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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In the late 1960's to 1973 Arab-Israeli War US EW contractors could meet a two week cycle time with "quick reaction capability program" to bypass normal procurement procedures and speed urgently needed electronic systems to the battlefield.
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Given the the triple handicaps of Silicon Valley practice of outsourcing of engineering talent, counting foreigners as 'diversity hires,' and ITAR restrictions for defense work.
The USA lacks the electronic engineering talent it did in the Apollo/Vietnam era to do 'QRCP.'
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The mass production of China's "Corvus Mulberry" tank landing barges proceeds apace in a shipyard also building freighters for a Taiwanese shipping firm.
Taiwanese capitalists are literally paying the Chinese shipyard that is building the means CCP will use to invade Taiwan! 1/
The US Navy doesn't have the tankers, salvage ships, tugs, fire boats & destroyer tenders to attempt running China's drone & anti-ship missile gauntlet when the CCP invades Taiwan.
China collapsing from a 3-4 year US naval blockade will disgorge Taiwan from the CCP's grip. 2/
Will someone please explain to me why the US Navy should impale it's carrier battle groups on Chinese anti-ship hypersonic, ballistic and cruise missiles to rescue Taiwan from this foolishness?
Distant naval blockade will collapse China's economy for for far fewer US lives.
The mass production of China's "Corvu Mulberry" tank landing barges proceeds apace in a shipyard also building freighters for a Taiwanese shipping firm.
Taiwanese capitalists are literally paying the Chinese shipyard that are building the means CCP will use to invade them.
Will someone please explain to me why the US Navy should impale it's carrier battle groups on Chinese anti-ship hypersonic, ballistic and cruise missiles to rescue Taiwan from this foolishness?
Distant naval blockade will collapse China's economy for far fewer US lives. 2/
The US Navy doesn't have the tankers, salvage ships, tugs, fire boats & destroyer tenders to attempt running China's drone & anti-ship missile gauntlet when the CCP invades Taiwan.
China collapsing from a 3-4 year US naval blockade will disgorge Taiwan from the CCP's grip.
It turns out that, in addition to "TAF-10" USMC SCR-270 radars, the USMC 90mm Heavy AA Battalion SCR-584 radars saw quite a few of the Japanese Balloon Radar Decoys at Okinawa in/near Hagushi Beach, Yonton & Kadena air fields.
The Marine AA troops didn't know what they were, but their descriptions match known aerodynamic templates for them.
The balloon decoy tended to fall through different levels of wind direction & updrafts. So the decoy often went in different directions than the ground wind. 2/
The 1st Marine Provisional Anti-Aircraft Group Hqtrs saw the radar decoy balloons most often when the Japanese engaged in a night time tactic they referred to as "Ice-Tong attacks."
Pairs of Japanese planes established themselves in orbits just outside effective 90mm gun
The one of the previous drawing is of a captured decoy from Roi island in March 1944.
Roi was subject to several IJN air raids using this decoy, as USS New Mexico reported its effects 14 Feb 1944, later reported in a Section 22 Current Statement dated 3 April 1944. 2/
Somehow the report in General Douglas MacArthur's Section 22 radar hunters current statement was scrubbed from all the Feb-March 1944 period after action reports and war diaries of USS New Mexico I've checked.
There is an tragi-comic story behind this Russian foreign ministry claim.
The Russian use the term "direct participation" because of a lie by Chancellor Scholz a year ago when he claimed the computer system used to program the Taurus missiles... 1/