Outrunning supply lines

What does it mean that the Russian army outrun its supply lines at the beginning of the offensive?
How does that happen?

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  1. 11 months ago
    Anonymous

    Logistics moves slower than other units and time delays for it stacks up fast, bottlenecks in things like fuel and ammunition have long knock on effects. Normally you expect to outrun your logistics train, and then stop for a while to reorganize then keep moving. The Russians couldn’t even do that, their logistics broke down less than 50km from their border in plenty of cases.

  2. 11 months ago
    Anonymous

    It happens like this.
    - where is trucks?
    - trucks cannot run without fuel
    - where is fuel?
    - our boss sold fuel, bought dacha
    - here, we stole some fuel, send trucks to come get it
    - we cannot send trucks
    - why not?
    - our boss sold trucks, bought another dacha
    - here, we stole some trucks AND fuel, now send us our stuff!
    - we cannot send stuff. Want to know why?

    • 11 months ago
      Anonymous

      Thought this was gonna be a joke

      >- here, we stole some trucks AND fuel, now send us our stuff!
      >- we cannot send stuff. Want to know why?
      >Why?
      >Some butthole stole our fuel and trucks

  3. 11 months ago
    Anonymous

    >How does that happen?
    They invaded in the muddy season so they had to stick to the roads (especially due to non-existent vehicle maintenance) and then they decided to do a massive convoy to Kiev and between having shitty AA that was often turned off, unsecured comms that were being flooded with pop songs, slurs, and fake info, and lazy ass infantry that refused to get out and guard the flanks, the convoy got torn to absolute shreds by flanking ambushes, artillery, and drones.

    Everything was outrunning everything because whenever a vehicle got blown up it'd turn into an absolute clusterfrick where the line got severed cause the vehicles behind would slow down/stop and the vehicles ahead would keep going. Imagine a frickmassive train where the link between every single car has been blown apart, some of the cars needed the food on the other cars, and also the front 400 cars are all crashed off a cliff into a fiery canyon west of Kiev.

  4. 11 months ago
    Anonymous

    Several things:
    1.The russian army logistics have been mostly based in trains shipping stuff to the front lines since the Cold War
    2.Their BTG combat groups didn't have enough dedicated trucks in their organization, so any loss of them due to combat operations compounded the lack of supplies on hand
    3.they already had a lack of trucks before the war:
    https://warontherocks.com/2021/11/feeding-the-bear-a-closer-look-at-russian-army-logistics/
    4.The russian army trucks do not use pallets and forklifts like the West or Ukraine, they handle everything by hand (much more slower and dangerous)
    5.They didn't expect the ukies to fight, so they did a moronic Thunder Run bypassing ukie defences at first but didn't even carry enough supplies to last until relief arrived, and the truck column with most of those supplies was stopped north of Kyiv.
    6.They also never were able to secure Hostomel airport so transport planes could deliver supplies.
    7.Their supply organization is anyway a badly executed version of soviet planning, with big centralized depots close to the front lines that are very vulnerable in modern warfare (as we saw later when HIMARs fricked their artillery in the summer)

  5. 11 months ago
    Anonymous

    Everyone gets the general idea but they're missing one key point.
    Every army at the start was told "Da tovarich this exersice" then that suddenly changed to "Tovarich drive up this road to city and occupy"
    They did as they were told, nobody bothered to wait for supplies because they were all supposed to hit minimal resistance if any at all. Logistics never entered into the equation because they were given the wrong parameters because their intel was all wrong, they were never supposed to actually need supplies.

    • 11 months ago
      Anonymous

      Several things:
      1.The russian army logistics have been mostly based in trains shipping stuff to the front lines since the Cold War
      2.Their BTG combat groups didn't have enough dedicated trucks in their organization, so any loss of them due to combat operations compounded the lack of supplies on hand
      3.they already had a lack of trucks before the war:
      https://warontherocks.com/2021/11/feeding-the-bear-a-closer-look-at-russian-army-logistics/
      4.The russian army trucks do not use pallets and forklifts like the West or Ukraine, they handle everything by hand (much more slower and dangerous)
      5.They didn't expect the ukies to fight, so they did a moronic Thunder Run bypassing ukie defences at first but didn't even carry enough supplies to last until relief arrived, and the truck column with most of those supplies was stopped north of Kyiv.
      6.They also never were able to secure Hostomel airport so transport planes could deliver supplies.
      7.Their supply organization is anyway a badly executed version of soviet planning, with big centralized depots close to the front lines that are very vulnerable in modern warfare (as we saw later when HIMARs fricked their artillery in the summer)

      >How does that happen?
      They invaded in the muddy season so they had to stick to the roads (especially due to non-existent vehicle maintenance) and then they decided to do a massive convoy to Kiev and between having shitty AA that was often turned off, unsecured comms that were being flooded with pop songs, slurs, and fake info, and lazy ass infantry that refused to get out and guard the flanks, the convoy got torn to absolute shreds by flanking ambushes, artillery, and drones.

      Everything was outrunning everything because whenever a vehicle got blown up it'd turn into an absolute clusterfrick where the line got severed cause the vehicles behind would slow down/stop and the vehicles ahead would keep going. Imagine a frickmassive train where the link between every single car has been blown apart, some of the cars needed the food on the other cars, and also the front 400 cars are all crashed off a cliff into a fiery canyon west of Kiev.

      It happens like this.
      - where is trucks?
      - trucks cannot run without fuel
      - where is fuel?
      - our boss sold fuel, bought dacha
      - here, we stole some fuel, send trucks to come get it
      - we cannot send trucks
      - why not?
      - our boss sold trucks, bought another dacha
      - here, we stole some trucks AND fuel, now send us our stuff!
      - we cannot send stuff. Want to know why?

      Logistics moves slower than other units and time delays for it stacks up fast, bottlenecks in things like fuel and ammunition have long knock on effects. Normally you expect to outrun your logistics train, and then stop for a while to reorganize then keep moving. The Russians couldn’t even do that, their logistics broke down less than 50km from their border in plenty of cases.

      Ok but let’s go to the basics, you got a number of trucks that take supplies from strategic sources and then move it to intermediate depots with trains and then trucks bring it to the line.
      Then you have X trucks and Y distance and Z amount of supplies, then you got the throughput that comes to the line, Z amount of supplies in T time, depends on your activities.
      Every truck can move a max volume/weight of supplies, at a certain speed, given by the truck engine, traffic, and road conditions.
      So given a certain distance, and the speed of the trucks, you get how many trucks, and hence supplies, you get in a given amount of time, (should also be noted that if the trucks have to move more distance, for the round trip, than their tanks allow, you need additional trucks to carry fuel for them).
      So if you have a longer distance you need more trucks for delivering the same througput in a given amount of time.
      There is also a “recharge” time for when the next supplies can come in (assuming you used all your trucks and there aren’t more in the back), that’s the time it takes for the trucks to go back and be loaded.
      When they arrive there’s the unload time, then I think the load time on company organic trucks, and the time for delivery, and then the distribution at small level (platoon and squad).

      • 11 months ago
        Anonymous

        The russian answer to these problems is to use trains as much as possible and as close to the front they can, WW2 style.
        They've been using ukrainian railways since they were able to secure them.

        • 11 months ago
          Anonymous

          Well that’s not a bad idea, you reduce the distance to be moved by truck and allow higher trhougput

          • 11 months ago
            Anonymous

            Sure, but in the end is a sign of their inability to do logistics and force projection like a western army. Just finally using pallets would improve a frickton their supply chains.
            But this is the same armed forces that still mostly use foot wraps instead of socks like everybody else since WW2.

            • 11 months ago
              Anonymous

              Why would pallets help at this point? What fork trucks would they use to unload the trucks and wagons with?

      • 11 months ago
        Anonymous

        Also forgot

        The structure of the road influences how many trucks can go through, if you have only one lane you can only go in one direction at a time, if you have more lanes more trucks can go in parallel, to me it didn’t seem to make much of a difference but when I see how many trucks are used having one more lane means halving the column length, and when that length is some km it makes a difference in the amount of supplies you get through in a given time

      • 11 months ago
        Anonymous

        Sorry I wasn’t very clear with the First part, let me explain again

        Production > strategic transport (train-ship for slow but huge cargo-, and also more fuel efficient - plane for small but fast cargo and consumes a lot of fuel) > drop off point > operational level trucks bring cargo to drop points > low echelon trucks pick up cargo and go to platoon and squad level where it’s distributed, but idk how that happens, someone tell me thanks, also tell me if I made errors

      • 11 months ago
        Anonymous

        Don't bother trying to explain logistics on this board. If OP was ever going to understand, he thought about it for 10 then understood and not asked. Every logistic concept is incredibly simple to grasp if you aren't a moron and apparently impossible if you are.

        • 11 months ago
          Anonymous

          Guess what I’m the op and I’m the one who made that post

          • 11 months ago
            Anonymous

            ok but why though. it's like explaining the basic concept of suppression of air defense in a thread about why russia failed at suppression of air defence. you turned DUHHHH into needlessly long prose

  6. 11 months ago
    Anonymous

    they didnt outrun the supply lines technically speaking, the problem was that the convoys were so long and the roads so narrow that they couldnt physically get to the units that needed resupply to get them moving again.
    this is why there was a 60km long traffic jam going towards kiev.
    second problem was that the ground offroad was soft and muddy so they were forced to unfrick the convoy from the back to the front one bit at a time, rather than just being able to take a detour offroad and get the supply trucks to the front directly and speed things up.

  7. 11 months ago
    Anonymous

    >How does that happen?

    Remember the noodle offensives at the start of the war?
    >Russian armor and mechanized troops advance deep into Ukraine, bypassing any defensive positions
    >they're now situated deep in what is still de facto enemy controlled territory
    >soft and poorly protected truck convoys try to catch up so they can resupply them
    >Ukrainians ambush and destroy them by the dozen
    That's how it happens.

    • 11 months ago
      Anonymous

      Funnily enough this works if you can preemptively destroy any enemy unit based in the towns you're passing, but it doesn't work if you just pretend they aren't there. A Ukrainian armored unit with T-62s quite notoriously sat in a city between Kharkiv and Kyiv, occasionally sending probing attacks out to the very vulnerable Russian convoys passing by, because the Russians refused to or were incapable of destroying them.

      • 11 months ago
        Anonymous

        T-64’s anon, and that was the 1st Tank Brigade. They took serious casualties but completely fricked the eastern push on the capital by counterattacking wherever they could and ambushing Russian armor convoys at basically point blank where the Russians couldn’t bring their indirect fire assets into the slugging match. Close in fighting is the best way to negate an artillery disadvantage, and the Ukrainians have by hook or crook become very very good at obtaining local fire superiority, grabbing the Russians by the belt and clobbering them in close quarters. It’s classic NVA/PAVN tactics.

  8. 11 months ago
    Anonymous

    unit a needs 100 supplies an hour to function
    ut's logistics train can move 1000 supplies at any one time
    if the unit is more than 5 hours away from it's supply dump, 5 going 5 going back = 10 hours
    it will now no longer be able to get all the supplies it needs for it's operations
    and that is without any other elements of friction like sleep, maintinance, trafic jams, loading and unloading time, loses ect ect.
    So the more work you can make the enemies logistics do, the worse the unit gets supplied.
    So if you force the russians to move everything back beyond himars or now shadow mcedgename range. The more they have to drive, the less supplies they can get to the front on any day ect.
    but moving supplies also costs supplies, you need to feed the crews, fuel the trucks, get spare parts ect ect.
    so there is a point where a unit operating x away from it's supply dump will just get shit supplies and even that getting them those supplies takes more supplies than the supplies being moved

  9. 11 months ago
    Anonymous

    ask rommel
    catpcha kx nggr

  10. 11 months ago
    Anonymous

    it didn't. it's cope.

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