Trent Telenko Profile picture
May 8, 2021 16 tweets 7 min read Read on X
@DrydockDreams has put up another Coral Sea post modeling ships & US Navy CAG William Ault plus his disappearance returning from the strike against IJN CarDiv 5.

This thread goes into what the role of preventable HF communications failure played in that

...disappearance.

To do so I will be using screen captures from Squadron Leader A. L. Hall, RAAF, presentation "farewell to communication failures" reprinted in the Aug 1944 CIC magazine

This is a clip showing the beginning of S/F Hall's manuscript.

WW2 wartime military periodicals often have 'retro' or 'era specific' high tech buried in the articles that modern eyes will not understand.

3/
What that diamond & cross shape with chains between a plane, a ship and two ground antennas represents is a Rhombic antenna.

This antenna was invented by Bell Labs in the 1930's and was used extensively in WW2 era strategic HF coms & SIGINT.
See:
qrznow.com/the-mighty-rho…
4/
At the beginning of WW2 Australian government & military built a series of rhombic antenna point to point high frequency analog voice circuits (wireless telephone of W/T) to link Northern & Western Australia to the South East.
5/
This system brought Australia face to face with the problems of what we now call "space weather" living in the bad radio neighborhood of the "Great South Pacific Radio Blob."


6/
This radio system didn't pop into existence like Athena from Zeus' brow.

Australian Radio Research Board, established by J P V Madsen in 1928, worked together with the Australian civil service & got the American Carnegie Institution's Department of Terrestrial Magnetism to
7/
...put an ionosphere observatory in Watheroo, Australia.

The operation of Australia's HF wireless telephone system brought Australian RAB scientists face to face with the fact that the British military HF frequency prediction system pushed by Marconi scientist T L Eckersley
8/
...did not work as well as the the British civil radio predictions using the Appleton-Beynan periodic layer model.

E Appleton & T L Eckersley had been academic enemies of the worst sort since 1930. When the British ISIB was stood up in 1941 & copied by the USA. It used the
9/
...rival Newbern Smith model instead.

In Australia, it was all "needs must as the devil drives" & the devil was the "Great South Pacific Radio Static Blob."

Just prior to Coral Sea, Gen. MacArthur called a scientific conference to standardize HF communications in the SWPA.
10/
This standard was implemented for Coral Sea and all SWPA air & sea search elements. They had no problems communicating with each other.

This was not the case for CAG William Ault and the air groups on Lexington & Yorktown.
11/
S/L Hall obliquely refers to this inability of the SWPA to communicate by radio to USN carriers during the Battle of Coral Sea in his manuscript.

The inability of the SWPA & SoPAC to effectively communicate endured until the latter was absorbed by the former in Aug 1944.
12/
The inability of USN carrier groups in 3rd/5th Fleets to communicate to SWPA units lasted the entire war and played a major role in the Battle of Leyte Gulf.

The US Navy, or course, blamed General MacArthur for this.

13/
S/L Hall's manuscript gives a very good idea of how CAG William Ault died.

Six Mhz was generally the best SWPA HF radio freq. during the daylight hours, but failed at dusk & dawn. But, you had to have planned alternate frequencies for where your plane was going & it's base.
14/
CAG William Ault was not so blessed.

Being outside the ground wave, facing a weather front, Ault wound up in a high freq. "skip zone" where no communications would reach USN CV's.

Like Hudson A-16-198 in S/L Hall's manuscript, Ault got lost, ran out of fuel & crashed.
/End

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More from @TrentTelenko

Jul 2
Injection molding requires an industrial scale, and above all, _reliable_, supply chain to be more efficient that 3D printing.

This is in a lot of 3D/AM industrial guru papers on the transition from low thousands a year production to the tens of thousands scale.

1/
Injection molding gets you a lot of one thing cheaply. Think lots of fiber optic guided FPV drones, which are immune to radio jamming.

3D/AM allows a lot of modifications to meet the changing requirements of war. Think rapidly evolving Ukrainian interceptor drone designs.

2/
The issue for Ukraine versus Russia is Ukraine has to more widely disperse its industrial base because Russia has a bigger cruise and 500 km(+) ballistic missile production base.

Ukraine's need to disperse production and evolve drones means 3D/AM is a better industrial fit.

3/3
Read 4 tweets
Jul 1
Ukrainian mass production of FPV interceptor drones has reduced the cost per shot from $7,200 to $5,800.

The US Coyte II drone interceptor runs to $100K a shot.

The cost difference was the Big/Expensive/Few platform & missile cult was in charge of developing the Coyote II.
1/2 Image
Image
Image
The Coyote I was a propeller interceptor like the Ukrainian FPV's, but it wasn't "enough" for the higher end drone threat like the TB-2 Bayraktar.

2/ Image
So the US military abandoned kinetic solutions the lower end drone threat.

And it has to pretend that high power microwave weapons and jamming will be the answer to fiber optic guided FPV's at weed height and grenade dropping drones behind tree lines.

3/3 Image
Image
Image
Read 4 tweets
Jun 27
The F-35 Big/Expensive/Few Platform & Missile cult is in deep denial of this battlefield reality.

Air superiority below 2,000 feet/600 meters has been lost by crewed aircraft.

F-35's are irrelevant for the Mavic drone threat, save as a budget threat to the C-UAS procurement.
1/
The arrival of the Ukrainian Gogol-M, a 20-foot span fixed-wing aerial drone mothership, with over a 200km radius of action while carrying a payload of two 30km ranged attack drones under its wings, underlines the impact of low level airspace as a drone "avenue of approach."
2/
The Gogol-M flys low and slow, below ground based radar coverage like a helicopter.

It opens up headquarters, ground & air logistics in the operational depths to artificial intelligence aided FPV drone attacks.

3/ Image
Read 9 tweets
Jun 27
This is the main example of one of the most unprofessional delusions held by the US Navalist wing of the F-35 Big/Expensive/Few platform and missile cult.

Russian fiber optic FPV's have a range of 50km - over the horizon!

1/
This means things as the Russians make these FPV's from Chinese commercial drone components in six figure and soon 7 figure (millions!) numbers.

This has huge implications for the impending Chinese invasion of Taiwan.

2/ Image
Image
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When China invades Taiwan, the 1st move will be occupying the small islands around Formosa (left) and making them drone, GMLRS & HQ9 SAM bases.

50 km circles around all those small islands cover almost all the invasion beaches (map right) with PLA 50km fiber optic FPV's.

3/ Image
Image
Read 5 tweets
Jun 24
It isn't just a matter of pre-2023 sniper tactics being obsolete.

Every patrolling tactic taught by the US Army Infantry and Ranger schools are obsolete when you can "just send a drone. "

1/3
Drones simply don't have ground line of sight issues like soldiers do.

Drones can see in more of the electromagnetic spectrum than humans.

And the US Army refuses to buy enough small drones (1 m +) to train their troops to survive on the drone dominated battlefield.🤢🤮

2/3
"Just send a drone" is the proper tactic for almost everything a 21st century infantryman does from patrolling, raiding enemy positions, sniping and setting up forward observation posts.

3/3
Read 4 tweets
Jun 23
Please note that Iran _ISN'T_ shooting down IDF drones over Tehran⬇️

There are technological reasons for that.

1/2
The odds are heavily in favor of the IDF having parked Hermes drones with "Gorgon Stare" technology over Tehran to hunt Iranian senior government officials.

2/2 Image
P.S.

This is the wiki on Gorgon Stare technology.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gorgon_St…Image
Read 4 tweets

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