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Trent Telenko Profile picture
@TrentTelenko
Nov 18, 2024 • 11 tweets • 4 min read • Read on X
Russia seems headed towards a February 1917 moment.

1. A kilogram of potatoes in Nov 2024 is 73% more expensive than in Jan 2024.
2. Interest rates reached 21% in Oct 2024
3. Mortgage rates have risen to 28%

1/
 express.co.uk/news/world/197…
The Russian railway system is now falling apart.

It's not one thing, it is everything.

The Western ball bearing were the excuse for the Russian railway system to fire its entire maintenance department in 2013.

2/
 moscowtimes.ru/2024/11/15/rzh…Image
~40% of Russian railway rolling stock is Soviet era vintage.

Russia went to 100% utilization of the Trans-Siberian railway in the late summer of 2021 and has stayed there ever since.

Those rail cars were not well maintained to start with, less Western bearings.

3/
Finnish firms were also hired out to do some of the Russian engine maintenance before Feb 2022.

All of the above ended in April 2022.

This isn't the first time I've mentioned this subject.

4/
Modern railway roller bearings last 2 million kilometers with good rails and reliable preventive maintenance cycles.

That is 108 round trips from Moscow to Vladivostok and back in about 63 months on an 80% usage rate.

5/
The war has lasted 2 years ~9 months with 100% usage since 3rd qtr 2021

Things have gotten so clogged on the east-west pats of the Russian railway system that Russian companies are _Trucking_ railway rolling stock just to have the ability to move
6/
...product by train on other parts of the system.

Half of Russian engines and rolling stock may have burned out their Western bearings by now.

The bill for delayed/deferred maintenance has come due.

Plus, the Chinese rail bearing have far less


7/
...life & require lubrication that Western bearings do not.

The Moscow Times article makes clear that lubricated Chinese bearings are not a real option for Russia as there is also a huge labor shortage for locomotive crews as well as for rolling stock.

Clip H/T @Prune602
8/ Image
The Russian rail system collapse sequence is as follows:

1st trains on remote Russian rail lines derail.

2nd more Russian trains on lines closer to Moscow derail.

3rd the Russian repair trains derail on the way to open derailments.

9/
4th we see triage as the Russian rail system starts collapsing on a LARGE SCALE.

5th, Russian rail transport apocalypse

The Moscow Times article points to Russia closing in on #4.

Clip H/T @Prune602
10/10 Image
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More from @TrentTelenko

Trent Telenko Profile picture
Dec 19
Let us be clear what has happened here.

Ukraine has a drone armed merchant raider lose in the Mediterranean hunting Russian shadow tankers.

Upshot: There will be more elsewhere on the world's oceans in the near future effecting maritime trade.

2025 Merchant Armed Raider 🧵
1/
@grok answered the following questions for me:

" 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/ Image
Image
Image
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/
Read 11 tweets
Trent Telenko Profile picture
Dec 11
US Ground force flag ranks deny this 2025 reality 🤡⬇️

"The Ukraine war has exposed a large and increasing gap between Western reconnaissance doctrine and modern conventional battlefield reality.
1/3
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."

Upton Sinclair reports:
3/3 Image
Read 4 tweets
Trent Telenko Profile picture
Dec 9
I said this about the US Navy in 2023 (⬇️)

....and the institutional failures on display in the USS Truman CVBG Red Sea deployment proved me correct in 2025.

1/2
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.

2/
 news.usni.org/2025/12/04/inv…
Those officers know in their guts that radar skin paints alone from their ship's SPY-1 will be borderline for high tempo engagements...

...but this is not the first time this kind of problem occurred:

3/
 twz.com/air/how-uss-ge…
Read 6 tweets
Trent Telenko Profile picture
Nov 16
Just...listen...to this video clip with your eyes closed.

The predominant sound isn't artillery.
It isn't assault rifles.

It is the scream of drone rotors coming close, punctuated with the explosion of the drone upon impact.

1/3
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.

3/3 Image
Read 4 tweets
Trent Telenko Profile picture
Nov 10
WW2 is calling again with Ukraine developing Drone version of SHORAN.

_SH_ort
_RA_nge
_N_avigation

1/
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/ Image
...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.

3/ Image
Read 12 tweets
Trent Telenko Profile picture
Oct 29
One the DCMA quality inspectors on my team worked at an EMALS contractor in Texas.

I can't say more than the Chinese tested their EMALS at subsystem level (unlike the USN) with the knowledge the four catapults needed to be independent of each other for operations,

EMALS🧵
1/5
...based on how the USN f--ked up their EMALS design.

That is, when any single EMALS catapult on the Ford class goes down for any reason. They all can't be used.

2/5
As strategypage dot com put it in 2019:

"EMALS proved less reliable than the older steam catapult, more labor intensive to operate, put more stress on launched aircraft than expected and due to a basic design flaw if one EMALS catapult becomes inoperable,

3/5
Read 5 tweets

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