Thread by @TrentTelenko

If you have never seen efficient mechanized warehouse operations moving pallets from truck to a staging area.

This video is a treat👇

I'm going to use it as a teachable moment on American intelligence failure.🧵
1/

https://twitter.com/DeptofDefense/status/1518359584942997504

First a truck comes to a dock. It stops and a forklift brings out a commercial pallet with six missiles at the ~00:15 sec hack.

The forklift brings the missile pallet to a group of three standard USAF 463L cargo pallets where four of the missile pallets can be placed on
2/

...each.

The airmen secure the four pallet loads on the 463L cargo pallets, 24 missiles per 463L.

Then the forklift moves the consolidated load to a roller conveyor, which moves it inside the staging area.
3/

All of that securing of the smaller pallets to the 463L pallets is hard manual labor, but it isn't back breaking/body destroying like you see in the Russian Army.

The hardest work of moving material saved for the machines, not for the people.

4/

Once you see and know the "look" of efficient mechanized logistics. You simply cannot miss it's lack in the Russian Army like this.👇

5/

https://twitter.com/u24_news/status/1517368674352476160

Yet, Western intelligence analysts did so for eighty years.

Despite a US Army intelligence officer making good money in a fictional book where he described non-mechanized Russian Army logistics in detail in 1989!

6/

https://twitter.com/Harlentropolis/status/1513193984230842374

The bottom line as far as I can see in intelligence analysis is that you pay attention to what your bosses think is important...

...and don't mention to the bosses important things they don't want to hear.
7/

The non mechanized nature of Russian Army logistics checked both those boxes.

The table of organization of Russian Army material handling equipment, like forklifts, in a Russian artillery units simply wasn't important compared to "shiny things" like guns, vehicles & radios.

8/

And when mavericks like Ralph Peters said "The Russian Artillery emperor has no clothes" the leadership-pleasing groupthink closed in to reject all his ideas, because reasons.

This is not new.

We saw the same thing in the run up to Pearl Harbor.

9/

I wrote a piece over on the Chicagoboyz weblog about it.

The Forgotten and Buried Intelligence Lessons of Pearl Harbor, December 7th 1941
December 7, 2019
chicagoboyz.net/archives/61235…
10/

This is the key lesson:

"The reason for this pattern of failure boils down to the forgotten and unlearned — frankly impossible for American elites to learn — intelligence lessons of Pearl Harbor. Those unlearned lessons being that the interlocking patron-client
11/

...political relations inside the American federal civil government, military and intelligence organizations lead to narrow self-interested groupthink over the concerns of outside reality.

And that this tendency towards self-interested groupthink is at its absolute worse
12/

...when facing a foreign enemy with a police state internal security system that is running a campaign of strategic deception and denial.

If that “worst case” foreign enemy sounds a lot like Imperial Japan, the People’s Republic of North Korea, China, the Soviet Union,
13/

...Iraq and Iran. It means you have paid attention to both American history since Pearl Harbor and to current events."

The issues arising from the non mechanized nature of the Russian Army fell into this abyss political-military 'clientelism.'

14/

And I expect that the utterly system d--ning nature of that 80-year failure will be completely ignored.

It is simply the nature of the American political system to groupthink the hard reality of intelligence failure away, while pretending things have changed.

15/

"For It is the doom of men that they forget"



16/End