Trent Telenko Profile picture
Nov 11 10 tweets 4 min read Read on X
The idea of Russia substituting artillery tubes with 122mm rockets fails on a couple of counts - accuracy and propellent mass.

These two things are related.

1/
The inaccuracy of the 122mm Grad rocket system is proverbial.

A full salvo of 40 rockets landing at 20 km range spreads over an area of up to 600 m x 600 m.

It is a wasteful weapon for tube artillery missions and is highly locatable when firing.

2/
characterisationexplosiveweapons.org/studies/annex-…Image
The Ukrainian SSU has made that vulnerability abundantly clear recently in showing 16 Grad launcher truck kill videos.

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mil.in.ua/en/news/ssu-ne…
The real problem with 122mm rockets versus 122mm and 152mm shells is the mass of the propellent versus a rocket.

The most common Russian 122mm rocket is the 9M22 which masses out at ~66 kg.

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The 9M22 122mm rocket contains 6.4kg of TGAF-5 explosive comprising 40% TNT, 40% RDX, 17% aluminium powder and 3% phlegmatizer.

Its propellent mass is 23.8 kg based on the table below, which I pulled from a study on adding a guidance kit to the 9M22 rocket.

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A 122mm shell for a D-30 gun has a 3.528 kg bursting charge and a 3.6 kg propellent charge.

A 9M22 rocket has about twice the explosive of a 122mm artillery shell but uses six times the propellent to deliver it.

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Assuming it takes five 122mm shells to hit a Ukrainian target using a Russian drone for spotting and a 40 round volley of 122mm rockets for the same target.

The 122mm shells use 17.64 kg of explosives and 18 kg of propellent to service the target.

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The 122mm Grad rocket volley uses 256 kg of explosives and _944_ kg of propellent.

That is enough explosives for 72 122mm shells worth of bursting charges and 262 122mm shells worth of propellent.

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Any Russian attempt to directly substitute 122mm rockets for 122mm artillery shells will amount to a 1/100th structural disarmament of the Russian "God of War" because of the lower accuracy and explosives/propellant inefficiencies involved.

9/9
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More from @TrentTelenko

Nov 10
Ukraine's SSU used long range FPV drones with radio repeater drone to do counter battery for killing sixteen GRAD 122mm multiple rocket launchers.

21st century artillery counter battery🧵
1/
mil.in.ua/en/news/ssu-ne…
This YouTube video shows all the "greatest hits" with the SSU first person view (FPV) drones.

Ukrainian drone operators were able to steer the FPV's into the loaded rocket launcher where "cope cages" could not cover.


2/
This is a Ukrainian Armed Forces’ Matrice 300 RTK drone with relay antennas for extended range FPV drone counter battery strikes. ⬇️

Photo credits: Charitable Foundation “SOS palīdzība Ukrainas armijai”

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Read 5 tweets
Nov 9
I did an interview yesterday (Friday 8 Nov 2024) with @esherifftv on the lawfare going on between the Biden Administration and @elonmusk SpaceX over the International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR).

1/
Being a old DoD Quality staffer, I brought powerpoint slides.🤣

This 1st slide shows how the ITAR law defines what a "US person" is, versus the Dept. of Justice discrimination lawsuit claims under the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA).

2/ Image
The second slide shows how "illegal exports" under ITAR includes 'foreign persons' - everyone not a 'US person' - seeing a ITAr controlled technical data package inside the USA counts as a 'export' to the nation an asylee or a refugee comes from.

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Read 15 tweets
Nov 5
Western media & political commentary are dominated by "doomers" predicting short & long term outcomes on the 'inexhaustibility' of Russia's personnel & equipment pools, despite overwhelming evidence that Russia is struggling badly.

Reality:
Russia is in a crisis of loss. 🧵
1/ See: https://newsukraine.rbc.ua/news/confirmed-russian-battlefield-equipment-losses-1730799222.html
The following are the things I've been tracking for some time:

1. The Russians are losing an infantry division every week to 10 days in terms of soldiers at a rate of between with a 1,100 to 1,700 and associated equipment.

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2. The Russian artillery is getting shorter ranged over time from losing the ability to make barrels and liners for 152mm guns. We are seeing literal WW2 122mm artillery pieces, presumably from North Korean stocks, in the Donbas.

3/
Read 15 tweets
Nov 3
This Warzone article is an example of one of the things that has been driving me bug house nuts watching the US Military deal with drones.

Recognizing the utter collapse of analytical rigor compared to the "Big Five"
1/
...procurement programs and the MLRS artillery rocket system in the late 1970's-to-early 1980's.

The post 1973 Arab Israeli War US Army understood the idea of "the logistical costs of a stowed kill."
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The US Army kept the 105mm on the M1 in production so long because the depleted uranium (DU) 105mm "Long Rod" APFSDS could kill a early T-72 and you could carry 55 rounds versus 40 rounds for a 120mm gun firing a tungsten APDS or early DU APFSDS round.

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Read 47 tweets
Oct 4
Thermite drones inside a bunker are all sorts of evil beyond burns.

My WW2 flame weapon research found that CO, carbon monoxide, fills the chemical bonds that O2 does in the lungs of air breathing fauna.

That means once CO hits those bonds in your lungs, you suffocate.

1/
What killed Imperial Japanese soldiers in WW2 "without a mark" inside bunkers was carbon monoxide poisoning, not a lack of O2.

Once you get enough CO in the lungs on the O2 chemical bonds.

No further O2 can get into the bloodstream and you suffocate.

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I ran across that fact in a trip report of a US Army Chemical Warfare Service (CWS) medical doctor sent to Leyte to take blood samples from IJA corpses that died from flame weapons.

It didn't work out and the CWS used goats in bunkers hit with flamethrower weapons to get the CO poisoning medical data.

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Read 4 tweets
Oct 4
You all realize that this Ukrainian thermite drone innovation just made every field fortification design by every army in the world obsolete?

1/
Any trench w/o overhead cover and any passage or firing slit that is big enough to shoot a crew served heavy weapon or vehicle out of is also big enough for a FPV drone spewing thermite to fly into.

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Every field fortification manual ever written by every military in the world is obsolete and will have to be re-written with an eye to placing curtains, nets or wire screens across firing slits and doors to keep out small drones.

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Read 4 tweets

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