@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
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.
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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."
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.
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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
What is interesting for me is that the pre-2022 Western intelligence assessments of the Russian Army credited it with lots of tactical pipelines to move fuel.
Those would be far more useful in moving water than trucks...yet...where are they?
These pipelines seem to have fallen into that same logistical 'assume they exist but don't' black hole as Russian truck D-rings & pallets, tactical truck trailers, and Russia's "superior" tooth to tail ratio that acts more like 1863 Union Army where...
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..."every soldier is a logistical manual laborer when not in combat".
Water is heavy. Pipelines are more efficient that trucks. Yet all we are seeing is Russian water trucks?
Who stole the Russian Army tactical pipelines? Or were they nothing but disinformation?
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While we are getting Western intelligence assessments that continue to point out Russia's vast increases in production of military materiel, especially tanks, IFVs and APCs (from the same people who claimed Russia would over run Ukraine in 3-to-5 days)
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...claiming Russia is "obviously winning."
We are at the same time seeing economic signs of Russian "End Run Production."
The Russian wartime economy is functioning hand to mouth with oil sales revenues because all of the foreign exchange reserves are spent or frozen.
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Given what happened to DoD procurement after the 2nd Clinton Adm. annihilation of military specifications, which killed the configuration mgt, systems engineering & production engineering disciplines in defense contractors.
I've written about this issue for seven years starting on the Chicagoboyz weblog with a post titled:
"The 737 MAX and the Death of MIL-STD-499A SYSTEM ENGINEERING MANAGEMENT
March 24th, 2019"
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In 2020 I was talking how the decay of systems engineering skills are affecting US Navy nuclear sub safe programs due to the lack of good systems engineering talent in Defense contractors.
The snail like pace of Western military procurement versus the Ukrainian fielding of an all-aspect stealth shaped OWA drone in less than a couple of years is very noticeable.
On the morning of 20 July 2025, a AFGSC airman at Minot AFB took his M18, still inside it's issued holster; and placed it on a desk.
It then went off, struck him in chest, and killed him
AFGSC issued a halt order on 21 July 2025 for use of M17/18 Modular Handgun System.
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As an ex-DoD procurement official, that letter is a procurement killing hammer.
This is going to hit SIG Sauer like a moderate sized asteroid in terms of DCMA corrective actions requests or "CAR."
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This AFGSC halt use order letter will be grounds for a level three corrective action request (CAR).
A DCMA level III CAR is defined as follows:
"A Level III Corrective Action Request (CAR) issued by the Defense Contract Management Agency (DCMA) is a serious action taken when there are significant contractual nonconformities.
It is directed to the supplier's top management and is just one step below the possibility of contract suspension or termination.
This type of CAR serves as a management tool to address critical issues that need immediate attention."
During WW2's combined bomber offensive, unitary incendiary bombs were found to be five times as effective as high explosive, mass for mass, at destroying buildings & structures.
But the bomber barons were hung up on the tonnage delivered, not their effects.
A single 100lb M47 bomb (left) was as effective as a M65 500lb general purpose HE bomb.
The Bomber Mafia in ETO fought incendiaries, as their bombers lacked the bomb station multiple release modifications for most of WW2, as the mass of bombs dropped was a 'success metric.'
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After the bomber barons -finally- surrendered to the realty of incendiaries operational effectiveness.
Avoiding any USAAF responsibility for the horror that was Dresden cemented the burying of the effectiveness of USAAF firebombs used in the ETO.