Also Truck Offed
Nothing NSFW, I hasten to assure you, and for this blog Intro, I'm not sure how far to go. We may get to 900-odd words or the whole of the blog, as we're covering a topic dear to my heart, which may induce rigor mortis of the intellect in other people, mind: logistics. SIT BACK DOWN! This is interesting and the first to exhibit signs of boredom will experience the full Remote Nuclear Tormentor experience. Art!
RMT by night
Going back all the way to the Second Unpleasantness, I am drawing on Kenneth Macksey's 'Why the Gerrmans Lose at War' and one prime reason is that they seriously neglected logistics in courses taught at Staff College. In May 1940, during their successful conquest of France, they had to mobilise thousands of Dutch and Belgian trucks when their train logistics broke down. This reliance on a motley assemblage of foreign trucks persisted throughout the war as the Teutons never had enough of their own trucks. Art!
French trucks in Teuton service
It might work as a temporary expedient but if continues you need spare parts and tools and experienced mechanics for every new truck variant.
Four years later in May of 1944, the Allied air forces had turned their attention to Teuton rail logistics and were giving them, to use a technical term, an absolute malleting in the Normandy and Pas De Calais area. Only 32 trains were making it through, instead of the necessary 100 daily, a statistic you need to remember. Then bridges across the Seine were attacked, in addition to locomotives, severely limiting the Teuton ability to supply their forces in Normandy. Art!
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| Stick a pin in this one |
The Allies had total control of the skies, so much so that Teuton supply convoys had to travel at night to avoid being blammed apart, which meant only being able to transport logistics for 8 hours instead of 24. One especially perfidious tactic the Brylcreem Boys had was to knock out a bridge late in the daylight hours, knowing that this would bottleneck Teuton transport overnight. Then they'd turn up in the small hours with flare-dropping Mosquitoes and blam apart the queued vehicles. Perfidious Albion is - perfidious. Art!
Someone is about to have a bad hair night
Let us now jump to another work, "Gunships" by Wayne Mutza, which is an exhaustive listing of the South Canadian transport planes that were armed to the teeth with miniguns and cannon. The 'minigun' is one of the worst-named weapons of all time, as it was rotary-action six-barrel machine gun spitting out up to 6,000 rounds per minute. By the time you count 'One-two-three' that's 100 bullets fired. Art!
Wayne described what constitutes a follow-on from the attacks on Teuton transport above, where the AC-47D 'Spooky' gunships were tasked with interdicting the Ho Chi Minh Trail, the primary supply route - more correctly routes - from North Vietnam via Laos to South Vietnam. Art!
That's the tracer output of a 'Puff The Magic Dragon' firing, and what you see are only one-fifth of the rounds being sent onto target. They were effective for a brief while until the NVA moved in scads of anti-aircraft guns, and the Spooky's moved out.
In 1969 they literally moved out, being transferred to the Vietnamese Air Force whilst the new 'Shadow' AC-119 gunships took over. Art!
Over a period of 9 months, to 31st May - that month does keep cropping up, doesn't it? - in Cambodia, where they were not supposed to be, the Shadows notched up 609 vehicle kills (and 237 sampans) which breaks down to 67 trucks per month, or just over two per day. The 18th Special Operations Squadron claimed a total of 302 trucks (and 26 sampans) destroyed in February 1970 alone, and Wayne gives the ammunition expenditure: 1.4 million rounds of minigun rounds, and 600,000 20mm cannon rounds. In March, thanks to the invasion of Laos by the South Vietnamese and South Canadian, the truck count skyrocketed as the Ho Chi Minh Trail was cut and huge bottlenecks occurred: 3,361 vehicles destroyed was the count. Art!Flying gun park
Then came the Spectre gunship, a Hercules transport hauler converted into a flying arsenal, which featured a 105 howitzer with a range of 6 miles. They were turned loose on the HCMT, and Wayne provides tonnage figures of traffic from North Vietnam to South Vietnam: to the end of April 1970, 68,000 tons of supplies had been sent south, of which 21,000 reached destination, or less than 30%. In the same period in 1971, the same amount was sent but only 9,500 tons got through, or less than 1/7th. This is logistics strangulation. If you don't have small arms ammunition, grenades, RPGs, mortar bombs, artillery shells, spare parts, medicines, explosives, mines or food, your operations are going to be reduced or halted altogether. Art!
Possibly one of the grimmest examples of logistics being trumped by air power, the 1,500 Iraqi vehicles destroyed in a single night by South Canadian aircraft during Gulf War One. Most of the occupants gave up trying to travel through the giant traffic jams and escaped on foot, absent their loot.
Which brings us up to the present day, and once again we're looking at Ukraine. Since March the Kozaky have been ramping up their drone campaign against Ruffian logistics, using Firepoint 2 and Hornet drones, low-cost mass-produced UAVs that deliver enough of an explosive payload to destroy any truck they hit. Art!
Courtesy 'Euromaidan Press'
Since March 1st, the orcs have lost almost 21,000 trucks and tankers, nearly double for the previous three months, which is bad news as their Avtovaz plant can manage, at best, 1,200 trucks per year, or 100 per month, and the average per day loss in June is 463. Not only that, the civilian truck and tanker drivers who used to crew these vehicles are now refusing to drive them unless they get vast increases in pay. Remember those Teuton train traffic figures? Well, Robert -splendid first name, old chap - 'Madyar' Brovdi, head of the Ukrainian Unmanned System Forces, says that Ruffian logistics traffic along their main highways and major roads in the occupied territories has been reduced by 71%. Art!
Courtesy Jake Broe
These are only the targets for 11th June in the occupied southern territories, showing that the Kozaky have plenty of mid-range drones to go around and generously share with their orc foes.
Remember what I said about Teuton logistics being severely affected by Allied bombing of bridges over the Seine? Art!
"Telegram channel Oka-Gora"
Again, courtesy of Jake Broe
The red circles here are where bridges have been attacked, from port: 4 at Armiansk (first one only partially visible), 2 at Chongar and another at Henichesk to starboard. The Armiansk bridges are kind of redundant, as they cross what used to be the canal that carried water to Krim, but which went dry when the orcs blew up the Kakhovka Dam and the reservoir water vanished. They can, in theory, dump spoil into the canal bed and allow trucks to cross such an improvised bridge - which they did at Khakovka after Ukrainian HIMARS destroyed all the bridges - BUT such a workaround is going to create bottlenecks and backlogs, which will become a 'target-rich environment' for Kozaky drones. Art!
The orcs response to both Chongar bridges being out of action is to put up a pontoon bridge, made out of separate flotation units across the waterway. Pontoons are far less robust than a proper bridge and have limits as to what can cross and how often, meaning more bottlenecks and traffic jams. People on Twitter are alleging that the pontoon has already been hit but with no sources or confirmation we cannot assume this to be true. Art!
One point I made is that it used to be very difficult to successfully attack a bridge, especially with a manned bomber, as they are very narrow targets, frequently defended by scads of AA guns - see the Bielefeld Viaduct photo above to see how many bombs had missed it - but for the Chongar Bridges, the Kozaky are 4 for 4.
Well, as partially expected, we've done the whole blog and then some on a single topic. O well. It's all quality scrivel. Art!
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