 18 tweets
May 4
I cannot begin to tell you how heartened I am by this development in Ukrainian combat barrier doctrine.

1/
Compare the picture above to my complaints about Ukrainian fighting doctrine in the Summer of 2024.

2/
Or my B*tching about its lack in the Summer of 2023 for the Russian Army

3/
Read 7 tweets

Did Thread Reader help you today?

Support us! We are indie developers!


This site is made by just two indie developers on a laptop doing marketing, support and development! Read more about the story.

Become a Premium Member ($3/month or $30/year) and get exclusive features!

Become Premium

Don't want to be a Premium member but still want to support us?

Make a small donation by buying us coffee ($5) or help with server cost ($10)

Donate via Paypal

Or Donate anonymously using crypto!

Ethereum

0xfe58350B80634f60Fa6Dc149a72b4DFbc17D341E copy

Bitcoin

3ATGMxNzCUFzxpMCHL5sWSt4DVtS8UqXpi copy

Thank you for your support!

Follow Us!

:(