@danieljleahy & @ww2tv had a crackerjack stream on Australian Stuart tanks at Sanananda New Guinea this morning. Someone in the chat asked how they go there.
This thread will address that question. 1/
So, lets talk about the Australian Operation Lilliput that ran freighter convoys from Milne Bay to Oro bay in 1942.
John Sheridan Fahnestock and Adam Bruce Fahnestock, friends with Pres. Roosevelt, originated the idea of a unit of small sailing ships to deliver supplies to Bataan, called “Mission X.”
These small boats were the key distribution mode for the SWPA. They moved supplies at night from advanced bases outside the bombing range of the Japanese Army and Naval Air Forces. Like the PT-Boat, their biggest enemy in 1942-43 was the small Japanese float planes... 3/
...that flew day & night plus were both low and slow enough to spot them. Then either these sea planes attacked, or worse, orbited and reported by radio to awaiting Japanese fighter patrols. 4/
The RAAN vessel HMAS Paluma (a 45 ton former examination vessel, see photo) did the actual surveys with the USASS luggers & fishing smacks the to find a reliable approach for larger vessels from Milne Bay to supply troops landed by air near Cape Nelson. 5/ ozatwar.com/sigint/paluma.…
The 1st Lilliput convoy "Operation Karsi" was in Dec 1941, it took "...the former train ferry Karsik was pressed into service as an emergency tank landing ship, carrying four M-3 Stuart tanks of the Australian 2/6th Armoured Regiment to Oro Bay." 6/ awm.gov.au/visit/exhibiti…
The Japanese took great exception to these convoys.
And given the geography of the Owen Stanley mountain range. The IJN had air superiority a few hours every day.
Photo left is of survivors of the s’Jacob, sunk on 8 March 1943, await rescue by HMAS Bendigo near Oro Bay 7/
The Allies in their turn took greater exception to these IJN attacks and deployed airfields radar & fighter control sensor network to gain air superiority & shield these sealanes.
This effort began before the Stuarts were delivered & went on after Sanananda was won.
The statistical comparison in the FBI data from pre-1961 is invalid as the underlying medical systems have so changed as to utterly pollute the "murders per 100,000" data.
Violent crime data pre-1961 and post 1961 are apples to oranges comparisons.
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-Trauma care centers (1961),
-Standardized trauma procedures (1978),
-Adoption of military Korea/Vietnam medical emergency treatment & air transport procedures,
-Improved triage (1986)
-And (since 2011) widespread adoption and use of blood clotting bandages...
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Chairman Xi suffers from the traditional dictator's trap of believing his own sh*t because he has made it too dangerous for his cronies and underlings to tell him the truth.
Thanks to that, Chairman Xi's Regime has pretty much no resilience in adversity because it's so kleptocratic and it's all about what the guy in charge can do for his next set of corrupt cronies today.
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This 1970's comment about the Shah of Iran is so historically on point in 2026 because it shows how Xi's regime is failing "The dictator on the wall test."
This map of 124 Russian railway electric traction stations and the 40K OWA drone fired in 2025 demonstrates the political-military leadership failure of the Zelinskyy government.
Like Stalin's failed winter 1941-1942 counter offensives against Nazi Army Group Center,
...Ukraine is penny packing OWA drones everywhere to no great effect based on which military "Union" faction was last in the room with President Zelenskyy before a decision
Even Ukraine's vaunted oil offensive is a bare plurality of total drone strikes 2/
The latest @RyanO_ChosenCoy thread detailing the bureaucratic issues of Ukraine's military in targeting Russian logistics makes clear Ukraine's military has inter-service and intra-service union/factional disputes that are positively American in scale.
If the target of a US "rapid strike" was either the Kharg Island oil export facility or Iran's banking/financial system with a combination of explosives and non-nuclear electromagnetic pulse munitions, the Mullahs will fall.
There are two real courses of action (COA) for an American air campaign if Regime Change is the goal.
The Schwerpunkt - political center of gravity - of the Mullah regime is its ability to pay for the use Regime Security Forces & foreign hired mercenaries.
This is one of the 3 major strategic mistakes of the Zelenskyy Government.⬇️
Putin has shown better, more consistent, and more effective leadership in the strategic bombing of Ukrainian electrical infrastructure than Zelinskyy has in striking Russia's railways.
Russia remains uniquely vulnerable to a focused drone strike campaign on it's electrical railway traction step down transformers.
Zelenskyy's leadership not only ignored hitting that unique Russian vulnerability since Feb. 2022.
See the figure below⬇️
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To give you an idea of the abject political-military failure of the Zelenskyy government in this regard one has to look at the industrial supply chain for those traction substations.
The Soviet Union had two major transformer factories: Tolyatti and Zaporozhye.
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