50,000 Rusty Old Trucks. Russia Might Need Them Soon.
Ukraine's counterlogistics campaign is wreaking havoc on Russian supply lines.
This story was commissioned by Euromaidan Press. Since Substack pays only around a fifth of my bills, I have no choice but to take on a lot of freelance work. I still want my Substack audience to know where to read those freelance stories, however. Hence this excerpt.
The Russian military keeps thousands of old trucks in storage. And it might need them soon. This spring, Ukrainian forces launched a drone strike campaign targeting Russian trucks, vans and other cargo vehicles across the logistical zone stretching 200 km behind the disputed gray zone.
The campaign is intensifying. And now the Russians are losing potentially hundreds of trucks every day. Far more than they can immediately replace with new production. While Russian ground forces possess tens of thousands of cargo vehicles, and buy thousands of new ones every year, they’re currently on track to lose thousands per month.
If truck losses continue at the current rate, or get worse, the Russians may have no choice but to begin doing for trucks what they’ve long done for tanks: pull very old vehicles out of long-term storage and do their best to refurbish them for continued use.
It could be tough. “Russia has an immense number of stored trucks,” analyst Jompy noted. They placed the number of old Cold War cargo vehicles in storage in Russia at 40,000 or 50,000. That’s more trucks than most armies have in their entire inventories, but it’s also just 100 days’ worth of trucks at the current rate of loss across the logistical zone.
Worse for Russian logisticians, most of the stored trucks have been parked “for decades without proper maintenance,” according to Jompy. “Most are junk.”
Read the rest at Euromaidan Press.