Weekly Signals Brief #1
19 December 2025
The Weekly Signals Brief gathers the most compelling historical and strategic articles that I have read over the past week. Each link below is a piece that piqued my interest (click the titles to go to the full articles).
The Weekly Signals Brief is part of a four-post weekly cadence—three original analyses and one curated intelligence sweep. Subscribe to receive it each Friday.
The Akagi
by Chris Sams—Chris’s Naval History Stack
Akagi’s story is more than a ship’s technical evolution. It is a story of Japan’s naval ambition and foresight. Chris traces her transformation from planned battlecruiser to flagship carrier, showing how successive refits, expanded flight decks, and evolving aircraft doctrine made her a centerpiece of the Kido Butai.
The article captures both innovation and operational risk: Akagi’s role at Pearl Harbor, her projection of concentrated air power, and the tension between Japan’s belief in battleships and the rising dominance of carriers. Chris also highlights the human dimension—commanders, crews, and the preparation that made her effective until her loss at Midway.
For anyone interested in how doctrine, technology, and strategy converge in a single vessel, this is a compelling and insightful read.
The Super Hornet Just Turned 30 and the Wright Brothers’ First Powered Flight
by Hangar Flying with Tog
Some aircraft define eras; others quietly carry them. Tog’s piece does both by placing the F/A-18E/F Super Hornet inside a much longer arc of aviation history that begins on the sands of Kitty Hawk.
What makes this article work is its balance. Tog treats the Super Hornet not as a flashy icon, but as what it truly is: a resilient, adaptable backbone of naval aviation—born in lean years, refined through service, and still indispensable decades later. Pairing that story with the Wright brothers’ first fragile flight is more than clever symmetry; it’s a reminder that aviation advances incrementally through innovation.
As someone who has loved aircraft since childhood—and has always counted the F-18 among my favorite jets—this piece hits exactly the right note. It honors both the dreamers who made flight possible and the machines that carry that legacy forward every day.
Wolf Packs: Battle of the Atlantic
by Big Serge Thought
Submarine warfare has always been the most unsettling form of naval combat—silent, patient, and unforgiving—and Big Serge captures that reality with rare clarity in this sweeping examination of the Battle of the Atlantic.
Rather than treating U-boats as mythic predators or reducing the campaign to tonnage charts, this piece explains why the Atlantic war mattered, how Dönitz thought about it, and what the Germans believed they were trying to achieve. The strength of the article lies in its refusal to simplify: wolf packs are shown not as a tactical gimmick, but as an organizational and communications triumph—and, ultimately, a strategic gamble that failed.
As someone who has long loved naval history, and especially submarine warfare, this essay resonated deeply. It sits comfortably alongside some of my favorites like Iron Coffins by Herbert Werner and Michael Gannon’s Operation Drumbeat—serious, analytical, and respectful of the men who fought beneath the sea without romanticizing the outcome.
Has the British Army forgotten the importance of artillery lethality in war?
by Dr. Robert Lyman MBE — The War Room
This is one of those rare articles that feels less like commentary and more like a warning drawn straight from the archive. Dr. Robert Lyman’s piece is a masterclass in historical continuity, using case studies from 1918, 1940, Burma in 1944, and the Gulf War to argue a blunt truth modern armies too often resist: wars are still decided by firepower.
Dr. Lyman’s strength lies in synthesis. He connects battlefield experience, doctrinal evolution, and institutional memory—or the loss of it—into a coherent critique of the modern British Army’s diminished emphasis on artillery lethality. His use of Kohima, the Ypres–Comines Canal, and Operation GRANBY is especially effective, demonstrating that success in maneuver warfare has always depended on centralized, overwhelming fire in support of infantry.
What makes this article stand out is its refusal to be distracted by substitutes. Drones, precision, and “conceptual sophistication” are treated not as revolutions, but as compensations for the erosion of massed firepower. The conclusion is unsettling but persuasive: armies that forget how to crush their enemies relearn the lesson at terrible cost.
Even though this piece appeared earlier in the year (14 September), it is among the most important things I’ve read recently. Serious students of modern warfare—and anyone tempted to believe that the character of war has fundamentally changed—should read it carefully.
No Truce? The Fighting on Christmas 1914
by WW1 Archives
The Christmas Truce of 1914 has become one of the most enduring and comforting stories of the First World War. This article reminds us that the reality was more complicated, and in many places far darker.
By presenting German, French, and British perspectives side by side, WW1 Archives strips away the myth of a universal ceasefire and replaces it with something more honest. Along the Oise, in the Vosges, and in Artois, Christmas came not with silence, but with artillery, bayonets, and frozen trenches. The eyewitness accounts are particularly effective, capturing both the brief moments of shared humanity and the brutal immediacy of combat that continued despite the calendar.
What makes this piece stand out is its refusal to desecrate the memory of the truce, while also refusing to romanticize the war. The men who sang carols, took prisoners, and thought of home did so in the shadow of killing and sometimes returned to it within hours. That tension is the real story of Christmas 1914.
For the holiday season, this is an essential corrective. It doesn’t diminish the power of the truce; it deepens it by showing just how fragile and uneven those moments of peace truly were.
Vasily Stalin: The Pilot Who Lived in His Father’s Shadow
by Patrick Kinville
This is a fascinating and unsettling portrait of a man trapped between genuine ability and inherited power. Rather than reducing Vasily Stalin to caricature or scandal, Patrick Kinville treats him as a serious historical subject—an accomplished pilot and wartime commander whose career was both enabled and distorted by his surname.
What makes the piece especially compelling is its balance. Vasily’s flying skill and combat record are acknowledged without apology, but so too are his volatility, alcoholism, and abuse of authority. Drawing on a wide range of accounts, the article shows how privilege shielded him during the war and destroyed him afterward, culminating in exile and an early death once his father’s protection vanished.
This is not just a biography of Stalin’s son, but a study of how absolute power warps everyone in its orbit. Patrick’s article serves as a strong reminder that proximity to power can be as corrosive as it is intoxicating, and that even decorated heroes can be quietly erased when they outlive their usefulness.
Mind the Mythstakes: A Better Approach to the History of the Marine Corps
by Bruce Ivar Gudmundsson’s The Tactical Notebook
Bruce Ivar Gudmundsson offers a thoughtful and necessary corrective to one of the Marine Corps’ most enduring origin stories. Rather than dismissing figures like Earl Hancock Ellis or the importance of interwar planning, this piece asks us to reconsider how hindsight distorts our understanding of institutional development.
By situating amphibious doctrine alongside small wars, constabulary duties, and competing contingencies, Gudmundsson shows that the Corps did not march in a straight line toward island hopping. It adapted, improvised, and prepared for multiple futures—most of which never came to pass. The result is a richer, more honest view of Marine Corps history.
This essay is a reminder that history is not prophecy fulfilled, but possibility narrowed, and that good military history begins by resisting tidy myths.
