Putin's Secret Attack Plan Would Be Ukrainian Nightmare

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30. I doubt it

Russia's abject incompetence at logistics is what kept them from winning this in the first week of conflict like Putin expected. They can't operate effectively more than 25 to 50 Km from a rail head because they just don't have enough support troops and vehicles to do it. We have pallets of supplies loaded by forklift in a few minutes per truck load. They don't use pallets or forklifts, they load rounds of artillery one at a time (each in a separate crate) BY HAND. Then they unload the same way on the other end.

It is wildly inefficient. As a hypothetical example: If it takes 30 minutes to load a truck, 30 minutes to drive to it's destination, 30 minutes to unload and 30 minutes to drive back, that is 2 hours for ONE LOAD. Double the distance. Now you have 30 to load, 60 to drive, 30 to unload, 60 to drive back. That is 3 hours.

Now double the distance again. 30 to load, 120 to drive, 30 to unload, 120 back. That is now 5 hours.

If the first example take 10 trucks a day to keep a unit supplied, the second example takes 15 a day, the third takes 25 trucks a day. It gets dramatically worse the farther Russian gets from a rail head. That is where Russia's logistics fail, they don't allow for more trucks they farther they get from a rail head, hence, their resupply capacity gets smaller with each step farther from the rail heads.

Russia is struggling greatly to supply what they have in the field now. And still failing to keep them fully supplied with the CURRENT supply lines. Longer supply lines (and a great many more of them) just make all of that worse. I doubt that, 11 months in, that they have magically reinvented their entire logistics system.