The 2nd comment below pointing to the Russian Federation suffering from 40% of their railway rolling stock being sidelined by bearing shortages come Feb 2022 represents a transportation calamity.
There is a reason I've hammered on the destruction of the Russian Army tactical truck fleet followed by the impressment and loss of Russian civilian trucks in Ukraine.
5/
Global and national just-in-time supply chains fail catastrophically when transportation capability is mildly disrupted.
While the fall of Russian imports from Western sanctions have reduced the need for Russian railway rolling stock.
The mass rail movement for the Feb 2022
6/
...Ukrainian invasion massively used up much of Russia's railway bearing reserves to get the huge mechanized forces in place.
Furthermore, the Russian mobilization is now making use of that Western import railway capability to...
7/
...move and support 'Mobiks' deep in Ukraine by rail.
These transportation trends are pointing to Russia suffering a Venezuela style failed state economic collapse as early as the winter of 2022-2023 due to a lack of rail rolling stock & trucks to distribute goods.
8/
The economic repercussions of Russian energy & food suddenly just falling out the world economy from this pending "transportation apocalypse" beggars the imagination.
Western national security and economic policy makers need to be putting together crisis teams to evaluate
9/
...the implications for both the world economy and for obtaining an armistice using access to railway cassette bearings as a leaver to obtain to two most important concessions -- Pre-2014 Ukrainian borders & getting back Ukraine's kidnapped populations -- that will make a
10/
...lasting cessation of hostilities possible.
The Russians have already started eating themselves inside Ukraine.
Defeat there will see exactly this sort of collapse in Russia.
The various Russian Oligarchs raising private military organizations right now looks a whole lot like Lebanon in the political-military run up right before it fell to Civil War.
Western governments failing to plan for Russian defeat/transportation collapse, so as to manage the transition to a stable post-war world, will put post-Putin Russia on the slippery slope to the hell of becoming a continent spanning Lebanese Civil War with loose bugs,
12/
... loose nukes & novachuk gas equipped sprayer drones.
It may not be possible to avoid this Russian meltdown collapse, but failing to plan for the possibility is planning to fail.
13/
If the USA had a real foreign human intelligence capability.
Now would be the time to be making openings to all of those Russian oligarchs to cushion the Russian transition with minimal bloodshed & economic disruption.
Unfortunately the 1970's Church Committee hearings...
14/
...destroyed that US capability without replacement.
This means the West & the USA in particular using either Ukrainian or Israeli human intelligence assets in Russia to make those approaches.
15/
Given the De-escalation Faction in the Biden Administration's irrational fixations of not escalating the Russo-Ukrainian War by denying ATACMS, F-16's & M-1 Abrams tanks to Ukraine & restarting the Iran Nuclear deal blocking the use of Israeli agents doing these approaches.
16/
We are left in the position of being spectators praying for the best & expecting the worse.
17/17 End
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Deploying lots of anti-tank and anti-personnel land mines with Gator cluster munitions dispensers was one of the major themes of the 1980's Follow On Forces Attack (FOFA) doctrine.
The doctrine was highly effective, hence Ukraine using it in 2026.
I called out the Chinese invasion requirements for Taiwan in May 2023 complete with a prediction they would have to be building satellite detectable 1944 invasion of Normandy Mulberry style infrastructure.
In that thread I connected classic "irrational regime" Chinese 'Wolf Warrior diplomacy' as a behavior indicator of how they would view the world wide maritime trade and financial collapse invading Taiwan would cause as advantageous to China.
I did two further @grok analytical passes which reduced the truck movements, first to 3K to 8K truck movements:
"Revised estimate: Likely 3,000–8,000+ effective military/logistics truck movements per month on key southern routes (e.g., M-14 segments, Mariupol–Taganrog/T-0509, Berdiansk/Melitopol spurs), potentially higher in gross passages but far lower in productive throughput than Western equivalents due to systemic non-mechanized constraints."
2/
And then down to 2.5K to 7K truck movements, See:
"Likely 2,500–7,000 effective military/logistics truck movements per month on key southern routes (M-14 segments, Mariupol–Taganrog/T-0509, Berdiansk/Melitopol spurs), with gross passages potentially higher to offset massive inefficiencies—but productive throughput remains severely constrained by non-mechanized realities, supplements like rail/barge, and systemic intelligence blind spots."
A hundred Russian trucks, with a high proportions of fuel tankers and wreckers concentrated on one or two supply roads or a single road junction in a couple of weeks is a horse of a different color.
That is anti-access area denial (A2AD) on a stick.