Just making a note that
@wdolson and the rest of us have no idea if OSINT is making the correct call or not, that the sources they use are often a fraction of the data viewed by the cia or others. What they cobble together is interesting and even useful to others but it is not “best”. Not by a long long shot. Certainly some of the primary data is manipulated prior to being released.
Trent is interesting and verbose but maybe there is a reason he is managing very little after 30 years in defense. Has he ever visited Russia? Does he speak Russian? He is not in any position to know anything about Russian stockpiles any more than you or I. If he was he could not share that on Twatter like he does endlessly. Also he could not or should be criticizing his superiors openly as he does. There are thousands of people like Trent in the DoD and industry ; a subset of thousands of them in dc and those are the the ones that are trusted to know and they dont post on twatter . I thought he was retired and consulting but after a few quick checks ....hmmm. I will check in on some things he writes but he has no better data than you or I on many things he writes about. The things he doesn’t write about are what is interesting about what He says.
Trent Telenko has gone outside his competency area in recent months. He crashed on the scene explaining why Russian tires were failing all over the place. He is a logistics guy and his analysis there is fairly good.
People like Mark Hertling and Ben Hodges have a better picture on what's up with the Russian military. They were responsible for force training in the US Army, and they both had insight into Russian preparedness. Hertling says he actually toured a Russian training base when he was on active duty. He was very unimpressed with what he saw.
I posted the Telenko link as evidence that Russian artillery fire is way down. There are other sources for that too.
I do think Telenko has some valid observations about the blindness of US intelligence when it comes to logistics. In the US military any senior unit commander has been steeped in all the ins and outs of logistics since they were a mid-ranked officer. Since the Spanish American War the US has put a huge emphasis on logistics in warfare. It was how the US was able to mobilize faster than anyone thought possible in WW I and it was the backbone of the victory in WW II.
But logistics is a specialized and not very sexy art. It's very mundane to anyone outside the field and few people who don't have to do logistics don't give it much thought. The intelligence specialties tend to be separate from the combat command specialties and the intelligence people aren't necessarily looking at logistics. Telenko is correct that US intelligence was blind to the fact that Russian supply logistics hadn't evolved since the 1940s and that was a major factor in their failures early in the war. The invasion in the north was doomed from the start because the Russians didn't have rail support close enough to Kyiv and they were too naive about logistics to realize it.
Outside of what Telenko has written I have seen estimates on the Russian stockpile of artillery ammunition and their manufacturing capacity. We don't have a clear picture of the quality of storage, but we do know that even under the best storage conditions artillery ammunition degrades over time. Stored in overly damp conditions will degrade it faster. There were a number of pictures of Russian artillery ammunition with corrosion, so at least some of their facilities had dampness problems. If the Russians were firing degraded ammunition, we should see an increased dud rate, which the Ukrainians were seeing in late summer.
We did not have a perfect picture how much ammunition the Soviets had squirreled away, but we could make estimates. It is finite, there is no such thing as an unlimited supply of anything. The estimates were that the Russian's own stockpiles would begin to run out sometimes between late summer and the end of the year.
Based on observations of current industry capacity, we could estimate the maximum Russian production capabilities. Russia does have pretty big ammunition production capacities compared to the rest of the world, but it's a tiny fraction of what they were firing over the summer. Estimates for their maximum capacity range between 3000 and 5000 shells a day.
The US production capacity for 155mm ammunition was 14,400 rounds a month at the start of the war. The US' goal is 90,000 a month according to this
With demand high in Ukraine, US Army ramps up artillery production
Russian artillery shell production is higher than what the US can do. However, that's not a severe deficit when artillery use is examined. Russian artillery is not really capable of precision fire. An artillery crew is considered elite when they can kill an enemy tank with less than 200 rounds. NATO artillery is commonly seen taking out Russian vehicles with only a couple of rounds.
The 3000 or so artillery rounds the Russians are firing per day is in line with current production. There is a chance they are holding back ammunition for some sort of offensive, but they did not increase artillery use before their attacks at Voledahr or in the Donbas. Those appear to be fairly good sized offensive pushes, but they did not have anything close to the artillery barrages the Russians conducted before their offensives in the Donbas last year.
We also know from Russian production data that they don't really make spare barrels for their artillery and the barrels they do make are softer steel than the old Soviet barrels. In the Chechen wars they fired a lot of artillery and just retired the artillery pieces after the barrels burned out rather than replace them. A number of artillery in storage at the start of this war were artillery that had burned out during the Chechen wars.
They may be making some barrels now, but production is probably not very significant. Scaling production under sanctions is going to be difficult. Russia doesn't make the machine tools needed to expand production and their main supplier, Germany, isn't selling to them. The Chinese may be selling them machine tools, but they are going to be different from German tools and require some reworking of plant designs to make the new machine tools work. It isn't that Russians can't expand production of artillery barrels, it's that they can't do it fast. They don't have the infrastructure. Back to logistics again.
Because production of barrels is limited and they fired staggering numbers of rounds over last spring and summer, they probably burned out a lot of their artillery. In late 2022 a lot more towed artillery was seen and a lot fewer SP artillery. The Russian artillery at the beginning of the war was almost all SP with a lot of towed in storage. There are drawbacks to towed artillery on the modern battlefield and they would use SP artillery if they had it operational, but the SP guns appear to be mostly out of service.
There are also stories of artillery units arriving in Ukraine and being turned into infantry which indicates a shortage of tubes. Russia's supply of stored ammunition and stored guns has a finite limit and they may be close to the limits on both.
Whatever is going on, Russian artillery usage is a small fraction of what they were firing back in May. Their artillery was the only part of the army that worked at all, but it's gone somewhat silent. That's an indication they don't have the artillery they used to.
Video says 1hr 10min, do we have a TLDR (TLD watch)?
In theory, Russia can survive forever harassing Ukraine and others to a significant degree, but would have to continue to vector towards North Korean economic, political, and other institutional type structures. Significant risk of Putin losing control and his life during this progression, but not certain as other dictators continue to live and die in their despotic bubbles.
Thriving ≠ surviving.
Russia can produce a limited amount of ammunition and they can produce some weapons domestically, but both have limits. Their biggest limiting factor is manpower. Russia has 3X the population of Ukraine, but Russia has to make pretty much everything themselves. The Chinese may be helping some, but the Chinese are obviously not giving the Russians any significant military aid. The Chinese may be providing components so Russians can make their own weapons, but not completed weapons. Russia is also drawing some supplies from North Korea, but that's a small country with a tiny economic base.
The bulk of war material needs to be made by Russia itself. That means either mobilizing all the women to make weapons (as the US and UK did in WW II) or hold back a good chunk of their men to make weapons. They don't seem to be interested in mobilizing women to build weapons, so they need to use their male workforce.
Ukraine's war production is largely outside the country. Ukraine can dedicate a much larger percentage of their male population to the war. Ukraine is also utilizing women in combat units much more than Russia.
Russia's tactics in recent months has been to exchange thousands of lives for territory. That's something they can't do indefinitely. Russia only has about 8-10 million men in the 18-40 age group. A significant number of those need to be held back to work in defense industries if they are going to make enough weaponry to keep fighting. Then there are those who are involved in the fight who are in the logistics of getting supplies to the front and supporting the war effort.
In WW II the US was more logistics support heavy, but 1/4 of those in uniform never left the US, and of those deployed, 1/3 never saw combat and were involved in support roles. I think the modern US military is even more skewed towards rear area jobs than in WW II.
Russia is efficient moving things by train, but once off the train, they get extremely inefficient. Their truck logistics are much more labor intensive than US truck logistics. The Russians have large military units just dedicated to keeping things moving by train.
Russia might be able to constitute about 2 million of the 18-40 year old population into combat units. But with their loss rates they will burn through that population rather quickly. With a loss rate of 800 a day, they are looking at 300K dead a year. Even with Russia's high death to wounded ratio, that probably means around another 300K disabled and unable to fight. That would mean a complete loss of that 2 million in a little over 3 years.
They can't sustain the fight anything like they are doing now. Ukraine is getting stronger and will be in a position to push Russians back further within a few months. In a lot of places the Russians may be back on their territory by summer. Russia might be able to barely hold onto Crimea, but the rest of Ukraine is probably not defensible against a well equipped Ukrainian force.
Russia could drop back to their own territory and lob artillery over the border as well as launch the occasional missile strike when they get enough built to do another launch, but that's only if they are able to sell the never ending war on the Russian people.
As pointed out above, Russia is not North Korea. North Korea shut itself off from the world before modern communications and they still live in a 1950s world. Russia has been connected to the outside world for 30 years. It hasn't penetrated to the hinterlands, but the people of the major cities have been very connected with the world. Shutting them off ala NK is not going to be popular.
I don't think Russia could turn themselves into a hermit kingdom like NK and remember that history shows Russians don't tolerate leaders who lose wars. Putin is good at manipulating people, but it's going to be very hard to spin losing Ukraine as any kind of win.
Another thing is that Putin has a limited shelf life. He is 70 and won't live forever.
There is an American author who has looked at dictatorships over the last 120 years. I forget her name now, I saw an interview with her last year. She has observed that dictatorships tend to fall apart when the dictator at the center of power dies. About the only one that has managed to survive is Cuba. Dictatorships that are run by a central committee like the USSR and China today are able to change leaders because the central committee is the backbone of the system and the dictator is just the current face of it. (Xi taking on a more prominent role in China may destabilize this.)
Russia's power all flows through Putin. When he does die, there will be a power vacuum and something will likely happen to the country as a result.
www.theguardian.com
