...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
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The following is evaluation is based on a number of professional discussions:
This CRPA found in a shot down jet Shaheed is reported to be Russian built. This is highly doubtful as the design and construction style looks far too professional for Russian industry.
Bluntly - Russians tend towards cheapskate up-front capital manufacturing solutions.
The upshot is injection molded and die cast components are not a common feature in Russian designs as tooling for manufacturing designs is expensive up front,
2/
...even if the mass production unit costs are lower.
In addition, Western style SMA RF connectors are not a feature of the Soviet technology base.
" Please summarize the pre-World War 1 to 1942 career of merchant armed raiders and compare that data to Ukraine's recent drone attack in the Mediterranean with a drone armed commercial vessel."
2/
This is @grok's final summary:
"In essence, Ukraine's approach modernizes the raider concept—swapping guns for drones and merchant disguises for stealthy launches— but lacks the historical volume due to the conflict's constraints.
3/
In Donetsk, reconnaissance operators face constant drone surveillance, electromagnetic degradation, and hyper-local combat conditions that invalidate long-held assumptions about stealth and standoff intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR).
2/3
This article contends that NATO must, with urgency, reform its reconnaissance doctrine, training, and force structure to survive and efficiently operate in a drone-saturated battlefield."
Every competent USN surface officer knows in their gut an anti-aircraft cruiser should not be operating with downed identification friend or foe (IFF) and Link-16 data link with no E-2 Hawkeye AEW support.
That sound drama isn't World War One or any "medium intensity" conflict since 1918.
It is the sound of how 21st century Peer-to-Peer conflict is fought.
A conflict Western ground militaries are obsolescent in equipment to face.
2/3
That Russo-Ukraine War video is a soundscape US Army National Training Centers are too obsolete/incapable of replicating, because US Army flag ranks are allergic to training with high densities of small/cheap/many FPV drones.
SHORAN was a WW2 blind bombing system using two radio stations and an electromechanical computer.
In 1938 an RCA engineer named Stuart William Seeley, while attempting to remove "ghost" signals from an experimental television system, discovered he could measure distances 2/
...by time differences in radio reception.
Instead of building a radar unit with this discovery, he proposed using this technique for precision ground-based radio beacon navigation bombing aid.