It turned out the Russians refusal to use artillery on Ukrainian counter-attacks at Izyum had to do with a large set piece artillery barrage the Russians had planned to open their Donbas offensive across the entire front.
The logic chain of that thread fell apart on that point.
It also helped I had been tipped off about coming a coming article saying there was a Russian shortage in 160mm & 240mm mortar ammo because of the heavy use of those calibers in Syrian cities.
The article's...
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... publication was put off by the start of the Russian Donbas offensive.
You can now file this under "Trent Telenko can be wrong."
There were additional factors besides those two points that gave me a context to reach that conclusion.
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Back in late 2014 I joined a Ukrainian diaspora email list covering the Donbas war. At the time I was studying the 1945 artillery battle at Okinawa.
Weirdness popped out immediately looking at the artillery rocket impact pattern in Kramatorsk
The key to the map
o Green UXO duds,
o Red KIA/WIA
o Blue exploded, no casualties
Most of the rockets overshot the airfield.
Seven out of 41 rockets UXO is an 18% dud rate. 6/
This dud rate is better than the oldest Ex-Soviet stuff seen in Afghanistan (~30%), but not the less than 5% rate of duds seen in older Western ammo.
Acronyms:
UXO - unexploded ordnance
KIA - Killed in action
WIA - Wounded in action.
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A shell fuze is an explosive train from smaller to largest of a primer, a detonator and a booster charge meant to set off the main bursting charge of a shell
The photo clip to the right is from a youtube WW2 US Army training film
Note: Fuze =/= Fuse
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Generally, as artillery fuzes age, they get less reliable. This is because the chemicals in the Fuze's primer are the most unstable & subject to degrading over time.
Artillery ammunition of all sorts has a life span.
...over time as hot/cold cycles, humidity & trace contamination causes crystallization.
An 18% dud rate on Smerch rockets is a symptom of the aging of the primer in the rocket fuze, AKA a time expired munition.
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There were other indications of "time-ex" Russian artillery rocket munitions from the 2015 122mm Grad rocketing of Mariupol.
As rocket propellent ages, it generates marginally & unpredictably less thrust.
Mariupol's 'short' rocketing in the figure right below suggests that
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...happened in 2015.
US military practice is to treat solid rocket motors as a 10 year storage item requiring inspect/replace in a missile/rocket midlife depot level refresh
Demilitarizing artillery rockets & shells is an utter pain as it requires EPA regulatory permissions
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...for burning the explosives & propellants.
DCMA administers these 'demil' contracts, which is where much of the information I've related on 'time-ex' ammo came from.
Russia's wars in Chechnya & Syria and the 1980's Iraqi purchases of Soviet shells saw large amounts of 13/
Soviet Union's strategic reserve of artillery ammunition used up.
When the US Military overran Iraq in 2003. It found more artillery ammunition, mostly ex-Soviet, than in it's own war reserves.
These Iraqi munitions were destroyed in the US anti-IED campaign of 2004-2007.
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Now we get to the 1945 artillery fight at Okinawa.
The radar proximity "VT-Fuze" debuted for the first time in Pacific ground combat at Okinawa.
(I've posted a great deal about Okinawa, see below photos.) 15/
So what is this lack of Russian & Ukrainian airburst fuzing mean?
Good fuzing is expensive, requires high end manufacturing capability & quality control.
Russian artillery simply doesn't have either available.
See this time mortar fuze from Taiwan. 25/
The replacement of chemical percussion, mechanical, and electromechanical fuzing with pure electric-electronic fuzing for superior shell performance is a 21st Century trend Russia is ill prepared to follow.
Taiwan is just one example of this. 26/
This is a Romanian 120mm Mortar with PF-120 proximity fuze ARM shells.
Please carefully note the huge beaten ground caused by the shell fragments in the photo clips & video. 27/
The lack of Russian airburst shelling in Donbas utterly stands out when you look at the lay of the land after repeated shelling over time.
But the best way to upgrade Ukrainian artillery is going to be with NATO & other artillery fuzes to give Ukraine more airburst and other options versus Russia.
And the fuze that will help Ukraine the most is the ATK precision guidance kit fuzes for its incoming NATO 155mm
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The PGK turns ordinary 155mm shells into precision guided artillery projectiles (PGAP) at the cost of 10% of maximum range.
You can airlift 40 PGK for the weight of a single Excalibur guided artillery shell. 30/
The PGK requires minimal additional training to properly use and it will vastly reduce the required artillery shell tonnage for the same battlefield impact.
The only reason it cannot be used on current Ukrainian shells is they have the Russian 36mm fuze threads compared 31/
...to the 45mm used on NATO artillery shells.
So the UA would have to take 152mm and 203mm casings and machine out the threads to fit the PGK NATO fuse thread.
Ukraine has a plant in Sumy that manufactures 122mm, 152mm ammo, so this is not an unusual challenge for them.
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It is the little things in war that make all the difference.
Things like shell fuzes.
Why we have not seen the Western intelligence notice or Defense Departments & Defense Ministries to go there with upgrading Ukrainian artillery and mortar fuzes is a mystery...
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and in September, 1,202 KIA and 649 WIA, i.e. 1.85:1.
These numbers strongly exceed any previous campaigns dating back to the Crimean War, and do not include non-combat deaths due to disease or exposure."
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Late 20th Century combat saw one dead for every four wounded.
Russia is suffering between one and 3/4 to one to something like one and 4/5ths to one killed to wounded at Povrovsk.
Gosh, remember all those 2023 US Navalist accounts that denied - DENIED, I tell you - that drones from containerships would ever, ever, be a threat and that I personally was delusional for saying so publicly.
One in every five US Naval vessels are defenseless to Chinese drones, surprise launched from Chinese merchant & fishing vessels, because the
every CNO since 1989 didn't want USN logistical officers to get a captaincy and compete for flag ranks.
Instead of dealing with reality, the USN flags send out minions on X to say "de-lu-lu" things like this⬇️
Because the USN Flags from the Aviation, Surface and Sub communities don't want to have logistical officers get flag ranks and spotlight their professional delusions🤮🤮 3/3
The missile is currently active aboard Gerald R. Ford-class aircraft carriers, Nimitz-class aircraft carriers, Wasp-class amphibious assault ships, America-class amphibious assault ships, San Antonio-class amphibious transport dock ships,
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Whidbey Island-class dock landing ships, Harpers Ferry-class dock landing ships, and littoral combat ships (LCS).[6]"
This was a US Navy procurement disaster in the age of drones.
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"Western Experts" on X who claim drones are a "Ukraine War unique fad" are complete fools⬇️
"Among the sensitive targets of September 2025:
• 1,895 ‼️ enemy wings of the Orlan, Zala, SuperCam, Lancet types, Molniya kamikaze wing, Shahed, Gerbera.
• 455 enemy pilot launch points and 738 crew antenna units.
• 150 mobile EW systems and 9 self-propelled EW systems.
• 2,124 self-propelled vehicles (armor, logistics, rocket artillery, auto-moto vehicles, MLRS).
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• 394 cannons and howitzers.
• and much more weaponry, assets, depots, shelters, etc."
The #1 counter-battery weapon on the 2025 battlefield isn't ballistic or rocket artillery.
The Russian Legioner armored vehicle is an interesting reinvention of the 1940's Red Army BTR-152 or US M3 Scout car.
It says a great deal about the defense industrial infrastructure limitations of the Russian Federation.
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The three 6x6 BTR-152 photos and drawings and one 4x4 M3 scout car photo will give you an idea of what is available to the 2025 Russian defense industrial base.