It appears the Ukrainian Kusk incursion has been accompanied by a new Security Service of Ukraine fixed wing FPV drone called the Gray Widow-1 that has a range of 50 km to stop Russian road & rail traffic.
The video of the Gray Widow-1 operations make clear it is now in service.
It's an easy to use munition that is logistically simpler to move and set up than a 60mm mortar and outranges a M109A6 155mm/L39 Cal gun firing an Excalibur GPS guided shell.
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This may be the FPV drone that Russia has complained about vociferously as having severed the E-38 highway connecting Kursk City with Rylsk.
A stop capture from the video shows Gray Widow-1 also comes with an explosively formed penetrator warhead option.
No pre-1979 tank or AFV design can survive such a top attack.
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A 52 km range from Ukraine's frontline positions means electric rail and electrical grid power sub stations between Lgov to Belgorod, Bryansk, Kursk & Oryol are in range and severable at Ukraine's will.
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If the Gray Widow-2 has a 70 km(+) range, as is likely. Then all road & rail links into Kursk proper are now under AFU's drone interdiction footprint.
That logistical reality will utterly unhing all modes of Russian ground lines of communications going into Donbas.😈
7/7
@threadreaderapp unroll please.
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A hundred Russian trucks, with a high proportions of fuel tankers and wreckers concentrated on one or two supply roads or a single road junction in a couple of weeks is a horse of a different color.
That is anti-access area denial (A2AD) on a stick.
Ukraine has achieved "Drone air superiority" over those roads rivaling WW2's Summer 1944 Allied air superiority over German occupied Normandy.
As a result, the Russian truck fleet is taking unsustainable attrition, particularly of its fuel tanker fleet. 2/
This AFU fuel interdiction campaign is causing panic:
"Fuel shortages are beginning in Sevastopol. This is the beginning of the consequences of the enemy's systematic strikes on oil refineries and tanker trucks along the land corridor to Crimea." 3/
Texas has seven unique advantages in terms of infrastructure, political culture, and resource geography that make it uniquely suited to be the next industrial heartland of the USA.
The seven industrial development advantages of Texas 🧵 1/
1. About 94% of land in Texas is privately held. This vastly limits what the Federal, State and local governments can do to in terms of regulations and NIMBY games.
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2. Texas is mostly flat. Texas hill country is small beer compared to the Appalachian and Sierra Nevada mountain ranges. This compounds with #1 for industrial development.
3. Texas has a lot of water compared to the US west & sea access.
This is one of the most logistically incompetent hot takes by any German journalist in the Russo-Ukrainian War.
95% getting through is a 5% loss rate per trip
95%(x) for 10 to 20 kills means x = 200 to 400 trucks on this route
10 trips means 40% total fleet loss - 80 to 160 trucks
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You can follow the 5% loss curve in this 500 unit fleet at 10 exposures in the graphic below.
A 40% fleet loss in 10 days from a 5% drone loss rate is logistical collapse for the Russian Army in occupied Ukraine.
Only some trying to get AfD eyeballs would say different.
2/
This leaves out the fact that the Russian Army doesn't use *ANY* mechanized logistical enabler like pallets, Truck D-rings, forklifts, or telehandlers.
Russian trucks are in the drone kill zones 3 times as long as a Western truck due to loading times.