Trent Telenko Profile picture
Mar 24 22 tweets 7 min read
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
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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.

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

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More from @TrentTelenko

Mar 24
@GRomePow 21 * 500= 10,500 missiles.

The US has only produced 45,000 Javelins since production began in the 1990's for all customers world wide.

It is 2022. The oldest stocks are over 20 years old and the US has a robust testing program randomly selecting missiles out of each production
@GRomePow lot.

Missile solid fuel engines age out at 10 years and require a careful depot level engine replacement plus electronics refresh.

The US does this as a matter of course, Congressional budget permitting, but most FMS customers do not.

2/
@GRomePow At most, 30,000 of that 45,000 are available somewhere in the world with about half being both in possession to the US military and available as warshot.

The US Army will not drain stocks from Indo-Pacific units, 18th Airborne Corps or the Stryker brigades.

That leaves the
3/
Read 4 tweets
Mar 23
Train Logistical🧵note the Russians are shelling Ukrainian train lines going to the Donbas.

This is a Russian battlefield "Admission Against Interest" regards their belief they will capture it anytime soon.

I've been looking for this since my "operational attrition" thread👇👇
Russians destroying Ukrainian train lines means they are more worried about Ukrainian logistics in future operations than their own offensives.

That is, Russia is now more worried about what Ukraine is about to do to Russians than what they will do to Ukraine...in the Donbas
2/
To restate it, the Russians are on the logistical back foot in the Donbas.

This is directly in line with Ukrainian Defense Ministry claims that:

"Russian forces have enough supplies to last 'no more than three days'"
3/
dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1…
Read 14 tweets
Mar 23
People are looking at the raw numbers here, 🧵look at the casualty ratio instead:
9861 Russian KIA
16,153 Russian WIA
The Russians have 37% KIA & 63% WIA, a 2 to 3 ratio.

This represents an utter collapse the Russian medical evacuation & treatment system. Note, no "missing"
1/
...or POW categories.

That lack of "Missing" & "POW" categories, which are standard in professional military casualty reporting, is a "poker tell" regards there being more Russian military casualties & losses.

There are a lot of small Russian columns wiped out by
2/
...Ukrainian forces.

There is no "Platinum 5-minutes," no "Golden hour" in the Russian Army.

Russian leaders simply do not care for the lives of the conscripts in their charge.

Compare that to 2 dead to 3 wounded ratio of the Russian Army to the between 1-to-7 and 1-to-10
3/
Read 10 tweets
Mar 21
Small 🧵This is an observation I will disagree with slightly in that the Russians have no choice but to keep putting Helicopters at Kherson.

They need helicopter air cover for truck resupply convoys so the Russian ground offensive can reach Odessa & supply the Mariupol attack
1/
Ukraine is doing to the Russian helicopters at Kherson what the IJN cruisers & battleships did to the USMC planes at Henderson Field on Guadalcanal in WW2.

2/ Image
This is why I keep repeating:

"Seldom are there things in war that have not happened before."

Failing logistics look the same war after war.
3/
Read 4 tweets
Mar 21
This is a truck logistics history🧵that will point back to my "Russian truck fleet is junk in 6-to-8 weeks from operational attrition" startment.

These KamAZ trucks are the newest generation available to Russia.
kamazexport.com
1/
This is a ZIL-131HV truck.

Production of all versions of the ZIL military truck at the Moscow plant ended in 1990.

It is 2022. You are seeing a lot of these in Ukraine.👇
2/
autoweekvirtualgreencarshow.com/the-best-sovie…
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…
Read 11 tweets
Mar 20
Alright Lady's & Gentlemen, boys and girls, it is time for another Truck logistics thread🧵 for this latest Russian Invasion of Ukraine.

In it we are going to discuss the concept of "Operational Attrition" as applied to the Russian Army truck fleet in combat.

1/
In my now widely read thread on poorly maintained, cheap Chinese made, truck tires, I explained how Russia lost trucks & mobility by not maintaining tires.

This loss of vehicles without a shot being fired is referred to as "Operational Attrition."

2/
That is, just by operating vehicles, you lose some of them because they break.

This gets a lot worse in combat. Each mile traveled by a military truck in war is between 10 and 20 miles wear. This is simple.

Truck drivers abuse trucks because they don't want to die.

3/
Read 17 tweets

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