Thread by @TrentTelenko

This is a insightful 15 tweet thread on the "Battle of Donbas' by @PhillipsPOBrien looking at Russian loss rates versus Ukrainian. You should read it all.👇

I'm going to highlight bits in this thread🧵to make a point about trucks
1/

https://twitter.com/PhillipsPOBrien/status/1520313940688912384

This tweet in the thread talks about Russian Army units being tied to supply dumps closer & closer to the front lines.

This is consistent & expected with high levels of attrition, both combat & operational, in the Russian Army tactical truck fleet.

2/

https://twitter.com/PhillipsPOBrien/status/1520313959924043776

As the Russian tactical truck fleet diminishes, the depth of Russian break-ins gets shallower & the chance of any sort of breakthrough followed by mobile operations disappears.

This is how a Pentagon spokesman phrased this problem👇
3/

"Still-continued logistics problems" boils down to not enough tactical trucks, efficiently used

The pace of operation the Putin regime insists upon means Russia simply cannot change over non-mech to mechanized logistics in the middle of the Ukraine war
4/

https://twitter.com/Osinttechnical/status/1508973215321841664?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1508973215321841664%7Ctwgr%5E%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fthreadreaderapp.com%2Fthread%2F1509239769053728776.html

This sort of mechanized artillery ammo logistics shown below simply is not going to happen for Russia in this war.

It is a system of systems at every level of logistics which requires investment & training over time to pay off.

5/

https://twitter.com/TrentTelenko/status/1509239776850812930

Part of the reason I did this thread on the history of TOW missile containers.

6/

https://twitter.com/TrentTelenko/status/1519401885534498816

And this thread demonstrating modern warehouse operations in context was to teach that mechanized logistics is a decades long incremental process developing people, physical infrastructure, and information systems used in modern supply chains.

7/

https://twitter.com/TrentTelenko/status/1518715063212859403

The Russian Army simply never made those organizational investments and its military leadership really doesn't have the 1st clue how to implement such a logistical system.

Not while the one it has is falling apart from vehicle casualties like this.

8/

https://twitter.com/visegrad24/status/1520037523027865601

And most chillingly in the tweet video below.

What this & the previous tweet both have in common -- beyond the hunting drone -- is the replacement of properly designed military vehicles with impressed civilian ones.

9/

https://twitter.com/visegrad24/status/1520080492992897024

This was seen first in Mariupol where "Scooby Doo" vans started replacing tactical trucks.

This makes sense as the civilian vehicles are moving short distances from rail heads and the Russians can steal spares from Mariupol car/vehicle dealerships.

10/

https://twitter.com/TrentTelenko/status/1516072383970516995

At the start of the war Russian had MTLB tracked fighting vehicles being used as ambulances.

Now they are using unmarked civilian cars with a sunroof for the same role.

This is the bleeding out of Russian Army vehicle fleet & the Russian economy too
11/

https://twitter.com/UAWeapons/status/1509897482662297603

These symptoms are consistent with my "Russian truck fleet dead from Operational Attrition in six-to-eight weeks" prediction.

It does not mean my prediction will pan out.

12/

https://twitter.com/TrentTelenko/status/1505370275273183239

The Russian Army withdrawal from Kyiv & concentration on Donbas was a reaction to their rate of truck loss when I made that prediction.

So were the Ukrainian "shaping operations" of blowing bridges

13/

https://twitter.com/BruckenRuski/status/1519687095719243777

...in the Southern & Eastern theaters to keep Russian trucks vulnerable to its "Hammer and Anvil tactics.

Tactics it picked up in part from Western trainers teaching UK Brigadier Richard Simpkin's NATO tactics versus Russians, AKA kill the trucks.

14/

https://twitter.com/TrentTelenko/status/1500974296277168135

Unless there are a lot of Western loitering munitions arriving at the battle front in the next two weeks, or Ukraine does it's Kherson break out & mobile operations.

It doesn't look like Russia's current rates of loss will get to 'immobilization from a lack of trucks level'
15/

...by ~May 15th 2022.

1701 trucks isn't even 50% of 4,000.

This is part of the issue of making prediction based on straight line projections.

The people you are predicting about will make changes in their operations to avoid that predicted disaster.

16/

This doesn't mean I'm going to be wrong at the middle-May end date of my projection, but doing a straight line projection from now says I will be.

Call it a less than 25% possible outcome.

We shall see in two weeks.

17/End