Ukraine

[Got Stripers]

Originally Posted by PaulS

Wonder if this is the reason the convoy is stalled - cheap Chinese tires:

Trent Telenko, a retired Pentagon staff specialist and military history blogger, suggests another big reason may be Russia's tires, as he explained in a long, illustrated Twitter thread based on photos of deserted Russian Pantsir-S1 wheeled gun-missile systems and his own experience as a U.S. Army vehicle auditor. "When you leave military truck tires in one place for months on end," the sidewalls get brittle in the sun and fail like the tires on the Pantsir-SR, he wrote. "No one exercised that vehicle for one year."

Karl Muth, an economist, government adviser, and self-described "tire expert," jumped in, agreeing with Telenko but adding some details about the tires.

"There is a huge operational level implication in this," Telenko said. "If the Russian Army was too corrupt to exercise a Pantsir-S1, they were too corrupt to exercise the trucks and wheeled [armored fighting vehicles] now in Ukraine," meaning "the Russians simply cannot risk them off-road during the Rasputitsa/mud season." That is a problem for the convoy in the north, he added. "The Crimea is a desert and the South Ukrainian coastal areas are dryer. So we are not seeing this there. But elsewhere the Russians have a huge problem for the next 4 to 6 weeks." Read Telenko's whole thread on Twitter.

It certainly appears the Russians have a big problem or multiple problems, it’s to bad they haven’t got the drones to take out the forward areas of that convoy and create a major bottleneck. Hopefully we have some covert supply operations ongoing to get those weapons to the front.