...track meeting the most neglected engines & rolling stock will cause more & more derailments starting in the arctic, then the Far East.
Then derailments in the Caucuses, moving towards Moscow/St Petersburg.
Finally, we would see derailments of the repair trains.
3/
In Oct 2022 Russia had 10,000 freight cars out of service, with 200,000 more railway freight cars at risk of bearing wear out after a few of years of Western sanctions
Every January the Russian government owned railway monopoly cycles a large fraction of the engines offline for periodic maintenance and it takes 2-to-3 months to recover full capacity.
Look what happened for the 2024 bottom red trend line.⬇️ (H/T @Prune602)
5/
The count down to Russian railway collapse from a lack of replacement Western railway cassette bearings in railway car trucks was straight forward math, unless you believe in "Russia Strong ™️" or "Escalation Management™️" ideological delusions.🙄
6/
If you believe in either delusion, then no amount of empirical evidence has any meaning.
The rejection of the empirical is the antecedent condition for either delusion.
If you accept empirical evidence, you cannot become invested in either
7/
..."Russia Strong™️" or "Escalation Management™️".
The empirical view is rooted in ground truths, like sun rotted tires, & the delusional is rooted in wishful thinking.
And these twin delusions mean the West is failing to plan for a Russian railway collapse.
Western governments failing to plan for Russian transportation collapse & defeat, so as to manage the transition to a stable post-war world, will put post-Putin Russia on the slippery slope to the hell
9/
...of becoming a continent spanning Lebanese Civil War with loose bugs, 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 when it arrives.
10/
The economic repercussions of Russian energy & food suddenly just falling out the world economy from this pending "railway transportation collapse apocalypse" beggars the imagination.
Even @PeterZeihan pales at the thought.
11/
Western national security and economic policy makers ought to be putting together crisis teams to evaluate the implications for both the world economy and for obtaining an armistice.
Using access to railway cassette bearings as a leaver...
12/
...to obtain the two most important concessions -- Pre-2014 Ukrainian borders & getting back Ukraine's kidnapped populations -- that will make a lasting cessation of hostilities possible.
But they won't.
They believe in "Russia Strong™️" or "Escalation Management™️".
13/13 End
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
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.
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⬇️
2/
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/
The predominant effect of a 1.4 million rial to the dollar hyperinflation combined with Regime Security Force public lockdown is the Iranian lower class has been set up to starve.
The lower class cannot go to work to get money to buy food.
We really need to talk about the huge opportunity that Mullah financial corruption has given the Trump Administration to crash Iran's financial system with E-bombs, AKA non-nuclear electromagnetic pulse.
Wiping the financial records of failing Mullah banks in a revolution...
What jumped out for me about @shanaka86 substack article was the implications of secure digital text communications for the Maoist model of Revolutionary warfare.
See the @grok summary of Mao's 4-level revolutionary model below. ⬇️
2/
Maoist Level 1 & 2 warfare has never had the secure digital text communications Starlink provides.
This means a whole heck of a lot and shoots decades of counter-insurgency doctrine about controlling/blocking guerilla communications in the head.
Okay folks, we have to say at this point what is driving the uprising in Iran isn't the strength of the protests.
It is the WEAKNESS OF THE IRANIAN STATE. Basij commander Shoushtari's killing is the neon sign of Mullah-ocracy weakness. It had to be an inside job, reasons.
This means we need to talk about Russia's LAST PLANE OUT OF TEHRAN. 🧵
1/
Just as US military evacuations of Saigon and Kabul required securing the embassy & airport for evacuation.
Perhaps as soon as 48 hours from now, the Russian VDV will have to secure the Tehran airport to evacuate not only Iranian Mullah gold, but lots of Russian intel & technical experts.
2/
The Fall of Kabul made clear you not only need marines for ground security.
You also needed a USAF operation/maintenance squadron (-) for loading, refueling and operating air traffic control as you can't count on the locals to run the airport as the security situation collapses.
3/