Trent Telenko Profile picture
Aug 11, 2024 20 tweets 8 min read Read on X
These complaints about RuAF casualties being utterly horrible and beyond anything this Russian medical worker has seen tracks with the latest column from James Dunnigan's Strategypage dot com

Patterns of Drone War Casualties🧵
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Dunnigan's report is not surprising. 

There is a whole lot going on accounting for the increased lethality of small AFU drones.

The Russians have a trifecta of institutional collapse that makes their troops lamost defenseless versus small drones. 

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strategypage.com/htmw/htmoral/a…
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First, the RuAF have no thorax ballistic body armor for about 95% of their troops and certainly no class IV ceramic plates to spread out impact shock.

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Second, ~95% of Russians lack a modern Kevlar or better helmet. 

Of that 95%, maybe half are given Soviet steel pots with many having bolts through them reducing ballistic resistance. 

The rest seem to being given paintball sports plastic & nylon "armor."

@secretsqrl123 has posted many examples.

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Third, Russian medical logistics have utterly collapsed.  Ukrainian FPV drones have created a 10 km "death zone" for all motor transport and Russian motor transport for medical supplies weren't good to start with. 

The upshot is most Russians wounded by drones are dying from blood loss when they are not killed outright due to a lack of blood clotting bandages and Casevac.

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The problem going forward is less about grenade munition dropping drones than FPV drones having warheads that utterly outclass any Western body armor.

By my count there are at least four or five overlapping revolutions in military affairs that are...


6/
...downstream from the reality of FPV drones...maybe more. The following that may qualify as "revolutions" off the top of my head:

1. Kinetic effectiveness
2. Logistical effectiveness
3. Cost effectiveness
4. Lowered barriers to entry
5. The triumph of mass/cheap over the few/expensive.

7/
For the kinetic piece, thermobaric warheads for FPV drones in the anti-personnel role are superior to HE/fragmentation in both likelihood of inflicting a casualty and the severity of the casualties inflicted, allowing for equal mass of their warheads.

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The thermobaric warhead is not limited to line of sight from the point of detonation to the target because its "point of detonation" is the surface area of a sphere containing the unburned fuel, i.e., it can go around corners as the sphere expands.

9/
That means a thermobaric warhead detonating a short distance from an infantry crouching in a deep foxhole or under an AFV will send some of its fuel over the foxhole/under AFV's & down into it.

Plus the fuel sphere can go around corners in a trench.

10/
That increases the likelihood of inflicting casualties.

Thermobaric weapons also inflict burns and more collapsed lungs as well as fragmentation casualties.

11/
The fact is that FPV drones can and have repeatedly chased infantry into hardcover with thermobaric grenades that no amount of Class IV body armor can save you from.


12/
I've seen several video clips of a Russian infantry squad hiding in a burnt out BTR or a bunker to avoid an FPV drone strike.  

And the f—king FPV flies into their cover and detonates its thermobaric grenade.

13/
And we know it was a thermobaric FPV grenade in the case of the burnt out BTR because the only things that could actually burn were the clothes, kit and bodies of the now KIA Russian infantry squad.

14/

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Western militaries are going to need HALO Master Chief, Star Wars Stormtrooper or Warhammer 40K Space Marine hard carapace blast & heat-resistant body armor suits to have even a chance of surviving a FPV's small thermobaric munitions'.

15/

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And I guarantee you that every FPV or drone dropped grenade aimed at US infantry is going to have a thermobaric warhead of some kind because of how much the US military invests in the individual effectiveness of its infantrymen.


16/
This makes the Western military power's investment in Class IV body armor obsolescent overnight.  

Obsolete with an elephantine procurement system where "good enough right now" isn't enough because the system wants one single solution that is "NASA perfect."

Which makes things too costly and too few to make a difference, assuming it isn't obsolete before deployment.
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Drones require a huge ecosystem of solutions which means a large number of small vendors pursuing many different technological approaches that the US DoD procurement organizations are simply not staffed either in terms of numbers or the technical skills

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...to write cost effective requirements for low unit cost, mass production based, peer to peer attritional warfare.

Small FPV with thermobaric warheads could easily produce a true military revolution by itself.

Only it isn't by itself.

19/19
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More from @TrentTelenko

Jul 22
On the morning of 20 July 2025, a AFGSC airman at Minot AFB took his M18, still inside it's issued holster; and placed it on a desk.

It then went off, struck him in chest, and killed him

AFGSC issued a halt order on 21 July 2025 for use of M17/18 Modular Handgun System.

1/ Image
As an ex-DoD procurement official, that letter is a procurement killing hammer.

This is going to hit SIG Sauer like a moderate sized asteroid in terms of DCMA corrective actions requests or "CAR."

2/ Image
This AFGSC halt use order letter will be grounds for a level three corrective action request (CAR).

A DCMA level III CAR is defined as follows:

"A Level III Corrective Action Request (CAR) issued by the Defense Contract Management Agency (DCMA) is a serious action taken when there are significant contractual nonconformities.

It is directed to the supplier's top management and is just one step below the possibility of contract suspension or termination.

This type of CAR serves as a management tool to address critical issues that need immediate attention."

3/Image
Read 11 tweets
Jul 18
This:

"Russian aircraft manufacturers have failed to create analogues of foreign bearings and electronic components for aircraft, said Anatoly Gaydansky, CEO of Aerocomposite."

Also applies to railway cassette bearings for Russian wagons and locomotives.

Russian Railway🧵
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Low friction roller bearings are a major technological strength of the West. 

They are the difference between Rolls Royce jet engines lasting thousands of hours and Russian or Chinese jet engines lasting half as long.

Rail roller bearings are different in their application

2/
...but the computer control software for SKF & Amsted co-production machine tooling that Russia used is proprietary. That software left Russia in April/May 2022.

Russian rail system has been doing the whole 'just in time' inventory game

3/
Read 13 tweets
Jul 16
The following is a serialized post from Strategypage -dot- com on the disastrously bad US Navy leadership decisions on fleet maintenance & where they have left US National Security.

"Surface Forces: USN Maintenance Mess

1/
July 11, 2025: The U.S. Navy is no longer able to maintain or repair its ships. In an earlier economy move, all the navy ship repair and maintenance facilities were sold off. The worst aspect of this was the loss of skilled shipyard workers. ...

2/
... The older ones were retiring and the navy did little to recruit and train replacements. Now, as the United States strives to expand its navy and repair and upgrade current ships, it finds that the resources are lacking. There are no easy solutions.

3/
Read 14 tweets
Jul 16
Well now, the reality of Russian casualty ratios from drones and 💩casualty evacuation in the Russo-Ukrainian War begins to emerge.

'Some people' 🙄 have been talking about this for literally years and how it has gotten worse over time.

1/
This is what I said in April 2022 when the "professional" Russian Army was around and FPV drones weren't.

2/
This is what I was posting in December 2023.

3/
Read 7 tweets
Jul 10
This Ukrainian fiber optic FPV drone attack underlines that 20th century style tactical truck based logistics are obsolete in the age of mass, cheap, 50 km FPV drones.

Drones costing less than $2,000 are killing trucks costing over $150,000.

US military versus Drones🧵
1/
The issue of Western truck production versus drone production is stark

Ukraine in 2025 is making ~12,000 FPV and grenade dropping class small drones a month.

The peak annual US Army FMTV production was in 2005 for a total of 8,168 trucks.

Those trucks are 20 years old.

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21st Century truck logistics in the age of 50 km unjammable fiber optic guided FPV drones requires systematic combat service support engineering to build vehicle "net tunnels" to protect from powered and persistent drones.

3/

Read 6 tweets
Jul 2
Injection molding requires an industrial scale, and above all, _reliable_, supply chain to be more efficient that 3D printing.

This is in a lot of 3D/AM industrial guru papers on the transition from low thousands a year production to the tens of thousands scale.

1/
Injection molding gets you a lot of one thing cheaply. Think lots of fiber optic guided FPV drones, which are immune to radio jamming.

3D/AM allows a lot of modifications to meet the changing requirements of war. Think rapidly evolving Ukrainian interceptor drone designs.

2/
The issue for Ukraine versus Russia is Ukraine has to more widely disperse its industrial base because Russia has a bigger cruise and 500 km(+) ballistic missile production base.

Ukraine's need to disperse production and evolve drones means 3D/AM is a better industrial fit.

3/3
Read 4 tweets

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