Trent Telenko Profile picture
May 26, 2022 7 tweets 4 min read Read on X
Getting MLRS guided rockets in either M142 HIMARS wheeled or M270 tracked launchers represents a phase shift increase in artillery capability for Ukraine.👇

MLRS Technology Thread🧵
1/
American Guided MLRS artillery rockets are a combat proven precision guided weapon (thousands fired) with a 200lb (90.7kg) insensitive explosive warhead equipped with multi option fuzing that is set electronically.

They use GPS & inertial guidance for 3 meter accuracy.
2/
Both the US move away from cluster munitions & the 30 year rocket age have seen early MLRS unguided rockets disposed of.

And while pilot quantities of GMLRS were built with cluster munitions in the early 2000's. Most (>99%) GMLRS built have unitary warheads.
3/
To restore lost lethality of cluster munitions against radars, towed artillery & missile launchers in peer combat, a modified version of GMLRS has been given a much improved fragmentation warhead.

This "Alternate Warhead" will be available for GMLRS ammo shipments to Ukraine.
4/
Given the bad memories of losing soldiers to unexploded M26 rocket cluster munitions in 1991's Desert Storm operations. The US Army spend a lot of money to make the GMLRS fuze as reliable as possible, in addition to being multi-option.

It functioned 74/75 times in testing.
5/
It is accurate to say that the arrival of GMLRS missiles, and their launchers in numbers similar to the M777, in Ukraine's hands will overwhelm both Russian artillery and the railway logistics it in the Donbas.

The USA has over 40,000 GMLRS missiles available in stock.

6/
This is the Lockheed-Martin video celebrating the 50,000th GMLRS produced.

The recent lot 14 production award was for 9,500 GMLRS unitary and alternative-warhead (AW) rockets and over 300 low-cost reduced-range training rockets.

7/End

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More from @TrentTelenko

Dec 19
Let us be clear what has happened here.

Ukraine has a drone armed merchant raider lose in the Mediterranean hunting Russian shadow tankers.

Upshot: There will be more elsewhere on the world's oceans in the near future effecting maritime trade.

2025 Merchant Armed Raider 🧵
1/
@grok answered the following questions for me:

" Please summarize the pre-World War 1 to 1942 career of merchant armed raiders and compare that data to Ukraine's recent drone attack in the Mediterranean with a drone armed commercial vessel."

2/ Image
Image
Image
This is @grok's final summary:

"In essence, Ukraine's approach modernizes the raider concept—swapping guns for drones and merchant disguises for stealthy launches— but lacks the historical volume due to the conflict's constraints.

3/
Read 11 tweets
Dec 11
US Ground force flag ranks deny this 2025 reality 🤡⬇️

"The Ukraine war has exposed a large and increasing gap between Western reconnaissance doctrine and modern conventional battlefield reality.
1/3
In Donetsk, reconnaissance operators face constant drone surveillance, electromagnetic degradation, and hyper-local combat conditions that invalidate long-held assumptions about stealth and standoff intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR).

2/3
This article contends that NATO must, with urgency, reform its reconnaissance doctrine, training, and force structure to survive and efficiently operate in a drone-saturated battlefield."

Upton Sinclair reports:
3/3 Image
Read 4 tweets
Dec 9
I said this about the US Navy in 2023 (⬇️)

....and the institutional failures on display in the USS Truman CVBG Red Sea deployment proved me correct in 2025.

1/2
Every competent USN surface officer knows in their gut an anti-aircraft cruiser should not be operating with downed identification friend or foe (IFF) and Link-16 data link with no E-2 Hawkeye AEW support.

2/
news.usni.org/2025/12/04/inv…
Those officers know in their guts that radar skin paints alone from their ship's SPY-1 will be borderline for high tempo engagements...

...but this is not the first time this kind of problem occurred:

3/
twz.com/air/how-uss-ge…
Read 6 tweets
Nov 16
Just...listen...to this video clip with your eyes closed.

The predominant sound isn't artillery.
It isn't assault rifles.

It is the scream of drone rotors coming close, punctuated with the explosion of the drone upon impact.

1/3
That sound drama isn't World War One or any "medium intensity" conflict since 1918.

It is the sound of how 21st century Peer-to-Peer conflict is fought.

A conflict Western ground militaries are obsolescent in equipment to face.

2/3
That Russo-Ukraine War video is a soundscape US Army National Training Centers are too obsolete/incapable of replicating, because US Army flag ranks are allergic to training with high densities of small/cheap/many FPV drones.

3/3 Image
Read 4 tweets
Nov 10
WW2 is calling again with Ukraine developing Drone version of SHORAN.

_SH_ort
_RA_nge
_N_avigation

1/
SHORAN was a WW2 blind bombing system using two radio stations and an electromechanical computer.

In 1938 an RCA engineer named Stuart William Seeley, while attempting to remove "ghost" signals from an experimental television system, discovered he could measure distances
2/ Image
...by time differences in radio reception.

Instead of building a radar unit with this discovery, he proposed using this technique for precision ground-based radio beacon navigation bombing aid.

3/ Image
Read 12 tweets
Oct 29
One the DCMA quality inspectors on my team worked at an EMALS contractor in Texas.

I can't say more than the Chinese tested their EMALS at subsystem level (unlike the USN) with the knowledge the four catapults needed to be independent of each other for operations,

EMALS🧵
1/5
...based on how the USN f--ked up their EMALS design.

That is, when any single EMALS catapult on the Ford class goes down for any reason. They all can't be used.

2/5
As strategypage dot com put it in 2019:

"EMALS proved less reliable than the older steam catapult, more labor intensive to operate, put more stress on launched aircraft than expected and due to a basic design flaw if one EMALS catapult becomes inoperable,

3/5
Read 5 tweets

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