Trent Telenko Profile picture
Dec 20 5 tweets 2 min read Twitter logo Read on Twitter
This Ukrainian 29 km FPV drone range for a Russian BM-27 Uragan 220mm MLRS kill sounds like a modified 10-inch FOV racing drone carried by a Baba Yaga that was acting as a radio relay.

It helps that Ukraine has the higher side of the Dnipro for radio line of sight reasons.😈

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This is another battlefield demonstration that artillery is far more vulnerable to drones than drones are vulnerable to artillery.

This is downstream from the physical reality that drones fly too low for artillery counter battery radars to detect them.

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FPV drones' ability to avoid Russian counter battery radar detection is why you see headlines like this in Newsweek from Mykhailo Fedorov, Kyiv's Minister of Digital Transformation.

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msn.com/en-us/news/wor…
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Seeing Fedorov quoted in Newsweek saying:

"They work sometimes even more efficiently than artillery," he told Newsweek. "So, FPV drones are indeed a tech revolution, even though the tech itself is quite easy. But it turned out to be very efficient."

...makes me laugh⬇️
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More from @TrentTelenko

Dec 18
While @johnkonrad has a great list of naval and maritime affair experts in this 🧵 All of them have missed the real point in the Red Sea.

The maritime insurance market market is cratering because of the Chinese proliferation of anti-ship missile ballistic technology to Iran
1/
Business 101:

Normal business need business insurance in order to operate.

When insurance actuaries cannot compute a risk, insurance policies are cancelled.

This happened before in 1987 when the Chinese sold Silkworm cruise missiles to Iran.
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Prior to then, Iran lacked anti-ship missiles with big enough warheads to critically damage oil tankers.

Half of all oil tanker losses in the 1980's tanker war were paid by Lloyds.

Lloyds ability to write maritime insurance policies was the critical node in the Tanker War.

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Read 15 tweets
Dec 16
The questions to ask here are:

1. How many missiles were used per drone.

2. How many AA missiles are left in the 96 VLS cells on the USS Carney versus Tomahawk cruise missiles.

3. How much did those _at least_ 36 AA missiles cost compared to Houthi drones?

1/
The costs of the cheapest & most expensive USN radar guided AA missiles:

- Standard Missile 2 (SM-2) Block IIIAZ - $1,200,000
- SM-6 - $4,318,632

Minimally the USN is out $43.2 Million, & at the top end $155.47 million in Standard missile costs.

2/
thedrive.com/the-war-zone/3…
The Houthi (Iranian) drones you see in the photo montage below cost between $25K and $100K. $3.6 Million at most if they represent the 36 drones downed by USS Carney.

Offense is $3.6 million and US Defense is $43.2 million-to-$155.47 million.😱

3/3 End
defense-update.com/20220927_yemen…
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Read 4 tweets
Dec 13
There was a Hot Mess conflict between @secretsqrl123 and the John Ridge account over whether the officials administering the PDD law can cost an excess defense article to Ukraine as zero cost.

Bluff:
@secretsqrl123 is right and Ridge is wrong.

See 22 USC §2321j (c)⬇️

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The US Defense agency in charge of administering the pricing of "Excess Defense Articles" under the PDD in lieu of the President or Secretary of Defense is the Defense Security Cooperation Agency.

I've included the web site link & a photo clip below.
2/
dsca.mil/programs/exces…
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When you go further down the the Defense Security Cooperation Agency EDA page, you find that EDA grants to foreign countries are priced as what the DSCA thinks it can get at FMS .

This is usually 5% to 50% of the ORIGINAL PROCUREMENT COST of the defense article.
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Highlights⬇️ Image
Read 9 tweets
Dec 12
This Ukrainian FPV strike video underlines a lesson from WW2 that medium caliber autocannons have to be covered by high cyclic rate heavy machine guns to deal with close in air threats.

Which today spell FPV drones.

1/
The US Army in WW2 used first water cooled .50 caliber single mounts to cover it's 90mm heavy and 40mm autocannon.

Then switched to quad .50 caliber Maxon mounts which lasted into the Vietnam War.

2/

Ukrainians, before this latest Russo-Ukrainian War kicked off, had begun attaching DShKM and ZU-23-2 sections to S-300 and Buk M1 batteries and restarted ZU-23 23mm dual anti-aircraft cannon (2А13) production in 2020.


3/ mil.in.ua/en/news/ukrain…
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Read 8 tweets
Dec 12
Russian Colonel General Mikhail Teplinsky, commander of RuAF's left bank Dnipro forces, has ordered the re-creation of the "White Guard."

Assault units made up of 100% officers.🤯

Red Army history in 2023 🧵
1/
pravda.com.ua/eng/news/2023/…
Per Andrii Kovalov, Spokesman for the Gen Staff of the AFU:

"These are some kind of attack battalions, modelled on the White Guard units of the 1920s. The main criteria for officers in assault units are the inability to command subordinates, personal indiscipline...

2/
...and poor motivation."

So, let me give you the bizarre BLUF:

RuAF has a huge officer shortage in the junior and field ranks in an army that has never had an non-commissioned officer corps.

And it is now concentrating the few it has left into meat assault units?

3/
Read 10 tweets
Dec 12
Isn't it interesting that the Houthi strike is exactly where their cellphone coverage of the Bab al-Mandab is most extensive?

Where they could ping and geo-locate merchant mariner's cellphones?

A lack of Western Cell Phone Security🧵
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I mentioned this in a previous thread for a lot of reasons.

Reasons starting in 1999 when the Serbs put a observer with a cell phone outside Aviano Air Base, Italy during Operation Allied Force, leading to a loss of an F-117.

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Reasons relating to Hezbollah's 2006 doxing Israeli IDF forces in Northern Israel because the IDF didn't take cell phones away from deploying troops.

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en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2006_Leba…
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Read 8 tweets

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