When Russia was conducting it's build up before invading Ukraine in Dec 2021-Feb 2022 I was looking for a lot of gravel, sand & pre-cast concrete structures.
You can do a lot of things with pre-cast concrete.
It is a mark of a modern economy to see a lot of these structures as it indicates highly mechanized productivity to avoid labor costs. 3/
Pre-cast concrete structures are how you get economies of scale & speed in major civil engineering projects like roads, bridges & the drainage for both.
The Russians used these pre-cast concrete structure building techniques to build the Kerch Straits bridge into Crimea. 4/
Yet to date, we have not seen anything like that temporary Ukrainian gravel & pre-cast concrete structure bridge from the Russian Army anywhere in occupied Ukraine.
Suppliers of pre-cast concrete structures have literal catalogs of standard structures they can sell from stock.
So why hasn't the Russian Army reached back into the Russian economy for such structures? 6/
It's not like the Russians are lacking for Ukrainian fording sites where building similar temporary bridge structures would be both useful & hard to destroy via artillery raids.
Unlike the floating bridge structures the Russian Army are using👇 7/
This is another example where a Ukrainian style pre-cast concrete structures & gravel temporary bridge would have been a better option. Simply because you can't sink it with fragments from Ukrainian MLRS artillery rockets.
I would have expected the LNR & DNR forces to have been using temporary bridging techniques similar to the Ukrainians simply because the Russian Army didn't provide floating bridges to them. 9/
Yet they too seem to be utterly lacking in gravel & pre-cast concrete structures which the Ukrainian civilian economy is capable of throwing together near-overnight.
10/
The general inability of the Russian Army to use pre-cast concrete structures that the Russian state has demonstrated it can produce for priority state projects like the Kerch Straits bridge suggests a number of things.
11/
o There are are few/no pre-cast concrete structure vendors in the Russian economy.
o If there are such vendors, they have no stocks of pre-made structures available for fear they will have their stock stolen by the state...
12/
...or destroyed by Russian thieves looking for scrap steel to sell.
Whatever the case, the idea that Putin can mobilize the Russian economy for a long war of attrition with Ukraine has to be viewed with great suspicion.
13/
Kleptocracies don't stop stealing because there is a war on.
The inability of the Russian State & economy to use pre-cast concrete structures outside of 'high imperial focus by Putin' priority state projects like the Kerch Straits bridge suggests any sort
14/
... of Russian general mobilization will fail because of Kleptocratic thievery @kamilkazani has extensively detailed.
15/End
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Alright folks, this is going to be a long logistical thread🧵 where I will try and make the case that that advanced US weapons systems like the Patriot SAM, M1A1 Abrams tank & F-16 with AMRAAM can be both rapidly transitioned & effectively used by Ukraine.
It won't be cheap 1/
...to do.
I going to walk you all through about 37 years of US military history (1985-2022) with an emphasis on the concepts of "Contractor Logistical Support" and "Private Military Corporations" with a bit of history involving the personnel policies of Claire Chennault's 2/
Flying Tigers thrown in.
Trust me, it's needed.😉
In the late Cold War year of 1985 LOGCAP or “Logistics Civil Augmentation Program” was established primarily to pre-plan for contingencies and to “leverage existing civilian resources.”
There were eight years of US, UK & other NATO training teams in Ukraine between 2014 & 2022 teaching mechanized logistics as well as modern anti-Russian tactics.👇 1/
So there were literally hundreds of NATO servicemen who could have been debriefed about Ukrainian Armed Forces effectiveness and what Ukrainians know about Russian logistics.
2/
Given the US DoD computer model predicting the outcome of a Russian invasion of Ukraine -- USING THE MOST UP TO DATE INTELLIGENCE ESTIMATES -- predicted Ukraine would fall in 72-to-96 hours.
Do you think anyone from the US CIA, DIA, US Military intelligence or their NATO
3/
Alright boys and girls, we are going for another wild ride in modern logistics & intelligence🧵
I want you to pay attention to the Russian artillery ammo & it's wood box packaging because I'm going to visually explain why it shows pre-mechanized logistics of the early 1930's 1/