Thread by @HN_Schlottman

1/ A few people have asked me about Russian logistics, a enormously complicated topic. Specifically, they wanted to know if there was a logistical constraint on their operations. The short answer is possibly and more work required. Thread will explain pic. Caveats in 2nd tweet.

2/ Caveats
- Did not include fuel and water, which are obviously critical. I will look into that upon more study and info.
- Not a logistics expert
- This take is very preliminary and the result of a few hours of research on the topic over the weekend. A lot more work is needed

3/ Returning to this map, I've ID'd 4 likely operational level supply points and their approximate distance from the frontline BTGs. These are along major rail lines. As noted by many, Russian rely heavily on rail for logistics. From there, they use trucks to get to the units.

4/ The distance to the frontline BTGs to the noted supply points slightly exceeds rough Soviet era norms for the division level. Couldn't find norms for army level, but suspect they are in the same ballpark.

5/ The 40km radius is a mostly notional outer limit for rocket assisted projectiles for conventional tube artillery. They are in range of systems such as the Smerch and Tockha, but at least safe against sustained conventional artillery fire for now.

6/ Finally, delving into supply requirements for Russian units. Documents provided by @kofmanmichael suggested a BTG of 600 personnel would require 1.03 tons of food (mostly) and kit a day. To check this, 3 MRE's weight 2.2kg, so assuming 3 MRE's per person gets you 1.3 tons.

@KofmanMichael 7/ Ammo is far more heavy. A BTG carries roughly 3 days worth of ammo with it. Using a list provided by @kofmanmichael again, I came to a # of 128 tons of ammunition, + 3 tons of other supplies previously mentioned. Per day this is 43.6 tons, ~10 tons of this are BM-21 rockets.

@KofmanMichael 8/ Translating this into truckloads, again, is very complicated and I've simplified it due to the absence of knowledge. A Ural-4320 has a max payload of 7.9 tons. Assuming an average load factor of 60%, means about 4.74 tons of this is used on average for cargo.

@KofmanMichael 9/ Load factor is maximum cargo weight capacity vs capacity used. As items take up room unevenly, a truck is almost never going to use its full capacity. A 2011 study suggested this number was 57% for civilian trucks. I don't have a similar number for military trucks yet.

@KofmanMichael 10/ The excellent article "Feeding the Bear" suggested each MLRS launcher takes an entire truck for reloads. I'm not 100% sure about that, or which specific launcher type it was referring to. I've used that assumption to move forward though: warontherocks.com/2021/11/feedin…

@KofmanMichael 11/ Here is the preliminary end result. 14 truckloads are needed each day for BTG ammo, food, and kit resupply. 6 for BM-21 reloads. Using typical equipment counts from Artillery Brigades and Rocket Brigades resulted in 13 and 19 truckloads for them.

@KofmanMichael 12/ On balance, I feel like this might be low. Militaries typical expend more ammunition and supplies than expected in wartime. So I started looking for historic examples. Unfortunately, there isn't an abundance of hard data for the Russians, there is for the Americans though.

@KofmanMichael 13/ VII Corps in Desert Storm may offer a useful comparing point and there is a lot of literature about their supply operations. Among them the paper "A Study of Ammunition Consumption" by William Freeman and "The Long Haul" edited by Keith Beurskens are excellent.

@KofmanMichael 14/ VII Corps in Desert Storm consisted of about 3089 armored vehicles and 42 maneuver (mech infantry and armored) battalions and needed 6,075 tons of ammunition per day.

@KofmanMichael 15/ Translating that into BTGs of course tedious and potentially flawed. Assuming a BTG has ~60 armored vehicles, VII Corps had enough to fill out 51.5 BTGs. If we count maneuver battalions, 42. Doing the math suggests a BTG *might* expend 3 times the ammo they expect to.

@KofmanMichael 16/ To date, I think we've only seen about 3 BTGs active in combat operations at any given time in each operational direction. I applied the tripled expenditure factor to 3 BTGs in each direction to give a high end level of truckload capacity needed.

@KofmanMichael 17/ On the topic of truckloads per day, I've used the same math as "Feeding the Bear." A decimal number between 3 and 4 is suggestive of some trucks being able to do 4 trips, while others only do 3.

@KofmanMichael 18/ Returning to the map, this preliminary analysis suggests they may need more trucks on the Popasna axis, while the others have sufficient support for now. As the distance increases, this will change.

@KofmanMichael 19/ However, if a truck only does 1 or 2 trips a day, the assessment would change. If the MTO brigade trucks only did 1 trip per day on average, there would likely be ammunition and other supply shortages.

@KofmanMichael 20/ Likewise, there are not enough trucks to support all the BTGs on each axis if we apply the high end expenditure estimate based on Desert Storm. That suggest their is an upper end estimate on number of BTGs they can use offensively at one time that is less than the total

@KofmanMichael 21/ Info that would help refine this estimate would be counting the number of trucks at the supply points, footage of them loading or unloading supply trucks (measuring the time it takes), and knowledge of Russian load planning.

@KofmanMichael 22/ The number of MTO Brigades deployed in each area is also a knowledge gap, as increasing or decreasing that number will hugely sway the results. Until then, I hope this preliminary take has been interesting and informative.

@KofmanMichael 23/ As @KC_Guy noted to me, if there is an additional transloading between the BTGs and the rear supply points I've depicted, it would add additional time to trips that would need to be accounted for! For now, I haven't accounted for that.

@KofmanMichael @KC_Guy 24/ Currently, in using the same math that the "Feeding the Bear" uses, there is 1 hour for loading and 1 hour for offloading. It's primarily done by hand.