Trent Telenko Profile picture
May 19, 2023 15 tweets 6 min read Read on X
This is another crackerjack translation thread by @ChrisO_wiki on the Russian air crew killed in the Ukrainian aerial ambush on 13 May 2023.

Go read it and come back for my "trends in Russian casualties" 🧵

The Russians have eaten the human seed corn of future military power
1/
So, what do I mean by "eating the seed corn of its future military power?"

I mean the downstream effects of the death of men like Viktor Khozhainov, recently of the Military Training and Research Center (VUNTS) of the Russian Air Force.

2/
The generally accepted Western Intelligence order of battle for the Russian Army in Feb 2022 was ~400,000. 

The actual body count was not over 300k due to the "ghost troop" scam.

That is 1/4 of the troops existed only on paper & Russian officers pocketed that 1/4 payroll.
3/
Everything in the Russian Army that was deployable in Feb 2022 was in the 190,000  sent into Ukraine by the end of March 2022.

Then lots of "non deployable" assets in Feb 2022 were made to be deployable through the year of 2022.

They were deployed, and then consumed.

4/
Stripping logistics for infantry replacements is standard for strained militaries. Every military did it in WW2.

Russia did it in 2022 without having enough logistics to start with.

"There are more conscripts where that came from, comrade," was the RuAF attitude.

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The RuAF stripped all of the training establishments, then they also stripped the academies, and finally gave all of the students junior officer commissions so they could deploy them.

>Poof<

That happened Q2/Q3, March/April, of 2022.

6/
That is when people like Viktor Khozhainov got put into an operational units, and now he has been...consumed.

Training establishments are the dragon's teeth of a military.

They sew the teeth that grow into trained manpower for tomorrow's fighting.

7/
But the Russians went far beyond that as they also stripped their research establishments.

It appears most were used up as infantry and tank/AFV crews.

The article I saw on researchers talked about a tank crew made up of officers with specialty skills sets in areas of...

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...science who were dropped into a tank with maybe a day of training and told to "figure it out themselves."🤯

That shows the Putin regime could not give a tinker's damn about the future of Russian military-technological power.

Only power right this second counts.

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The woes of the now destroyed Marine Bde at Vuhledar are another example.

Want to bet that most of these "Elite Marines" were repurposed sailors pulled off Black Sea Fleet warships?

There are reports of this happening last year to the sailor-survivors of Moskva.

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The Mobik units of the Russian Army collapsing on Bakhmut's flanks are the 'downstream' of the consumption of RuAF training establishment manpower like Viktor Khozhainov.

Untrained RuAF infantry in half dug muddy trenches facing Ukrainian
11/
...drone warfare tactics of veteran infantry using radios to talk to DJI drone controllers that are providing "Tinkerbell overwatch."

Overwatch which is telling Ukrainian assault troops where to throw grenades in the Russian trench system.

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And the 1 February 2022 the RuAF training establishment, which should have taught those Mobik troops all about Ukrainian "Tinkerbell overwatch" drone warfare, are as dead as Viktor Khozhainov.

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There is a name for this sort of attritional collapse in military skills.

Where each generation of new Russian troops mobilized is less skilled than the last.

14/
The thing about a "Lanchester Square Law Collapse," like any other cascading systems malfunction, is it goes "At first slowly, then ALL AT AT ONCE."

These RuAF casualty trends say what to watch for in the Ukrainian counter offensives is a RuAF collapse "ALL AT AT ONCE."

15/15 Image

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More from @TrentTelenko

Jan 24
I'm sorry, but this statistic:

>>Violent crime is falling, with homicides down ~21%. The largest annual drop on record.

...has been heavily polluted by improvements in trauma care, particularly hemostatic (blood clotting) bandages.

US Trauma care & FBI statistics🧵

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The statistical comparison in the FBI data from pre-1961 is invalid as the underlying medical systems have so changed as to utterly pollute the "murders per 100,000" data.

Violent crime data pre-1961 and post 1961 are apples to oranges comparisons.

2/
-Trauma care centers (1961),

-Standardized trauma procedures (1978),

-Adoption of military Korea/Vietnam medical emergency treatment & air transport procedures,

-Improved triage (1986)

-And (since 2011) widespread adoption and use of blood clotting bandages...

3/
Read 8 tweets
Jan 24
Chairman Xi suffers from the traditional dictator's trap of believing his own sh*t because he has made it too dangerous for his cronies and underlings to tell him the truth.

He has failed the "Dictator on the Wall Test."

1/
Thanks to that, Chairman Xi's Regime has pretty much no resilience in adversity because it's so kleptocratic and it's all about what the guy in charge can do for his next set of corrupt cronies today.

2/
This 1970's comment about the Shah of Iran is so historically on point in 2026 because it shows how Xi's regime is failing "The dictator on the wall test."

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Read 8 tweets
Jan 22
Greenland is badly needed by the USA to engage nuclear armed hypersonic glide vehicles and FOBS from China and Russia aimed at the continental USA.

So-called experts saying Greenland is "unnecessary" are "Cold War thinkers" focused on traditional ICBM threat geometries.
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They are not thinking in terms of the detection geometries required for lofted or depressed trajectory ICBM's, HGV, and/or FOBS.

For those threats, the further forward you can deploy radars and interceptors, the better for detection and intercept.

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When geometrically minded experts in Australia looked at PLARF depressed trajectory ICBM's, HGV, and FOBS threat set.

They ended up placing a TPY-2 radars on the Cocos Island & Christmas Island ("Greenland for Oz") to generate tracks for SM-3 & THAAD interceptors.
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Read 4 tweets
Jan 20
This map of 124 Russian railway electric traction stations and the 40K OWA drone fired in 2025 demonstrates the political-military leadership failure of the Zelinskyy government.

Like Stalin's failed winter 1941-1942 counter offensives against Nazi Army Group Center,

🚅🧵
1/
...Ukraine is penny packing OWA drones everywhere to no great effect based on which military "Union" faction was last in the room with President Zelenskyy before a decision

Even Ukraine's vaunted oil offensive is a bare plurality of total drone strikes
2/
The latest @RyanO_ChosenCoy thread detailing the bureaucratic issues of Ukraine's military in targeting Russian logistics makes clear Ukraine's military has inter-service and intra-service union/factional disputes that are positively American in scale.

3/
Read 6 tweets
Jan 19
Untrue⬇️

If the target of a US "rapid strike" was either the Kharg Island oil export facility or Iran's banking/financial system with a combination of explosives and non-nuclear electromagnetic pulse munitions, the Mullahs will fall.

COA🧵 Image
This post is typical of analytical thinking regarding strikes on Iran.

Note the complete lack of either Kharg island or the Iranian financial system on the list.

Regime Security Force as a distinct target set that needs a payroll is missing.

2/
There are two real courses of action (COA) for an American air campaign if Regime Change is the goal.

The Schwerpunkt - political center of gravity - of the Mullah regime is its ability to pay for the use Regime Security Forces & foreign hired mercenaries.

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Read 8 tweets
Jan 18
This is one of the 3 major strategic mistakes of the Zelenskyy Government.⬇️

Putin has shown better, more consistent, and more effective leadership in the strategic bombing of Ukrainian electrical infrastructure than Zelinskyy has in striking Russia's railways.

1/
Russia remains uniquely vulnerable to a focused drone strike campaign on it's electrical railway traction step down transformers.

Zelenskyy's leadership not only ignored hitting that unique Russian vulnerability since Feb. 2022.

See the figure below⬇️

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To give you an idea of the abject political-military failure of the Zelenskyy government in this regard one has to look at the industrial supply chain for those traction substations.

The Soviet Union had two major transformer factories: Tolyatti and Zaporozhye.

3/
Read 8 tweets

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