Thread by @TrentTelenko

Alright boys and girls, we are going to to have a Truck - Train logistical & Intel thread 🧵starting with this incredibly silly Russian operational security fail in the picture below, (h/t @ChrisO_wiki). Which confirms a operational pattern prediction of mine in May 2022.👇

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The May 22, 2022 thread 🧵I'm referring to is this one where I said the Russian army was using short trains to move forward artillery ammo through Popasna in Donbas:

https://twitter.com/TrentTelenko/status/1527798107618086912

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I said then the Russians had changed operational patterns because they had sufficient artillery ammunition to push back Ukrainian defenses when they didn't before.

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https://twitter.com/TrentTelenko/status/1527798088894644224

In addition to the changed Russian operational & logistical patterns of attacks from Popasna, the Ukrainians made several specific "Asks" for Western sensors and weapons including HIMARS & drone thermal sensors that suggested hidden rail logistics.

https://twitter.com/TrentTelenko/status/1527798098604466177

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And what the Ukrainians wanted those items for would go on to make @HIMARStime the Russian Army ammunition depot destroying reality it is today.

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https://twitter.com/Blue_Sauron/status/1550890123205779458

I mentioned then that understanding a military's social history, & its relationship with technology over time, was a useful tool for intelligence analysis that Western intel & military's have not included it in their P.M.E. since WW2.
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https://twitter.com/TrentTelenko/status/1527798140467875842

And that this failure to include military social history in professional military education lead to 80 odd years of cognitive bias blind spot failure in acknowledging the lack of Russian mechanized logistics by historically illiterate senior intel/policy makers.

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And to explain 'cognitive blind spot failure' please consider this drawing of a pretty young woman/ugly old woman. Both are there.

The one you see first is your bias.

If you can see only one of the two faces from the drawing unless someone comes up and outlines it for you
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That is a cognitive bias blind spot failure.

The @Battle_Order youtube channel has great logistics video that gives you the gritty mechanized logistical reality of fueling a US Army battalion that is the background this Western cognitive bias failure.

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If you think all there is to modern military logistics is this:

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And this:

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I means you simply are incapable of seeing this.👇

Or the fact that overloaded tactical truck tire tracks next to railway lines mean things.

I mean, this utterly silly. The UAF can track a train from 100 km away with a Wescam FLIR on the TB2 Drone.

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It isn't silly when you have no other choices.

It's called desperation.

The Russians major munitions problem is moving what munitions they have with "The Plan's" Rail Depot logistics shot to hell by GMLRS strikes. The Russians just don't have enough trucks for a Plan B.
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Worse, if you can see the rail lines from orbit. You can see those tire tracks too.

A "Coherent Change Detection" on satellite photos will spot those tire tracks instantly and you can build up a map of ammunition depots over time.
developers.google.com/earth-engine/t…
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HIMARS GMLRS strikes more than double the distance trucks have to travel from rail heads to be far enough back to be safe from a HIMARS launcher GMLRS footprint.

This "GMLRS Tax" requires lots and lots of new smaller intermediate dumps close to the firing batteries.
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That means the Russians need twice as many trucks as they thought they'd need, and there weren't enough to begin with in February.

They have a lot less trucks now.

And HIMARS can still hit their new intermediate dumps, which the Russians will bungle the management of

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... due to insufficient signals and command capability.

Hence these Train-Truck transfers in lieu of intermediate dumps.

The Russians simply do not have a truck-based distribution system that Western military logisticians & intelligence generally is familiar with.
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So that "Collective We" can't think outside that truck distribution box to use that Google tool to find Train-Truck transfer tire tracks.

This underlines the point that if someone is doing something considered "Silly" or "Stupid", but it works in war.

It isn't silly when
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...you have no other choices. It's called desperation.

And when it works, it's neither desperation nor stupidity. It is pure genius.

Especially if the other side simply can't see what you are doing because they are "Sophisticated" AKA have blind spot cognitive biases.

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'Sophisticated logistics' for Russia is in the railways & the Russian Railway troops. Railway troops are where all the logistical signals & big brained staffer officers with the mental chops for manual labor logistical operations are located.

Russian tactical trucks today
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...fill the cultural/logistical space that horse-drawn carts for the 19th century Russian Imperial Army. They are something that covers the last 20 km - 30 km from a rail head.

They are not over committed capital equipment for which close track must be kept in order to

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...maximize logistical transfer capability as shown in that @battle_order video.

@ChrisO_wiki has had a number of Russian language translation tweets underlining those facts with fire.👇

https://twitter.com/ChrisO_wiki/status/1554570914544713730

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To close this out, on 20 May 2022 I laid out the operational pattern that would create those tire tracks confirming Train-Truck ammo transfers before @HIMARStime.

No one on Twitter bothered to look, reasons.

Thus ends today's lesson in Trucks, Trains & Intel blind spots
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