Obviously, I’m very skeptical of the pro-NATO interpretation of events, but since I believe it’s important to always pay attention to what those with different perspectives think, this is one of the more relevant anti-Russian arguments presented, given that it focuses on the perceived logistics issues faced by the Russians in their special military operation. As it is said: “Amateurs talk strategy. Professionals talk logistics.”
Of course, on social media, amateurs talk tactics, strategy, logistics, and geopolitics, and all of it is nonsense. And the incessant, and ever-nonsensical propaganda from the so-called “military experts” on Fox News and CNN doesn’t help. But this logistical analysis comes with a concrete prediction, so it is worth noting.
This tweet in the thread talks about Russian Army units being tied to supply dumps closer & closer to the front lines. This is consistent & expected with high levels of attrition, both combat & operational, in the Russian Army tactical truck fleet. As the Russian tactical truck fleet diminishes, the depth of Russian break-ins gets shallower & the chance of any sort of breakthrough followed by mobile operations disappears.
“Still-continued logistics problems” boils down to not enough tactical trucks, efficiently used. The pace of operation the Putin regime insists upon means Russia simply cannot change over non-mech to mechanized logistics in the middle of the Ukraine war.
At the start of the war Russian had MTLB tracked fighting vehicles being used as ambulances. Now they are using unmarked civilian cars with a sunroof for the same role. This is the bleeding out of Russian Army vehicle fleet & the Russian economy too. These symptoms are consistent with my “Russian truck fleet dead from Operational Attrition in six-to-eight weeks” prediction.
It doesn’t look like Russia’s current rates of loss will get to ‘immobilization from a lack of trucks level’. 1701 trucks isn’t even 50% of 4,000. This is part of the issue of making prediction based on straight line projections. The people you are predicting about will make changes in their operations to avoid that predicted disaster.
This doesn’t mean I’m going to be wrong at the middle-May end date of my projection, but doing a straight line projection from now says I will be. Call it a less than 25% possible outcome. We shall see in two weeks.
The fundamental problem with this truck-based analysis is that it is predicated on the same assumption that every single pro-NATO analysis I have seen contains: the idea that the Russians have thrown 100 percent of their military assets into the Ukrainian battle. This has always struck me as highly unlikely, given that even Russia’s Chinese allies are aware that the real conflict is with NATO and the neocons, that the Russians have utilized significantly fewer BTGs than originally reported, and there has been very little use of the Russian Air Force in either tactical or strategic operations.
If mobility logistics are the limiting factor, then one presumes the Russians can figure out how to obtain vehicles from their primary ally, who happens to produce 48 percent of all the heavy trucks manufactured in the world.
My assumption is that the Russian strategists are smarter and better-informed than I am. Most of the so-called “expert” analysis I have seem appears to be predicated on the idea that the Russian strategists are ill-informed and too stupid to recognize the obvious. Time will tell whose position is closer to the truth.
