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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
476 subscribers
Jan 17 • 6 tweets • 1 min read
The fire and forget millimeter wave (MMW) radar guidance AGM-114L "Hellfire Longbow" being referred in the War Zone post as "a new anti-drone armament" for the LCS actually ceased production in 2005 and reaches end of life in 2025.

1/ One of the reasons the AGM-114L was dropped from the US Army M-Shorad is the US Army didn't want to pay money to recertify the AGM-114L inventory...

2/
Jan 16 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
It is a bad week to be Russia.

Qatar, one of the biggest LNG exporter, just announced it's new six MTPA (million tonnes per annum) nitrogen fertilizer plant.

The chemical process involved is natural gas->ammonia -> urea for a
1/
 dohanews.co/qatar-set-to-b… ...vertically integrated facility.

This new Qatar facility means Middle Eastern fertilizer industrial plants have now displaced Russia on the world fertilizer market.

2/
Jan 15 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
I disagree with the thoughts in this post for multiple reasons.⬇️

1st, Ukraine made a systematic effort in Oct 2024 to take out multiple Russian alcohol distilleries.

So distilleries are on the AFU strategic bombing list.

1/ 2nd, there are a lot of things that alcohol is a chemical feedstock for that Russia desperately needs to make.

I've talked about synthetic rubber for tires in another thread.


2/
Jan 15 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
Ukraine struck another Russian alcohol plant?

I'm beginning to think the Russians have been using alcohol to make butadiene based synthetic rubber.

My WW2 US mobilization resources say grain produced alcohol was the primary chemical feedstock for the synthetic rubber

1/ ...in US tires until August 1944.

The process was invented by a Russian, Via wikipedia:

"The Russian chemist Sergei Vasilyevich Lebedev was the first to polymerize butadiene in 1910....

2/
Jan 13 • 5 tweets • 3 min read
If you are going to talk about the US Army's WW2 "Revolution in logistical affairs."

You start at TM 55-310, Stevedoring⬇️

It lead to another Civil Rights revolution 25 years later.

Stevedoring & Civil Rights🧵🧵
1/ Image
Image
Image
Image That War Department technical manual codified how the US Army would apply mechanized logistics - pallets, forklifts and warehousing using same - world wide.

2/
Jan 11 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
Russian Shaheds have been using early 1990's style digital scene mapping and correlation (DSMAC) guidance.

Depending on how much memory is on the Shahed, it could be avoiding the use of GNSS (Think GPS) radio navigation entirely.

1/ Image But as the figure I used above noted, Ukraine is mostly flat and that is bad for DSMAC accuracy.

An analysis of the data bases of downed Shaheds will yield the landmarks these drones are using.

That data, plus an AI analysis of past Shahed trajectories in GNSS jammed...

2/ Image
Jan 11 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
This is nothing new in warfare.⬇️

The British Army in WW2 need it's "Phantom" or "J-Service" to listen to its own army's radio circuits to get accurate reports to senior leaders that were slow and...call it...garbled on the way to senior leadership.

1/ The WW2 US Army duplicated this practice and created a dedicated radio units called SIAM - Signal Information and Monitoring - whose sole mission was to monitor the radio traffic of US units for violations of signal procedures and cipher security.

2/
Jan 11 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
This is exactly the kind of naval craft/infrastructure required for an invasion of Taiwan.

Chinese production of such invasion "shore connectors" should be considered a war warning clock starting its counting down.

Period. Dot.

1/ OSINT & Western intelligence now needs to be looking for mass deployments of Chinese 21st century prefabricated Mulberry harbor equivalents.⬇️

2/ Image
Jan 9 • 7 tweets • 3 min read
The economic barriers to entry for drone airpower have fallen so far as to make current Western expeditionary warfare model insertions by paradrop, heliborne landing and by naval landing craft obsolescent.

A wilful ignorance🧵
1/ This is denied by the "usual suspects" for the historical, US Army Horse Cavalry branch protecting its bureaucratic empire from the reality of the 1939 Nazi blitzkrieg of Poland, after France fell in 1940, reasons.

2/ Image
Image
Jan 7 • 10 tweets • 3 min read
In case anyone missed the obvious, Russian losses in 2024 were greater than 2022 and 2023 combined.

It is worth noting that the Russian loss of ~429,660 personnel in 2024 is similar to British losses in the WW1 Somme campaign.

RuAF casualty ratio🧵
1/ Image There is one very important difference between the Somme and the 2022 to date Russo-Ukrainian War.

The WW1 British lost ~1 KIA for every 4-5 WIA in the Somme.

Most of the UK missing and 1 in 10 of the wounded were either dead, or died of wound infections, respectively.

2/ Image
Image
Jan 6 • 13 tweets • 5 min read
The thing about being a retired DoD Quality Staffer is I'm not afraid of asking 3rd parties, or AI's like Grok, about my work product.

I've done several threads that are reflected in Grok's impressions of my Xeets on military boat-drones.

Boat-Drones in Naval Warfare🧵
1/ Image This is what I said almost a year ago, back in February 2024, about how the ship name "Ivanovets" will join "Prince of Wales" and "Repulse" marking the day the world changed for Naval power.

2/
Jan 2 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
This is an interesting, and double false, claim by the Russian Fighter bomber channel about boat-drones:

"Due to its speed and maneuverability, it is almost impossible to hit a BEK with a drone, as well as with emergency drops."

1/ @sambendett has posted videos about the Russians successfully destroying Ukrainian boat-drones with FPV drones back in May 2024.

2/
Jan 2 • 8 tweets • 3 min read
This is another useful translation thread by @sambendett dealing with the Russian reaction to the downing of two Russian helicopters by boat-drone launched R-73 (NATO reporting name AA-11 Archer) missiles.

Boat-drones vs helicopters🧵
1/ I've tried with an earlier thread to give this engagement both historical context and possible implications for Western naval helicopter operations in littoral waters going forward

2/
Jan 2 • 10 tweets • 5 min read
I've gotten some interesting claims of "Cope" from the pro-russian troll accounts on X.

Oh no, Russian VKS backwardness neither begins no ends with a lack of pallets.

Let's talk about the manually hand pumped VKS bomb lifts like the one this Mobik is using⬇️

1/ Image A long line of VKS bombs are shown here from the same TV clip with orange and green painted, hand pumped, lift trailers.

The big handles on each are how you lift and lower the bombs.

Can you imagine how many handle strokes it required to raise a 500 kg or 1,000kg bomb?

2/ Image
Dec 31, 2024 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
Ukraine's use of boat-drones to shoot down a Russian crewed helicopter with a R-73 missile is as historically significant as Israeli destroyer Eilat (ex HMS Zealous) with a Styx missile by Egypt. Image The era of the armed naval helicopter hunting submarines, small boats and spotting/screening for naval surface warships may be coming to a close.

2/ Image
Dec 31, 2024 • 11 tweets • 4 min read
Gosh,

This is such a logistical admission against interest by the Russian VKS I don't know where to begin.

We see here a single Russian forklift operator moving a FAB-500 bomb with _chains_ wrapped around forklift tines at the 12-16 sec mark

A USAF safety NCO's head

1/ ...would explode seeing the procedure used.

Four men build the UMPK kit on the loaded bomb.

The packaging for the FAB-500 is obviously made to be _rolled_on_the_ground_ by a mobik work gang or stacked in a gondola car of a Russian train by a crane.

2/
Dec 24, 2024 • 14 tweets • 4 min read
The defence-blog -dot- com website reported a very important observation on the production quality of current Russian Shahed production.

It's individual quality is declining, _Hard_.

1/
 Russian End Run Production 🧵 Image From the article:

“The Russians have adapted these drones to their needs, but due to a lack of components and efforts to reduce costs, their quality has declined,” Kulchytsky explained.

Earlier iterations of Shahed drones contained numerous foreign-made components,
2/
Dec 22, 2024 • 10 tweets • 3 min read
Sadly, this F-18 shoot down isn't a surprise.

The US Navy, as an institution, had a really horrid record of "friendly fire" in WW2, to include shooting down a FM-2 Wildcat fighter coming of the catapult of the CVE USS Tulagi in Kerama Retto on 6 Apr 1945.

1/ I've done threads on X highlighting this historical US Navy friendly fire institutional dysfunction.

2/
Dec 21, 2024 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Congress being held accountable for stealth legislation & pork barrel spending _BEFORE THE VOTE IS CAST_ is my most unexpected and welcomed result of Artificial Intelligence large language models (LLM) in 2024.

AI vs Lobbyists🧵
1/ It would take eight speed reading lawyers with eidetic memories 16 to 24 man hours to parse a 1000 page piece of legislation.

Specialty lawyers charging hundred of dollars an hour working for K-Street lobbyists.

2/
Dec 17, 2024 • 12 tweets • 5 min read
I've been involved with three US Army FMTV reset programs.

So this newest report from Ukraine's Defense Express on the the repairability problems with Russian AFV's out of their reserves is so much fun to share with you all.

1/ Image Defense Express pulled an article from the No. 10 issue of the Russian magazine "Material and Technical Support" on how horrid the vehicles coming out of reserve are plus problems with battle damaged reserve vehicles.

2/
 en.defence-ua.com/analysis/repai…
Dec 16, 2024 • 12 tweets • 4 min read
Ukraine’s claims to have produced 100 Peklo (Hell) cruise missiles over the past three months.

This works out to about 1.1 Peklo a day, but manufacturing production lines don't work like that.

Peklo Manufacturing 🧵

1/
 pravda.com.ua/eng/news/2024/… The infographic figure below is a typical commercial production line curve.

Ukraine's stated production and use of the Peklo (Hell) cruise missile marks it as being on the 'start of production to market entry' ramp up part of the curve below.

2/ Image