Should have left them in the garage

Robert Beckhusen for War Is Boring in a piece titled “Military Exercises Are Tearng Up Russia’s Infrastructure“:

In recent days, 574 vehicles of the crack 74th Guards Air Assault Division set off at night from its base at Pskov near the Estonian border for a training site at Strugi Krasnye some 40 miles to the northeast. The lumbering convoy headed up a cracked, pitted, asphalt-covered federal highway, tearing up the road and inflicting more than half-a-million dollars in damage.

Twenty of the division’s vehicles broke down during the journey for a failure rate of 3.5 percent, which isn’t bad, demonstrating the division’s ability to move on short notice with relatively few mechanical losses. But the damage upset local authorities. “It’s scary to imagine what will happen when they go back,” Simeon Gutsu of the Pskov’s region Commission for Road Safety told Glavny.

I think Beckhusen is too kind here. Twenty vehicles out of 574 breaking down during the first 40 miles on a paved road signals a pretty poor maintenance standard.