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Trent Telenko Profile picture
Trent Telenko
@TrentTelenko
Married father of four great kids, Retired US DoD Civil Servant, Section 22 Special Interest Group list admin, Chicagoboyz-dot-net history blogger
472 subscribers
Nov 22 • 11 tweets • 5 min read
So, the Russians are using TMM-6 assault scissor bridges to cross gaps in partially destroyed bridges?

Nothing like a medium girder bridge?

This points not only to a major gap -ahem- in Russian bridging capability, but also one in the Russian state.

Logistics & the State🧵
1/ Image I've mentioned this gap in both Russian bridging capability and Western Military Intelligence assumptions about it back in June of 2023.

2/
Nov 22 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
This line about AFU drone warheads:

>>It is especially well suited for attacking energy infrastructure.

Makes me wonder what is about to happen to the Russian power grid after Pres. Biden leaves office.🤔⬇️ Please recall DR. Celeste Wallander [ASSISTANT SECRETARY OF DEFENSE
FOR INTERNATIONAL SECURITY AFFAIRS] extended rant about what the Biden Administration considered civilian versus military targets inside Russia for Ukrainian assault drones.

2/
Nov 21 • 8 tweets • 3 min read
This act of cost-ineffective public theater by Putin is his going away present to the Western escalation managers they so desperately need to justify their failed retread of appeasement policy jobs

The cost of an IRBM/ICBM is around 10-20 times the cost of an ALCM/GLCM/SLCM
1/ ...for about the same payload, with the several hundred meter CEP accuracy of a daylight of February 1945 B-17 raid.

The Putin regime put out propaganda yesterday about using the RS-26 Rubezh, a SS-20 SABER lookalike, to scare Western policy makers⬇️

2/
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Nov 20 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
Please note:

@elonmusk has stated two launches from now there will be an attempted 2nd stage catch at Boca Chica.

That is in the 1st quarter of 2025.

The SpaceX Starship catch will be the "HMS Dreadnought" moment of the Space age.
1/3 After that event, every non-reusable orbital class rocket launcher in the world designed and built before her will be obsolete the same way every battleship built and designed before the all big gun HMS Dreadnought was made so.

2/3 Image
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Nov 19 • 15 tweets • 5 min read
People haven't paid anywhere near enough attention to this development⬇️

Russian cruise missile production is now like their tank production.

Russia is living off of Cold War stockpiles that are thinner & thinner as time goes on, & harder to resuscitate.

Attrition🧵
1/ The spokesman of the Main Intelligence Directorate of the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine, Andriy Yusov has stated that Russia's military-industrial complex can produce 40-50 Kh-101 cruise missiles every month.

2/
 unian.ua/weapons/skilki…
Nov 18 • 11 tweets • 4 min read
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
Nov 16 • 10 tweets • 5 min read
They are a lot of accounts analyzing the Ukrainian War that are unable to relate lethality to accuracy to weapons effects.

The Rorschach test for this weakness is below⬇️

The idea that fragment density/velocity, overpressures & CEPs are highly non linear mean nothing to them
1/ The idea of a small warhead 6 inches from the vulnerable spot of a target has of no relevance to them.

Nor is the idea that the orientation of that small warhead makes all the difference for a nose mounted shaped charge used on a Lancet loitering munition, see X-ray below⬇️
2/ Image
Nov 11 • 10 tweets • 4 min read
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
Nov 10 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
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/
Nov 9 • 15 tweets • 4 min read
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
Nov 5 • 15 tweets • 4 min read
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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Nov 3 • 47 tweets • 21 min read
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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Oct 4 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
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.

2/ Image
Oct 4 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
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.

2/ Image
Oct 1 • 7 tweets • 3 min read
These appear to be long range heavy MLRS of 240 mm to 400 mm diameter rather than "ballistic missiles."

1/ Heavy MLRS like the Chinese PLA, 350 km range, PCL191 erases the distinction between short range ballistic missiles & guided MLRS.

It is unclear exactly what the real ranges range of Iranian Heavy MLRS are given Chinese technology transfers.
2/
Oct 1 • 18 tweets • 7 min read
Just...no. That's bad analysis.

One of the spaces @secretsqrl123 had with @RyanO_ChosenCoy present. He made clear Ukrainian FPV drones based on Hollywood camera multi-copters have a 50 km one way range.

The other issue is the disintermediation of drones from platforms.
1/
Image "Disintermediation" means any shipping container or flat space on a vessel/vehicle works as a launcher.

A ISO container with 126 drones can be stacked on a 24 X 24 top level of a Chinese MGX-24 container ship and lob 72,576 drones in a simultaneous wave 50 km or more.

2/ Image
Sep 30 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Missiles are structurally strong nose to tail because, rocket acceleration. Side to side missile structure is as weak/light as possible for performance reasons.

Railway gondola cars moving missiles like this rattles them side to side like beans in a maraca.😱

1/3 Things like the Russian SAM malfunction you see below happen for reasons, some of them involving long distance railway transportation.

2/3
Sep 30 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
This seems to be my day to kick the cognitive bias blind spot failures of Western intelligence.

This time on casualty ratios due to 💩 Russian military medical care.

The horrible thermite injuries in the video below will likely produce lots of preventable fatalities.
1/ It takes 40 hours for RuAF casualties to reach medical care equivalent to a battalion aid station.

The odds are RuAF field hospitals will not be able to control the infections that thermite burns generate, because they don't evacuate quickly enough.
2/

Image
Image
Sep 23 • 31 tweets • 11 min read
Given the latest failure of the Russian Sarmat ICBM...

...it is time to ask some hard questions about the combat readiness of the RU nuclear triad.

Extraordinary claims of Russian nuclear readiness now require extraordinary evidence🧵
1/ This is the 4th failed test attempt of the "combat operational" RS-28 Sarmat Heavy ICBM.

The RS-28 is a derivative of the original R-36M / SS-18 which was Ukrainian built and maintained until 2014.

2/
Sep 18 • 9 tweets • 3 min read
This is no surprise.

People saying Ukrainians could not maintain F-16's were and remain utter fools and tools for people who want Ukraine to lose.🤢🤮

1/
Image I've been saying this about the maintenance capabilities of the PSU for years.

They have an economy that is deeply penetrated by computers because of their egalitarian wealth distribution.

This makes US F-16 style two level maintenance easy peasy.
2/
Sep 18 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
This Foreign Policy article did not age well:

The False Promise of Ukraine’s Deep Strikes Into Russia By Stephen Biddle, Foreign Affairs:
“Hitting Faraway Targets Will Not Tip the Balance of the War”

1/ The combination of technological/logistical incompetence, economic ignorance, and military-historical illiteracy as Stephen Biddle dropped in that article makes me despair about the competence of the US national security experts versus drone airpower.


2/