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🧵
1/
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. 

2/
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

18/
...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

Mar 8
Just...no.

This is the "Russia Strong" narrative pushed by those unknowingly spreading Russian Reflexive Control infowar propaganda, as here.

Russia is _Not_ Strong🧵

1/
The semiconductor industrial base is the foundation of 21st century economic & military power.

The USSR only ever produced single detector element technology like Long Wavelength Infrared (LWIR) Infrared Line Scan (IRLS) or scanning infrared Search and Track (IRST) like those on the MiG-29 Fulcrum A.

2/Image
The USSR never produced any of the classic nodding or spinning mirror LWIR Forward Looking Infrared (FLIRs) sensors that the US introduced during the Vietnam war.

In fact there is no evidence Russia was able to sustain any of the large Soviet semiconductor industry.

3/
Read 10 tweets
Feb 19
The vast majority of US military aid to Ukraine was in fact spent inside the USA to replace vastly overpriced by the Biden Adm. National Guard & Air Guard surplus weapons.

Spending aid money buying Joint Light Tactical Vehicle (JLTV) to replace NG surplus Humvees

Infowar🧵
1/
...was just one of the aid grifts @JakeSullivan46 NSC crew played to pretend they were helping Ukraine while not offending Russia & buying US Defense contractor kit.

Pres. Trump is literally parroting Russian reflexive control scripts from Biden Adm.

2/
This should not be a surprise as I've pounded on the fact for 2 years that Russia has mapped & fed to each specific US tribal & professional demographic the data to eat up messages/memes Russia wants those groups to believe.

Calling Ukraine's...

3/
Read 7 tweets
Feb 9
This @sambendett thread here makes Russia seem like a poor kid looking through a candy store window at the "candy" of Ukrainian ground resupply drones.

1/
We still don't see D-rings on Russian UGV's to hold down pallets lifted by all terrain forklifts and telehandlers.

[Hey, @TimothyDooner! Rate this strap work⬇️]

2/
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I mean, seriously, Russia is now introducing a camel transport corps because the Russian startups and big defense contractors cannot produce supply UGV's at scale to deliver potable water to front line troops.

3/3
Read 4 tweets
Feb 9
This 🧵by @GrandpaRoy2 demonstrating the increasing battlefield obsolescence of tube artillery in the face of fiber optic fiber guided FPV drones is a useful jumping off point the following:

66% of RuAF AFV's & equipment killed in Jan 2025 were victims of drones

Drone tech🧵
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Back in November 2024 I did a long thread on how drones were an "effectiveness revolution" on the battlefield and we would see drones displacing other battlefield weapons because of it.

2/
Drones are a cost effectiveness revolution compared to conventional weapons.

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Read 12 tweets
Feb 7
It appears the collapse of Russian Army motor transport is nearly complete and hippo train (mules & horses) are being pulled out of the 19th century for the "2nd strongest Army in the world."

This won't end well for Russia.

A Mule Logistics🧵
1/
Being a WW2 historian of electronic warfare and logistics has it's advantages when it comes to looking up US Army standard operating procedures for horse & mule logistics.

See #1 thru #9 below and consider if a Mobik from a Russian city could do them.

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Russian Mobiks have a hard enough time maintaining trucks, cars and tractors. How do you think they will care for a mule?

Again, from the US Army Wagoner S.O.P.:

"ROUTINE DUTIES OF THE WAGONER
It is a good plan to have a fixed time for every routine duty, as then there will be no chance of over looking anything. Certain duties should be attended to daily and others weekly. The following is suggested as a daily program to be followed:

3/
Read 16 tweets
Feb 5
The NTSB - via Epoch Times - is reporting the UH-60 and Commuter jet altimeters were showing different altitudes.

"Officials said the control tower recorded the Black Hawk helicopter flying at an altitude of 200 feet at the time of the collision,

1/5
theepochtimes.com/us/ntsb-confli…
...in line with its maximum allowed altitude for its flight path.

However, data from the passenger jet’s flight recorder show the collision occurred at an altitude of about 325 feet, plus or minus 25 feet.

2/5
“That’s what our job is, to figure that out,” NTSB member J. Todd Inman said during an evening news conference on Feb. 1.

Investigators hope to reconcile the altitude differences with data from the helicopter’s black box, ...

3/5
Read 6 tweets

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