Thread by @TrentTelenko

Over the last few days the media and not a few accounts on Twitter have run for the clickbait from this Foreign Policy article.

There is more to war than numbers of systems.

Logistics & Signals🧵

1/
foreignpolicy.com/2023/02/08/ukr…

Click bait number's⬇️

"Ukrainian military estimates Russia already has 1,800 tanks, 3,950 armored vehicles, 2,700 artillery systems, 810 Soviet-era multiple rocket launch systems such as Grad and Smerch, 400 fighter jets, and 300 helicopters ready for the new wave of attacks
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And the NY Times even broke out this clickbait map of "The Great Donbas Encirclement" you have seen paid Pro-Russian energy creatures posting for the last year.

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https://twitter.com/nytimes/status/1624100908949811239

The problem with those clickbait numbers & the great encirclement map is the Russians simply didn't have the logistical truck lift or secure radio signals density to do that in February 2022.

The RuAF has lost on the order of 1/2 of their tactical truck fleet by now.

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Worse, the arrival of the HIMARS/GMLRS combination in Ukrainian hands has pushed Russian Truck logistics back 100km

See this @NLwartracker thread on the implications of that fact⬇️

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https://twitter.com/NLwartracker/status/1616482407984529419

And the idea that RuAF can _Simultaneously_ launch a major offensive south from Belarus into Western Ukraine is utterly brain dead for the same truck logistical reasons.

5/
kyivpost.com/post/12038

This decay of Russian truck lift capability is why I make a big fat hairy deal whenever I see RuAF using trailers with their tactical trucks because they will double RuAF truck lift the moment the are deployed in numbers matching the truck park.

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https://twitter.com/TrentTelenko/status/1623792861635379200

The second issue for this renewed Russian offensive, signals, hasn't really been addressed by anyone.

So let's set the wayback machine to this thread by @sbreakintl from 1 March 2022 on how hollowed by corruption RuAF radios were.

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https://twitter.com/sbreakintl/status/1498619303717142529

And this tweet from @CITeam_en on 28 February 2022 on how much RuAF relied upon Chinese made civilian band hand radios in the first days of this latest Russian invasion of Ukraine.

https://twitter.com/CITeam_en/status/1498233574834716674

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And this @RALee85 tweet & the 🧵 it is within explains the Russian corruption scandal buying the R-187-P1 Azart digital radios resulted in this substitution.

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https://twitter.com/RALee85/status/1367614591698690056

Because the RuAF have been using insecure radios. Ukraine has been systematically killing high value Russian targets revealed by them.

This link has the following observations:

"The loss of specialists like artillery forward observers and similar
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strategypage.com/qnd/russia/art…

...specialists who accompany the combat troops was high during the first months of the war because Russian sent most of these specialists in with the invading combat troops so they could gain some low risk combat experience. These specialists were killed in large numbers...
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...along with the troops they accompanied. The dead included instructors from the schools that trained new specialists.

I have a few observations to add to strategypage -dot- com.

First, Ukraine hasn't gone after just forward observers. They have been systematically

12/

...targeting Russian artillery command posts and counter battery radars for capture/killing in ground attacks, and with American HARM missiles, respectively.

See the attached infographic for where those command posts & radars are in the Russian counter battery system.

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This has slowed down the speed of Russian counter battery fire from 20 or so minutes to near nonexistent compared to March-April-May 2022. The counter-battery radars were used as a wide sector cueing sensor to tell where the Orlan-10 & other Russians drones had to go in
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...order to provide "eyes on" corrected artillery shoot.

Since most of the low end Orlan-10 drones lacked laser rangefinder/designators. They had to fly directly over the prospective artillery target to get a GPS/Glosnass fix.

(See the photo clip)

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The Ukrainians countered this by placing MANPADS teams with every artillery battery to kill Russian drones. This worked, mostly.

Then the Russian campaign against the Ukrainian power grid saw a large fraction of these AFU artillery

https://twitter.com/Caucasuswar/status/1537907960331923460

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...protecting MANPADS assets being placed into roving mobile anti-aircraft units to protect the Ukrainian electric power grid.

This thinned out the MANPADS density for AFU artillery, but the fear of using radars in the surviving Russian counter-battery radars is such that
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...the Russians seem to seldom use CB radars outside of large, pre-planned, set piece attacks to suppress Ukrainian guns.

The video interview in this Reddit post shows a M777 Gun the AFU are using under a anti-Lancet drone fence which has been in the same position

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...for seeming days.

The use of the "Lancet Fence" at this M777 position is a good indication that Russian Orlan-10 cued Lancet drone attacks are now AFU artillery's biggest counter battery threat.

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reddit.com/r/UkraineWarVi…

These Orlan-10's limited field of view cameras' are "like looking for something through a soda-straw."

So the most likely cueing sensor are Russian passive radio direction finding gear in electronic warfare units that are passing on GPS/Glosnass coordinates to Orlan-10

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...drone wranglers.

But also be aware that AFU is using its own direction finding gear to locate Orlan-10 drone wranglers for artillery strikes like they did Russian forward observers.

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The systematic annihilation of the RuAF artillery forward observer corps, artillery command posts and counter battery radars by AFU in the last year of war leaves RuAF incapable of generating the artillery firepower in Feb 2023 that it could in Feb 2022.

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