It’s already the middle of June and as it happens we are again in another one of those ambiguous periods with respect to the continued – relationship? antagonism? I can’t think of what turn of phrase to use to describe what’s going on between the US and Iran, and don’t want to be too coy, either. While I typically don’t expect this to affect HFGCS traffic, June is now also the period of time where I’m actively reminded otherwise – as I wrote on X shortly after the day in question, the timing of HFGCS traffic around June 21 2025’s OPERATION MIDNIGHT HAMMER conspicuously lines up with the timing of the declassified mission timeline.

It will be very interesting to see what happens during the last few weeks of June this year. Prior to June 2025, this period of ‘the third or fourth week of June’ was already on my radar, with the ‘Norway FAKEMASTER’ which took place on June 23 2024 I had noted down as a remarkable day for the HFGCS and the main reason I even was monitoring in June 2025.

As of writing, my running theory as to what took place on June 23 2024 is that it was not a simple ‘photo op’ as most people framed and understood it at the time, but was actually a GLOBAL STORM exercise that the US military publicly declined to identify as such. A timecard I originally published in July 2023 had idle comments about hearing Global Storm activity on the HFGCS that I forgot about and sat unnoticed until I prepared it for its December 2025 re-upload.

Realizing I was basically the only person with anything identifying GS23 taking place and that this sat unnoticed for over 2 years, I put together a video which documents GS23 taking place on 230711, and makes the case that, just like my ‘October SKYMASTERS’ are actually ‘GLOBAL THUNDERs’, the 240623 ‘Norway FAKEMASTER’ may actually have been ‘GLOBAL STORM 24’ .

This leads to a rather confused question on my part – was MIDNIGHT HAMMER ‘GLOBAL STORM 25’? I feel very confident saying – “no, absolutely not, GS is doing something else entirely” – but the way my hypothesis of HFGCS traffic, timing, etc… I’m actually sort of stuck monitoring June-into-July 2026 to make sure things resolve the way I expect them to to prove that’s not the case.

But I’m getting ahead of myself a little bit. Let’s talk about what we’ve heard in June 2026 so far.

First weekend of June 2026 – TANGO FORCE

I have already published the respective DTCP entries for 260605, 260606, and 260607, which document EAM broadcasts for TANGO FORCE across the first Friday–Sunday of June 2026. I was zero percent surprised by this. Although I was not comprehensively monitoring and transcribing the first two weeks of June 2025, I did have a timecard for the first Saturday of the month, with 250607 (SAT) noting traffic for TANGO FORCE began the day before.

As noted in the HFGCS FAQ and the HFGCS Wiki (the HFGCS Wiki is dead, long live the HFGCS Wiki), these ALPHABET FORCES are conspicuous in their own way. EAMs directed to TANGO FORCE in June of 2025 were the first time such had been documented since November 2023, and it was during a period that had all the hallmarks of a SKYMASTER nuclear command and control exercise – and if it was, it was one of the ‘big ones’1.

What are these FORCES? I’m not sure, but their invocation during, you know, “the exercises where they practice global thermonuclear war” means more people should probably be interested in who they might be than they seem to be. Now, it might be mundane. They could be tankers. Or in some way they could be a ‘guy at a desk’. Even if it’s a big fancy STRATCOM desk at Offutt HQ, it could be that. Or it could just be referring to the E6Bs under yet another set of addressee callsigns. I personally suspect they might be bomber squadrons, but I have yet to find anything I can share with you that makes the suggestion compelling. But I think you should be interested.

Anyways, hearing TANGO FORCE on the first weekend of June 2025 was definitely surprising, because I wasn’t expecting it. As for hearing it on the first weekend of June 2026? No, because this time I was expecting it.

It’s the central hypothesis of my workings, right? Almost all of this stuff will turn out to be routine, and anything that isn’t a routine will become one (until it abruptly stops), and anything that doesn’t turn out to be routine is of remark.

This is not a terribly difficult thing to expect if you accept that hypothesis. The fact there are a number of people who get upset with me for this is kind of whatever, right, and I’d be wasting your time if this was yet another NEET INTEL Is Right Again Award self-congratulation ceremony. This is elementary school stuff at this point. However, I would like to add a few things here.

June 2026’s TANGO FORCE Weekend

As noted on the side of the 260606 timecard and on a post I made on radioreference.com’s forum in the middle of Saturday’s broadcasts, it quickly became obvious that aside from simply ‘oh wow, there are broadcasts for TANGO FORCE on the first weekend of June 2026, just like on June 2025!” there is also a pretty good level of agreement on the timing of those broadcasts;

This sort of observation doesn’t seem like it might be in ‘any of the literature’ across hobbyist forums. However, this isn’t even the first time I’ve documented it;

The above shows the first Saturday of GT26 having broadcasts for ALPHABET FORCES going out at the same time as broadcasts for ALPHABET FORCES went out on the first Saturday of GT25. (By the way, yes, this does imply that I can predict in advance the timing of EAMs that will go out in October 2027, but please put a pin in that until it’s October…)

But anyways – there you go, right? Another annual invocation of ALPHABET FORCES? Is there some kind of annual STRATCOM exercise brewing in the first week of June? Even if STRATCOM won’t tell me what it is, it’s time to ask AI about what the US military is up to in early June that might be related.

Oh, Claude thinks it’s an annual June exercise that NATO conducts? Well, hold on there as well.

March 2026’s TANGO FORCE Weekend

I was not monitoring or even recording the HFGCS in March of this year, so credit goes to iemats for this one – he posted recordings of FORCE messages to Soundcloud [links: 1,2,3,4,5,6], and so I transcribed them for my dataset. And would you believe it?

You’ll have to do a bit of ‘math in your head here’ – due to the DST differential, it makes the most sense if you nudge up the timing of the March broadcasts up an hour, at which point they’ll align with the other weeks a little bit better. At any rate, it’s pretty darn obvious it must be the same thing, whatever it is.

So our June TANGO FORCE exercise isn’t annual. It seems a little close to quarterly, right? June and March are the last months of the respective quarters, and we’ve previously identified a bunch of HFGCS traffic that’s quarterly in nature2;

However, June and March is not quarterly. We’d need Septembers and Decembers to prove it’s a quarterly exercise. I unfortunately can’t actually spend 24/7 365 monitoring the HFGCS, so I have nothing recorded or even noted for the first weekend of December 2025. This is sometimes a pain to communicate to people – often times, there are no EAMs documented not because no EAMs went out, but because nobody was free to record and/or note them down. This can be especially difficult to communicate to AI – it regularly struggles to parse through the dataset and understand when I have comprehensive notes vs some notes vs no notes. At some point I necessarily fed it the DTCP and said “assume this is necessarily comprehensive, assume anything else isn’t”.

So it can sort of conditionally accept that the lack of December data means it can’t refute or support the idea we have a quarterly routine here.

But how about September 2025?

I was working on this last night – my dataset was coming up empty, because I didn’t have any timecards or transcriptions, but I did have HFGCS recordings sitting on my Youtube channel, and AI suggested the best recordings to review would be for the September 06 2025 afternoon session.

I didn’t go through everything thoroughly, but here’s some of what I did get just from a first pass;

2025.09.06    19:56  WMFB3R6V5UJWCEMPEPPEYNKY2IQWMT     [FOR ROKE]
2025.09.06    20:19  WMH6QGOSKCBHWHB67CI4NO2S5LSQN3     [FOR ROKE]
2025.09.06    21:32  WMWBYGUIMCR7NV4XKBX2ZTAHWGV5TZ     [FOR ROKE, MENARD]
2025.09.06    21:52  WMHWS4S3ADOPQQTIYR6X5ZZLE4UKPQ     [FOR ROKE]
2025.09.07    15:47  WMP6ZCVECFDCF24PW3I6DVZ2HGMFRF     [FOR WOLFER]
2025.09.07    16:33  WMW36QBPNU3OYWSTK7HJXQOIJJM27G     [FOR WOLFER, PATH BLAZER]
2025.09.07    16:49  WMYARN6YXWXDQMT7ZRUJRKNDSBRJTA     [FOR WOLFER]
2025.09.07    17:01  WMYARN6YXWXDQMT7ZRUJRKNDSBRJTA     [FOR WOLFER]
2025.09.07    17:33  WMUVRLY3QRFFTMEH7SV6IU4LB6MXNY     [FOR WOLFER]

September 2025’s TANGO FORCE Weekend, except no, not really. Like, not at all, right?

To make the obvious point, none of those messages are for FORCES. And none of the broadcast times are quite right. But, they’re not totally wrong, and when you visualize them on a timeline, you can see an almost something;

I’m pretty comfortable looking at something like this and thinking ‘maybe’, but understanding I certainly couldn’t put this in front of someone and have them be convinced this is a ‘maybe’ and not a ‘maybe this guy has lost his seriousness and is grasping at straws with this stuff now’.

AI helped me dig into this way further than I would, but another ambiguous dead end where more monitoring will be needed. That’s fine, we’ll see what happens in June 2027, I guess.

But…

With any new model of Claude AI, I usually use the EAM dataset to get an idea of how profound the new model’s improvements are, so I’ll ask it to do something it’s usually struggled with. In this case: “Across the June 2025/March 2026/June 2026, approximate a skeleton structure of the relevant message broadcasts, and then scan that structure across the rest of my entire dataset of EAM transcriptions, and see what you pull up as a three day period with a rough conformity to that structure.”

February 2023’s CHINESE SPY BALLOON Weekend

February 2023 and the HFGCS EAM DAILY COMPILATION RECORDING PROJECT pre-dates the DTCP. It goes back to when I actually tried to do a long-form thing of screen recording EAMs and publishing them for review every day. (People insisted they wanted this but barely supported it, totally underestimated how time-consuming it was to interrupt whatever I was doing to record those messages, transcribe them, and then spend time editing the videos to get not more than a few hundred views on any one of them.)

Anyways, the first weekend of February 2023 was also the weekend the world-famous Chinese Spy Balloon got shot down. That might or might not be why the HFGCS has the appearance of a lot going on that weekend, but it seems possible that ‘underneath all the other stuff going on’, we might’ve had our quarterly exercise going on;

Before we get to the points of objection, I’d like to mention there is no way I ever would’ve found a parallel here, and there’s no track record of anyone else finding parallels like this. If you look at the timecard of recordings, especially for February 04, you see a lot of other messages and a lot of other stuff going on. It is difficult to look at a day like that and discern ‘I ought to just pick out the messages for addressees here’, when the parallels between long EAMs and the Chinese Spy Balloon’s activity is too tempting to look beyond. I am pretty good at understanding ‘the military can multitask, actually’ in principle, but this principle can be drowned under such a high volume of messages. Whatever my limitations in extreme cases, AI sucked at this just in general …up until recently. And now I think it’s probably better than me at it.

Now, let’s discuss the possible points of objection to the idea of a parallel here. Why February, and not March? Why are there no FORCES again3? I think if I ever had manually found this myself , I’d probably be very inclined to try and be brutally objective about it – “despite all the timing and effort, isn’t this just another instance of grasping at straws?”

But as it stands, I don’t think this is a matter of grasping at straws, and I don’t think the parallel is weak at all. I didn’t really twist Claude’s arm into finding anything per se, and yet it found another Fri–Sun where it’s the first weekend of the respective month, and the ‘shape of the thing’ is pretty close4. Just so you don’t have to scroll up and down and up and down, here’s all the weekends we’ve looked at in just one chart;

This is something.

And you want to know another something?

I asked Claude to scan my dataset for more MIDNIGHT HAMMERs.

It had had some suggestions.

But this article is already way too long, right?

Similar to the way people underestimated how much time I was sinking into the older HFGCS Daily Compilation Recording Project, you might not realize how quickly time adds up to continuing the DTCP – by listening to and transcribing EAMs, and then for spending time and credits with AI to analyze the dataset, and then spending time writing all this up takes. I’ve effectively quit posting about the HFGCS on X because the incentive for writing up long-form analysis just isn’t there when it comes to that platform.

If you think what I’m doing is of interest or value, you should consider signing up for a paid subscription. While my interest in monitoring the HFGCS will continue, whether it makes sense for me to take the extra time5 to share my findings with you will be determined based on the level of support the outcome of those efforts receive.

This is an updated version of an early 2024 FAQ previously posted to Twitter. Anthropic’s Claude AI (Opus 4.7) was used to compose this article, although it still took a few days put together, on top of all the time spent researching the information this article is based on.

This page works through the usual questions about the HFGCS, but even if you have read this kind of thing before, or watched a video about it, I think you will still get something out of it because a good deal of what follows I have not seen adequately discussed anywhere else. A lot of people have been content to recycle the same old information about the HFGCS over and over for years at a time, and for lack of independent research or even verification, ended up oblivious to the fact much of the information they were recycling was out of date. This FAQ includes observations resulting from my own original findings and research, and also works as a running set of corrections against a general body of knowledge floating around out there that isn’t quite right.

I monitored the HFGCS from early 2022 into 2026. Two core projects came out of my efforts — the DAILY COMPILATION RECORDING PROJECT and later the DAILY TIMECARD PROJECT. Between them, and supplemented by additional posts and videos across Twitter and YouTube, the overall NEET INTEL project amounted to a multi-year, often day-by-day record of EAM traffic. This FAQ is built on top of that record — thousands of transcribed messages, hundreds of structured timecards, and an untold number of hours of HFGCS broadcasts captured in continuous, 24/7 livestreams. Much of the information in this FAQ comes from original observations made during this effectively unprecedented endeavor.

What is the HFGCS?

If you go looking for an explanation of the U.S. military’s High Frequency Global Communications System (HFGCS), what you will mostly find is the same explanation, recycled, that has been sitting around for fifteen or twenty years12. Some of that is just the way these things go, but there is an underlying dynamic that precipitated the current situation. Once upon a time, the military used to be reasonably candid about the HFGCS. In fact, at one point the system even had its own public website, hosted by McClellan AFB3. However, after 9/11, the information portals stopped being publicly accessible. The system itself was never fully classified, and still isn’t; it still turns up in news stories, in non-classified documentation, in Air Force public affairs material. However, primary sources are no longer making friendly overviews accessible to the public, and they certainly aren’t going to provide any deeper dives along the lines of what the NEET INTEL project was able to cobble together.

The most current authoritative descriptions of the HFGCS from official resources are those found buried in Department of Defense budget justification documents. The FY27 procurement document in particular has a genuinely detailed account of the HFGCS;

The High Frequency Global Communications System (HFGCS) program provides the Department of War (DoW) with a critical unique strategic asset: a global, high-power, high-frequency (HF) network. This network ensures resilient communication for both nuclear and non-nuclear command and control (NC3/C2), serving a wide range of users, including US Strategic Command (USSTRATCOM), Air Mobility Command, the White House Communications Agency, Navy submariner forces, and other government agencies like the Department of Homeland Security and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA).

HFGCS is essential for disseminating critical information to global strategic forces, especially in contested environments where satellite communications might be compromised. The program leverages a network of 13 strategically located ground stations and two network control stations equipped with modern, commercially based, HF radio technology, ensuring beyond-line-of-sight communication with aircraft, ships, and land-based platforms.

— FY27 Air Force Other Procurement, Program Element 0303133F4

When people say ‘HFGCS’ colloquially, what they usually mean is the worldwide network of high-power ground stations that simulcast Emergency Action Message broadcasts, run phone patches, and handle a fairly wide range of other beyond-line-of-sight traffic. There are around 13 active stations at the moment5.

For a long time the whole network was run from a single Centralized Network Control Station (CNCS) at Joint Base Andrews. But a post-9/11 review identified this situation as exactly the sort of problem you could expect it to: a single CNCS was a single point of failure. The original plan was for Offutt AFB to become the second CNCS6, but a 2019 flood7 that tore through parts of the base may have interrupted those plans. Whatever the case, it was ultimately Grand Forks AFB which became the secondary NCS8.

The hfgcs-msl GitHub repository9 assigns each of the 13 stations to one of two network control stations, labeled ‘ANCS’ and ‘GFNCS’, which it is reasonable enough to speculate are Andrews and Grand Forks.

It should be noted that nobody seems to have undertaken any effort to align HFGCS traffic with these assignments. The designations may also simply not matter much in practice, as each NCS appears able to remotely control any station, regardless of label.

In addition to the known HFGCS stations, there are also entities which behave as if they are additional HFGCS stations, though not quite. RED RIVER and WOLFHOUND, respectively the 608th Air Operations Center at Barksdale AFB and the USAFE Joint Personnel Recovery Center at Ramstein10, can be heard on the HFGCS coordinating activity and communications between ground stations and air assets. However, they are not known to simulcast or rebroadcast EAMs.

What are the HFGCS frequencies?

As of 2025 the primary HFGCS frequencies are 4724, 8992, 11175, and 15016 kHz. The ground stations will usually simulcast a message across all four, but not always, and this is where listeners sometimes tie themselves in knots, because a broadcast can be exclusive to one frequency, or to some of them, and someone who couldn’t pick it up on 8992 will report, with great confidence, that it ‘wasn’t broadcast on 8992’ when it simply was and they missed it. The network as a whole runs 24/7 and does not switch on and off, but individual stations have historically kept per-frequency schedules11, and very likely still do, even if the current scheduling isn’t anything I’ve seen documented publicly, or, for that matter, been able to work out for myself.

These four are only the primary frequencies. CHARLIE WINDOWS, ZULU designators, VERDIN, and various UHF channels each get their own Q&A below. Information on many HFGCS related frequencies can be found on HFGCS Wiki12, and a NEET INTEL video provides information on many of them13.

How many HFGCS stations are there, exactly?

The honest answer is that the U.S. Air Force itself does not seem to have settled on a number. The FY27 budget document says there are ‘13 strategically located ground stations’. A 2022 DVIDS release, covering an antenna installation at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson, likewise calls that antenna ‘one of the U.S. Air Force’s 13 HFGCS stations’. And yet the photograph attached to that very release shows the 673d Communications Squadron’s own HFGCS wall map, which labels itself ‘1 of 14 HF Sites’, and plots fourteen of them.

So practically speaking, it feels like the answer is 14. But why is there a contradiction in what sources say — how many stations are there, officially? The honest reading is that it might depend on whoever produces the official material. More likely it simply depends on which sites get counted as full ‘stations’ in any given document. These are documents being written at different times by different people in different branches, who’ve never compared notes and maybe never will.

What is an EAM?

Emergency Action Messages (EAMs) are, in the words of the Department of Defense’s own budget documents, “highly structured, authenticated messages primarily used in the command and control of nuclear forces. They are disseminated over numerous survivable and non-survivable communication systems including terrestrial and space systems.” That covers the basics well enough. Most of what you’ll read online gets these basics right (most EAMs are 30 characters, and so on), but the basics are also where these writeups often stop. There is quite a lot more to say.

Structure

Many EAMs are highly structured, and you don’t need to do anything clever to start seeing it. Earlier work of mine pointed at repeating tetragrams turning up in similar positions across messages of the same length14. More recent analysis15 goes a good deal further: some long EAMs (not all of them, and the picture varies a great deal from one length to the next) appear to be assembled out of a vocabulary of discrete 44 character blocks. Not a periodic 44 character cipher, but actual, reused blocks of content: two messages that share a prefix can turn out to share whole blocks, weeks or months apart. Where that happens, it is not something strict OTP encryption can do, and it is exactly what a fielded message format would do. The per-length structure heatmaps give a much better feel for how much of this varies.

A couple of odds and ends

At one point EAMs were generated by a program called EAMGEN16. The current-day system context, named throughout the FY27 budget documents, is the Strategic Automated Command and Control System (SACCS), the NC3 system through which the National Command Authority disseminates EAMs (along with Force Direction Messages and automated ICBM re-targeting data) to the bomber and ICBM legs of the triad.

Are EAMs encrypted with one-time pads?

The single most-repeated claim about EAMs is that they’re encrypted with one-time pads. This claim is regularly asserted with enormous confidence. It is probably wrong.

When we consider EAMs logistically, it actually makes more sense for them to not be encrypted with one time pads. EAMs are received simultaneously by assets all over the world, the volume going out on any given day isn’t fixed in advance, and the actual operational requirement doesn’t really demand OTP-grade secrecy in the first place! These are time-sensitive messages that, even fully decrypted, would still be codewords and abbreviations and authentication elements that anyone other than an intended recipient would struggle to understand. Encryption strong enough to resist real-time cryptanalysis is enough. OTPs would probably be over-engineering it.

The statistical case against all this is newer, and might be the most compelling. A 2026 ciphertext-only analysis of 5,377 unique 30 character payloads17 found a distribution that simply isn’t consistent with the uniform output a standard authenticated cipher produces. Character frequencies are visibly skewed — the letter M and the digit 5 in particular run roughly a third low — and certain positions show structural suppressions a random source could never produce. Identical content blocks also turn up across different messages weeks or months apart. The details are laid out in the EAM characters Q&A, but the premise is simple. A one-time pad, by definition, cannot produce identical ciphertext for two different messages.

We can also argue against the idea based on official documentation. The FY27 budget documents put a name to the cryptographic hardware that handles EAMs: the KG-3XA program — an embeddable module, the KGV-363, and its host, the KG-333M — described as a ‘form, fit, function modernization’ of the crypto required by the Minimum Essential Emergency Communications Network and the Fixed Submarine Broadcast System, ‘employed in various airborne and ground equipment for processing of Emergency Action Messages in the nuclear triad.’ That is not proof of anything on its own, since key management for a pad would need hardware too, but it seems odd to write a procurement line to ‘form, fit, function modernize’ a one-time pad, because a pad is not a device. EAMs are run through a cipher unit, and a cipher unit is a far more comfortable fit with everything above than a stack of pads is.

My best guess as to where the OTP idea even came from: the shortwave-listening community largely arrived at the HFGCS by way of numbers stations, most of which probably did use OTPs, and brought the assumption along with them. They told anyone they could that their asserted expertise meant they knew EAMs were encrypted with OTPs, but never had the real expertise to think they might stop and check if what they were saying made sense before they said it, a million times and never with any qualification or caveat, to anyone that ever asked.

What are the four EAM Groups?

You can sort EAMs into four behavioral categories, on the basis of how their two character prefixes behave over time. I designated them as Groups 1 through 4, and made a video discussing such a categorization system on Youtube in November 202318. It has held up well enough across everything I’ve monitored since.

Group 1 is the bulk of HFGCS EAM traffic — roughly 66% of all EAMs are Group 1 messages, and every single Group 1 message that has been documented is exactly 30 characters. Only one Group 1 prefix is active across the whole network at any given time, and it rotates every three to eight weeks. These are also the messages E-6B aircraft rebroadcast most often.

Group 2 is about 26%. Group 2 messages run anywhere from 30 to 163 characters, and a little under half of them, about 47%, carry an explicit FOR [CALLSIGN] addressee, which is its own subject entirely (see the Directed EAMs Q&A).

Group 3 is small, around 3%. Its messages cluster at particular lengths, and they frequently carry embedded runs of three or more repeated characters. Group 3 prefixes are the sporadic ones: they’ll surface for a few days, vanish for weeks or months, occasionally settle into a stretch of sustained activity, and then go quiet again.

Group 4 is the other 3% or so, and it produces the longest and most structurally elaborate EAMs there are. Known lengths run from 36 all the way to 292 characters19. About 60% of Group 4 messages contain a run of four or more identical characters (FFFF, XXXX, ZZZZ, that sort of thing), and about 38% contain repeated multi character sequences. Group 4 also, predictably, generates the highest operator-error rate, which is simply what length and structural complexity will do to a person reading aloud.

The naming and the categorization are mine, though they echo categorizations and namings that a handful other monitors had already been piecing together. The scheme is built on, and only sets out to name, readily observable prefix behavior.

Interestingly, the FY27 budget documents name four separate message classes: EAMs, Force Direction Messages (FDMs), Force Management Messages (FMMs), and Higher Authority Command Messages (HACMs). The idea of the four EAM groups aligning with these four official message classes can’t be confirmed, but it’s a genuine possibility worth keeping in mind.

What are Directed EAMs?

About 47% of Group 2 messages do something the rest of the dataset doesn’t: before reading the message, the operator names a recipient — FOR [CALLSIGN]. I call these Directed EAMs. Other people call them FOR messages, addressee messages, specifically addressed messages; none of those names are official either, but the format itself is real enough.

These messages fall into four subcategories.

ALPHABET FORCE messages are directed to a FORCE designated by a NATO phonetic letter. ALPHABET FORCES I’ve documented include ALPHA, BRAVO, CHARLIE, FOXTROT, GOLF, KILO, ROMEO, SIERRA, TANGO, UNIFORM, and VICTOR. They recur across years, and across notable activity periods (GLOBAL THUNDER exercises among them), which makes them feel like standing organizational entities rather than anything tactical or one-off.

ALPHABET REGION messages work the same way but for a REGION. Messages for REGIONS ALPHA, BRAVO, and CHARLIE20 have been documented, and messages for ALL REGIONS21 have been broadcast as well.

Messages for numbered callsigns (the [WORD][NUMBER] format), are very strongly tied to E-6B Mercury aircraft. You can usually take a numbered callsign you heard over the HFGCS and match it to a specific E-6B on ADS-B flight trackers. TAMPA52, WILE70, PRONG67, BETEL01, WAHOO73, etc. are all callsigns heard on the HFGCS, and all ended up documented as callsigns used by E-6Bs used over ATC, ACARS, and so forth.

The fourth subcategory is the largest by a wide margin. Several hundred messages for unnumbered callsigns have been documented across the monitoring periods, with some only appearing in a tight burst over a few hours, while others trickle out sporadically over days.

Around 8% of Directed EAMs name more than one recipient. Those can combine callsigns from the same category (FORCE + FORCE, REGION + REGION) or mix categories (FORCE + word-only). What I have never once seen is a FORCE paired with a numbered callsign, or a REGION paired with anything that isn’t another REGION. The largest multi-addressee message I’ve documented went out to ten callsigns at once, on October 24, 2024.

Every Directed EAM documented uses a Group 2 prefix. No Group 1, Group 3, or Group 4 message has ever carried an addressee, and that holds even at the extremes. Even the surprisingly long 285 character message of October 28, 2025, addressed FOR EXERCISE GT 26 CPX AC ST, still carried a Group 2 prefix22.

What patterns exist in EAM characters?

There are a handful of patterns in EAM characters. Some of them you would start to notice yourself, just by transcribing enough messages; others only surface once you run some higher-order analysis across the whole dataset, and would never jump out at you one message at a time. Here are a few of the more notable ones I’ve called attention to over the years.

M and 5 are under-represented. Across more than 6,000 unique EAMs, the letter M and the digit 5 turn up only about 60 to 65% as often as the other characters — call it a 35 to 40% deficit against what a uniform distribution would give you. It holds across every prefix group I’ve checked, and I have no good explanation for it in terms of any standard encryption scheme. It is just there.

0, 1, 8, and 9 don’t appear in standard EAMs at all. 8888 messages are the exception, and they get their own Q&A. The 0 and the 1 are obvious enough: written out by hand, they’re too easy to confuse with O and I23. The 8 and the 9 are less obvious, until you count what is left. A through Z, plus 2 through 7, is exactly 32 characters: a base-32 alphabet.

Those first two patterns (the M and 5 deficit, and the four characters that never appear) are the kind of thing best put in a single picture. Here is every character’s share of the payload across the Group 1 dataset:

In a 30 character Group 1 EAM, the last six characters are almost always all distinct from one another. Across the 30 character Group 1 dataset, any pair of positions inside that trailing window coming up equal is suppressed by something like a factor of fifteen; it is ‘almost’ rather than ‘always’ because there is an interesting set of exceptions. That is a good deal stronger than a simple ‘no doubled letters’ rule: it isn’t about adjacent characters, it is every pair of positions in the window.

Identical strings of characters show up across different messages that share a prefix, sometimes weeks or months apart24. This is one of the things that quietly demolishes the OTP hypothesis — a one-time pad, by definition, cannot produce identical ciphertext for two different messages.

Are EAMs used to communicate DEFCON levels?

On September 11, 2001, an EAM was used to change the DEFCON level, and the phone-conversation transcript that records it happening is sitting, declassified, in the DoD archive2526. It is worth reading. A DEFCON change is squarely the kind of nuclear command-and-control traffic an EAM exists to carry, so the answer is plainly yes27.

What is a Force Direction Message?

People almost never ask about FDMs, but they probably should! Force Direction Messages have been named alongside EAMs in DoD documentation for decades (a 1999 description of the Single Channel Transponder System states outright that SCTS “provides Emergency Action Message (EAM) and Force Direction Message (FDM) dissemination capability”28), and I used to write that whether they still existed as a distinct class was an open question. However, even the FY27 budget documents name Force Direction Messages repeatedly, and plainly as a current, fielded category: the Strategic Automated Command and Control System (SACCS), which disseminates EAMs for the National Command Authority, is described as handling ‘Higher Authority Command Messages, Force Direction Messages, EAMs, and automated ICBM re-targeting data’, and the Global ASNT terminal program lists ‘Emergency Action Messages (EAMs), Force Management messages, and Force Direction messages’ among what it receives and relays to bomber and tanker aircrews. All this to say that FDMs are not a lapsed historical curiosity, but an ongoing message type.

However, at least from the outside, an FDM may well still be indistinguishable from an EAM, though it’s possible prefixes set FDMs apart, in which case it isn’t. A budget document naming the category does not tell you how to pick one out on the air. So the shortwave-listening habit of calling everything an ‘EAM’ sits exactly where it always did: unavoidably imprecise, because FDMs are real and, as far as audible structure goes, a lookalike. The four-Group taxonomy might still map onto an EAM-versus-FDM split, or onto the broader four-class breakdown — either way, not something I can settle from monitoring alone.

Nonetheless, ‘EAM’ is the colloquial term everyone uses to talk about and understand these messages, and I reluctantly concede that insisting on ‘EAMs and/or FDMs’ everywhere would probably be more pedantic than it is useful.

How many EAMs are typically broadcast on any given day?

Routine daily EAM counts vary, but they are not random. Across the 224-day stretch from June 23, 2023 to February 1, 2024, the average came out at 14 to 15 messages a day, with a median of 14. Later windows I’ve sampled ran a little higher, averaging 18 or 19 with medians of 16 to 17. Though I haven’t tried to fit a proper trend to it, there does appear to have been a gradual uptick in message volume over the years.

Days with a very low volume of EAMs (zero to three messages) are rare, and when they do happen they tend to land on federal holidays.

When do EAMs broadcast?

The HFGCS is a 24/7 network. In theory, an EAM can broadcast at any time of day, and on any day of the year. However, general trends in the time of day an EAM is more likely to broadcast and even what day it is more likely to broadcast can be observed when the entire NEET INTEL project dataset is charted out:

Do EAMs correlate with world events?

The news-cycle version of the question

This is the easy version, and it’s the one that goes viral. Something big happens in the news, the EAM count that day looks high, and people on Twitter and YouTube announce a connection. The same people reliably say nothing on a day with 30+ EAMs and no news to hang them on, and say nothing on a day of enormous headlines and unremarkable EAM volume. A strong, consistent correlation between EAM traffic and arbitrary geopolitical events has never been established. All of that is true. It is also a gross oversimplification, and one that concedes far too much to a particular cast of mind. A large part of the public, and no small number of self-styled ‘OSINT experts’ with them, come at this subject with exactly two settings: is this urgent, breaking, happening right now?, or else oh, this is nothing. Almost everything genuinely interesting about the HFGCS lives in the wide space between those two. Follow the two-setting logic all the way out and you would have to hedge Able Archer 83 down into a footnote, and the Cuban Missile Crisis next to it, for fear of ‘clickbaiting’ or ‘needlessly worrying’ an audience that had no intention of engaging with the detail to begin with. That is the tail wagging the dog. There are, in fact, any number of apparent exceptions to the ‘no correlation’ line: cases where large-scale military exercises and operations do seem to leave a ‘mark’ on HFGCS activity.

The operational version

Specific, pre-scheduled military activity does sometimes leave a detectable signature on HFGCS traffic; two cases stand out.

STEADFAST NOON 2023. NATO’s annual nuclear exercise ran October 16 to 26, 2023. Overall message counts and structure across that window looked entirely normal: no surge, no lull. But the YI prefix showed up carrying a distinctive internal repetition pattern on October 11, just before the exercise; again on the 16th, the start; and again on the 26th, the end, and then it was gone. The pre-exercise appearance was probably pre-deployment or keying of some kind; the bracketing of the exact start and end dates is the conspicuous part. A distinctive prefix family landing precisely on the boundaries of a known exercise might, of course, be coincidence, but it is conspicuous enough to be worth flagging and watching for.

Minuteman III ICBM test launches. Vandenberg SFB runs unarmed Minuteman III test launches on publicly announced schedules. Across 11 launches I had monitoring coverage for, Group 4 EAMs show up at roughly 3.6× their baseline rate in the D-1 to D-3 window ahead of the launch; 8 of those 11 launches showed elevated Group 4 activity. For comparison, on an ordinary non-launch day a Group 4 prefix appears only about 22% of the time (an average of 0.29 long messages a day, across 807 baseline days). A write-up is available for review at minuteman_icbm_x_hfgcs_eams.html.

This evidence is not in tension at all. Random news cycles do not correlate with EAM volume or content, but specific pre-scheduled operational activity sometimes might, at rates you could actually quantify. They’re two different things people are both calling ‘correlation’, and the second one is what serious monitoring is actually for.

Did the HFGCS play a role in OPERATION MIDNIGHT HAMMER?

On June 21, 2025, the United States struck Iran’s nuclear facilities in OPERATION MIDNIGHT HAMMER. Unusually, a fairly precise public timeline of the operation was publicly released. Thanks to this data, I was able to take a look to see if any correlation or alignment could be observed between EAM broadcast times and operation stages. There did appear to be non-trivial alignment suggesting the HFGCS did play a role in the operation29.

Are long EAMs cause for concern?

For the most part, no, long EAMs are not the cause for concern the internet has made them out to be. Long EAMs are the ones most likely to go viral, but a good number of them could be identified as running on a preset schedule. Once you have identified the schedule, it becomes easier to stop reading too much into them.

Three times across 2023 and 2024, on a roughly quarterly cadence, the same thing happened: a 194 character EAM went out on a Saturday evening UTC, and a 216 character EAM followed it the next afternoon, Sunday, at around 16:45 UTC. It happened on 19–20 August 2023, again on 18–19 November 2023, and again on 10–11 February 2024 — the same two lengths, the same Saturday-into-Sunday structure, near-identical UTC slots each time.

On Saturday, May 18, 2024, a 210 character EAM went out at 21:16 UTC, and within hours it was being passed around online as evidence of something, and a self-appointed HFGCS expert, @redanblacattack (now @Rick_Fenlon) made a tweet implying his ‘expertise’ meant he could credibly suspect the EAM was associated with concurrent breaking news of a drone attack in Russia. But if he was actually as diligent of a monitor as he implied he was, he would’ve recognized the 210 character Saturday-evening EAM as entirely routine and predictable. I made a short video walking through the whole pattern30, and was blocked for my troubles.

This isn’t to say we know that every long EAM is scheduled, but enough of them visibly are that we can begin to suspect even more are (just on less obvious schedules). Separately, we know that geopolitical events do not run on a timetable, so when someone points at a long message they happened to notice and declares it must be about whatever is at the top of their news feed, they are anchoring a random point inside a pattern that was already there.

If you want to go looking yourself, the 2022–2026 message calendar lays out all long EAMs in the entire NEET INTEL dataset. Diligent investigation is likely to continue to turn up some schedules or patterns that ‘experts’ like Rick Fenlon never put together.

Can you read anything into an operator’s tone of voice?

The claim that you can read significance into an HFGCS operator’s tone of voice is unfounded. It quietly assumes the operator either understands the message or has some context for how much it matters, and neither of those is well-established31. More to the point, the people who make this claim have a bad track record. I’ve seen people claim an HFGCS operator was crying because the EAM they were reading meant that WW3 was about to begin. Not only did WW3 obviously not begin, the operator wasn’t crying, they were laughing. Consider that an operator could read a practice message with strong enunciation and a little nervous tremble in their voice not because nukes are about to fly, but because they know a superior who will pass/fail them is listening. Just like anyone else at any job, the mood of an HFGCS operator could be affected by any number of things, such as personal troubles in or out of work, a funny joke someone just told them, workplace pressure, etc. The idea someone listening to them with a shortwave radio could accurately identify and differentiate their tone of voice as a ‘giveaway’, while completely separate from important context, is simply bizarre.

What is a SKYKING?

SKYKING messages get discussed every single time the HFGCS comes up, and they are, at this point, rarely broadcast on the HFGCS at all. People keep talking about them for the same reason a lot of HFGCS information is the way it is: it’s recycled from a period when SKYKINGs genuinely were common.

I can’t say the SKYKING side of things has ever much bothered me. To me, their whole foreboding reputation looks fairly undeserved. Larry Van Horn’s 2006 documentation defined SKYKING as “The collective call sign for all Single Integrated Operational Plan (SIOP) committed aircraft and missile crews. Its meaning is ‘all SIOP committed aircraft and missile crews copy the following message.’”, and my read, for whatever it is worth, is that SKYKING messages functioned as either mission abort or return-to-base messages. If I’m right, that would mean they were never the ‘it’s about to pop off’ signal anyone imagines. In fact, sometimes they might’ve been much closer to signals that could’ve been read as ‘whatever that was, it just ended.’

For the recent record: there is an April 12, 2024 broadcast that went out from SKYKING to SKYMASTER on 11175 kHz (recording), though some might hesitate to call it a SKYKING message at all: structurally it follows the SKYMASTER format rather than the classic SKYKING one, and several of its three-letter groups turned up in other traffic to SKYKING that same day. The case is less that ‘SKYKINGs have stopped’ than ‘the classic SKYKING message has gone quiet on HF, and the callsign surfaces in new and unfamiliar contexts that older monitors are uninterested in’.

Whatever the case, if you come across someone presenting themselves as an HFGCS expert but they still discuss SKYKING as if it’s the end-all-be-all of HFGCS traffic, that’s probably a tell that you’re talking to someone that’s out of the loop32.

Who is MAINSAIL?

When someone keys up and asks for MAINSAIL, they are making a deliberately open-ended request — to any global ground station, whoever can hear them, whether that’s Andrews or Offutt or Sigonella or anyone else. That has been the case for a while, with things still more or less in agreement with Larry Van Horn’s write-up from over a decade ago33.

What has changed is when the name is used. Stations broadcasting EAMs used to identify by their own station callsign — Andrews would say ANDREWS, Offutt would say OFFUTT, and so on. But around 2014 they all shifted to identifying as MAINSAIL during EAM broadcasts, and then around 2015 they shifted again to rotating daily callsigns. So today a ground station answering a MAINSAIL request might identify as MAINSAIL, or as the station it is actually transmitting from, or as the daily HFGCS callsign.

What is a “rotating daily callsign”?

Around 2015, the callsigns used for EAM broadcasts moved off station names and MAINSAIL and onto a rotating pool of unique daily callsigns. They almost always change at 00:00 UTC.

I have spent a genuinely non-trivial amount of time cataloging these, and with only a couple of ambiguous exceptions I am fairly sure of this: virtually every HFGCS callsign observes a 9 character limit, spaces included (some callsigns are two words). The apparent exceptions are things like CUTTY SARK and LIGHT BUOY (10 characters once you count the space), and my suspicion is that internally they are treated as 9, with the space simply dropped: CUTTYSARK, LIGHTBUOY.

The limit seems to reach almost everything else on the network, too. SKYMASTER fits inside 9 characters, so does MAINSAIL, and so do the station names: ANDREWS, OFFUTT, SIGONELLA. The one that genuinely doesn’t is PUERTO RICO, which is 11 characters, or 10 without the space.

What is interesting is that the limit might effectively be a kind of platform-type signature. HFGCS NCSes and E-6B callsigns stay inside 9 characters, but the 10 character tactical callsigns read as a different class of platform entirely. FILIBUSTER was heard during what looked like an attempt to contact an E-4 ‘doomsday’ platform on HF34, and SPELLCASTER and BELLPEPPER35 were both heard running radio checks ahead of a SKYMASTER exercise period in April 2026. Callsigns like these stick out in a pool of callsigns adhering to a shorter character limit.

The numbered callsigns (the [WORD][NUMBER] format) are very strongly tied to specific E-6B aircraft, and one appearing on the HFGCS can usually be matched to a specific airframe on ADS-B trackers; that is covered more in the Directed EAMs and E-6B entries.

So why did nobody notice the 9 character limit earlier? Probably just poor documentation. For years, an admin of eam.watch (someone who falsely claimed inside knowledge of the HFGCS36) logged, and kept logging, test counts from Diego Garcia under the callsign DIEGO GARCIA, when the recording plainly only says DIEGO37. Other listeners mishear callsigns and log ones that break the limit. Meanwhile, Air Force Instruction 33-21738 might’ve been dangling a definitive source just out of reach: “The VCSLI contains detailed procedures for requesting, assigning, and using voice call signs, and is available on the VCS SIPRNet web site”.

What is an E-6B Mercury?

The E-6B Mercury is a U.S. Navy aircraft, flown by Strategic Communications Wing 139. In the Navy’s own words, its primary job is to “receive, verify and retransmit Emergency Action Messages (EAMs) to US strategic forces.” For monitoring purposes the E-6B is the airborne half of the whole system: the ground stations broadcast EAMs on HF, and E-6B aircraft rebroadcast them on both HF and VLF (the latter via a trailing wire antenna), which is how the coverage reaches the submerged ballistic missile submarines that can’t pick up HF at all.

There is a fuller picture of what an E-6B crew actually does, and it turns up in an unexpected place: the same FOIA-released aircrew training plan that pins down NEREP and AKAC-274 (c.f. the 274 message Q&A) is an E-6B program syllabus. The aircraft’s wartime role is the Airborne Command Post (ABNCP), and crew train on things like Emergency Conferencing, handling Nuclear Execution Reports, the Nuclear Planning and Execution System.

E-6Bs show a strong preference for Group 1 messages when they rebroadcast EAMs, and they also work the CHARLIE WINDOWS and other discrete frequencies for E-6B-to-E-6B traffic. As mentioned earlier, the recipients of Directed EAMs with numbered callsigns can usually be matched to a specific E-6B on the public trackers (ADSBExchange, Flightradar24).

However, that last part has gotten harder in recent years. From late 2024 and on through 2025 and into 2026, E-6B visibility on the public flight trackers has been dropping: the aircraft turn up under false hex codes more often, fall off the trackers entirely more often, and there have been both large-scale exercises and apparently routine days of the week where radio traffic implied more aircraft airborne than would appear on flight radars. Attributing a callsign to a specific airframe is still useful, but it’s a lot harder to do now than it was in 2022 or 202340.

What is the E-6B rebroadcast timetable?

The E-6B rebroadcast relay pattern is worth identifying because it’s a regular feature on the HFGCS: a ground station broadcasts an EAM ‘for’ a specific aircraft, then follows it with a second message addressed ‘to no one in particular’ — and a while later another, different transmitter, under its own callsign and very probably that same aircraft, rebroadcasts the second message on a half-hour schedule, presumably toward submarines.

The exact minute past the hour it keys up on isn’t arbitrary, either — the slot tracks, roughly, which body of water the aircraft is covering:

Time slot coverage

:00 and :30 Gulf of America (and, rarely, Lake Michigan)

:10 and :40 Atlantic

:20 and :50 Pacific

What is VERDIN?

The VLF Digital Information Network (VERDIN) is the very-low-frequency counterpart to the HFGCS, and carries much of the same traffic. E-6B aircraft broadcast digital EAMs on VLF through their trailing wire antenna, mainly to the submerged submarines that HF can’t reach41.

VERDIN runs on a small set of VLF frequencies:

17.8 kHz VERDIN ATLANTIC

22.7 kHz VERDIN PACIFIC

26.35 kHz VERDIN SPORTS

27.2 kHz VERDIN GULF

30.0 kHz VERDIN PENINSULA OF UPPER MICHIGAN

SPORTS is the most amusing VLF frequency. 26.35 kHz was documented in use to broadcast information covering sports scores, closing stock prices and naval-history trivia42. 23 kHz might also be a VERDIN frequency43.

The FY27 budget documents contain some information regarding VERDIN as well. The KG-3XA cryptographic program (the same one discussed in the one-time-pad Q&A) includes an embeddable module, the KGV-363, described as supporting ‘Very Low Frequency (VLF) receivers and transmitters’ and tied to the Fixed Submarine Broadcast System.

If you want to take a look at some VERDIN captures, null has a dedicated YouTube playlist44.

What is an “8888 message”?

Standard EAMs never use the characters 0, 1, 8, or 9. 8888 messages (formally, Quad 8s or alternatively, Octopus messages) are the exception, containing those characters and, most conspicuously, opening with 888800 and closing on 8888. They are almost certainly not standard EAMs, and it’s entirely possible they shouldn’t be broadcast on the HFGCS at all.

As part of research for a video I made in 202345, I could only find evidence of 11 documented 8888 messages across nearly twenty years of records. The count now is over 38, HF and VLF combined, with the documented record running from a 1999 UDXF log all the way through broadcasts still happening in 2026. A writeup that supercedes the one in the video is available at octopus_8888.html.

What the expanded dataset shows is that the structure is consistent. An 8888 message opens with the 888800 header, then a two-digit day that matches the calendar date, then a four-digit time at or near the time of transmission, then a middle block of paired characters (most often AAEEGGKKNNXXZZ), and closes on a trailing 8888.

The HF instances are mostly disregarded (since 2018, most are followed by an explicit disregard call from the operator), while the VLF instances typically are not. And the VLF ones correlate with specific aircraft hex codes: E-4 airframes (ADFEB3, ADFEB4, ADFEB6) and E-6 airframes (AE0412, AE0414, AE040E) have all been associated with VLF 8888 broadcasts more than once.

There are two leads on 8888 messages. The first: the veteran HF monitor Larry Van Horn relayed an anonymous source saying that, historically, 8888-formatted messages appeared on the ISST (ICBM Strategic Satellite Test) system as test messages, which would make them test-format traffic rather than live launch orders. The second came out of a Titan II missile museum tour I included in that 2023 video, where a former crewman walks through the actual launch-authorization procedure: a two character envelope selector followed by a five character code, sealed in a ‘cookie’, that has to match for an event to be real. That 2+5 structure maps cleanly onto the inner fields of an 8888 message as observed on both HF and VLF, which strongly suggests these are either a direct descendant or a very close cousin of those nuclear command formats.

None of that confirms 8888 messages are ICBM-related. But the format, the documented adjacency to ICBM systems, and the simply tiny broadcast rate all point the same direction: toward high-significance test or control traffic somewhere inside the nuclear command-and-control world.

What is a SKYMASTER event?

The phrase SKYMASTER event has drifted into meaning two slightly different things at once: the radio callsign SKYMASTER, which sometimes appears on the HFGCS during certain large broadcasts, and the underlying STRATCOM exercise that produces it. They are not the same thing. A SKYMASTER event is, properly, a large STRATCOM-driven exercise; the radio callsign SKYMASTER is one optional surface symptom of that exercise, and when it does appear, it tends to appear near the end, not the start.

For what it is worth, SKYMASTER is a genuine procedural term and not a piece of listener folklore: ‘SKYMASTER procedures’ turns up as a named training subject in a FOIA-released E-6B aircrew training plan, and, tellingly, it sits in the same lesson as NEREP communication procedures (that document is discussed in the 274 message Q&A).

On the HFGCS, a SKYMASTER-scale exercise looks like this: hundreds of messages over many hours, several distinct formats running at once (ordinary EAMs, SKYMASTER-prefixed messages, 274 messages, RECOVERY REPORTS), and heavy use of additional HF and UHF frequencies well beyond the usual four46. In SKYMASTER mode each primary frequency starts behaving like its own network rather than a mirror of the others, which quietly breaks the usual assumption that the HFGCS simply simulcasts everything across 4724/8992/11175/15016.

I used to call all of these ‘SKYMASTER events’ and nothing else. They are better thought of as STRATCOM exercises that may or may not throw a SKYMASTER callsign onto HF. To handle the cases where the indicators are all present but the callsign isn’t, I added the FAKEMASTER category — see the next Q&A.

What is a FAKEMASTER event?

A FAKEMASTER is an event with every hallmark I’d expect of a SKYMASTER (E-6B forward deployment, conspicuous airspace reservations, heavy EAM traffic, unusual callsigns, all the formats discussed in the SKYMASTER Q&A) but with no documented SKYMASTER call. Either it is a similar-scale exercise that is genuinely different in some operational way, or the call happened and I missed it.

The cleanest example is June 23, 2024 (an E-6 forward-deployed to Norway, special airspace reservations, an unusual EAM read by the numeric callsign LOOKOUT44), which I flagged at the time as anomalous. The DoD afterward implied it had been little more than a photo opportunity of some kind, but HFGCS audio recordings clearly prove a real exercise took place concurrent with the DVIDS photo op. The case for that day being GLOBAL STORM 24 rather than a mere photo op is laid out in the GLOBAL STORM Q&A.

How often do SKYMASTER events happen?

Fairly often47.

How do you know a SKYMASTER event isn’t real nuclear activity?

This is the question that comes up most when one of these broadcasts goes viral.

First: I was able to forecast the dates of many major SKYMASTER events I documented well in advance. I would post these forecasts in public and with verifiable receipts, sometimes weeks or months out, and the events have landed on or near those dates. The forecasts and their paper trails48 would be published online ahead of time. Anyone insisting SKYMASTER traffic is real nuclear activity is, by implication, insisting that I am leaking sensitive US military information ahead of time, which would make me either a serious U.S. military security problem or a serious foreign-intelligence opportunity. I have not been arrested or kidnapped on either count.

Second: STRATCOM publicly announces its large exercises. Offutt AFB’s social media announced its April 2026 exercise window six days ahead of time. Whiteman AFB and DVIDS pages routinely publish dates. This activity is rehearsed in the open, and it is a genuinely routine part of how U.S. strategic forces operate. Some SKYMASTER events can be cleanly associated with these publicly identified exercises.

Third: a ‘real’ EAM would probably look and sound very much like an exercise message. The difference would be context, not content. In an actual crisis, every major news outlet on earth would be covering a nuclear emergency in plain language. You would not be finding out from the HFGCS.

What is GLOBAL STORM?

GLOBAL STORM is one of the recurring U.S. STRATCOM exercises with a known name, and is part of the same broad family as GLOBAL THUNDER and GLOBAL LIGHTNING, the kind of large strategic-deterrence drill that throws the activity discussed in the SKYMASTER Q&A onto the HFGCS.

Although OSINT missed it and audio proof sat unnoticed and undiscussed for several years, GLOBAL STORM 23 ran on July 11, 2023. A recording I made that day has a participant clearly identify the exercise by name over the HFGCS49.

Evidence points towards GLOBAL STORM 24 taking place on June 23, 2024. This happens to be same date as the USS Tennessee activity flagged in the SKYMASTER Q&A. At the time, the NEET INTEL project logged that day as a FAKEMASTER (the term is defined in the FAKEMASTER Q&A), while a good deal of the wider commentary settled on calling the day a photo opportunity, or a show of force. My read is that it was something a great deal bigger: a major, ‘Tier One’ STRATCOM exercise that simply went unrecognized as one, for the unglamorous reason that DVIDS never labeled it as such. The circumstantial case for the GLOBAL STORM 24 identification is laid out in that same recording; two further HFGCS timecard recordings back it up5051, and the documentary background (GLOBAL STORM, the broader STRATCOM exercise calendar, and the USS Tennessee deployment) is set out across the sources525354555657585960616263.

What is a 274 message?

A 274 message is a format that, for a long time, turned up almost exclusively during STRATCOM exercises. That is no longer quite true, as it has started to appear outside that context too. Either way it remains poorly documented, and was rarely logged online until recently64. Despite the name, these messages are not 274 characters long; the ‘274’ points instead to AKAC-274, a real operational publication named outright in a FOIA-released E-6B aircrew training plan65, where ‘the use of the AKAC 274/AKAL 1553’ is listed as one of the things a Force Status controller is trained on.

That same training plan also settles what NEREP means. NEREPs are Nuclear Execution Reports; the plan lists them explicitly, in at least three types designated LA, GA, and SA, with their own message precedence and their own communication procedures.

What is a CLARINET MERLIN message?

CLARINET MERLIN appears by name in the FOIA-released E-6B training plan discussed in the 274 message Q&A. The syllabus carries a lesson on the process of sending, relaying, and receiving CLARINET MERLIN messages. From this, it would appear to be a category of traffic that E-6B crew handles, but I never heard anything I thought might be a CLARINET MERLIN message.

What is a RECOVERY REPORT?

A RECOVERY REPORT is another format you will basically only hear during STRATCOM exercises. It seems to be an unusual way of confirming that SKYMASTER messages have reached their intended recipients. One remarkable thing about them is that slashes are actually read aloud as part of the message. This might be the only context in which they ever are read that way over the HFGCS.

What are the CHARLIE WINDOWS?

On top of the four primary HFGCS frequencies, and the discrete frequencies nobody outside knows, STRATCOM uses 9031 kHz, which, on the primary frequencies, I’ve heard referred to not as ‘9031’ but as the ‘CHARLIE ECHO WINDOW’, presumably to keep the handling of it a little low-key.

CE is one of a series of ‘CHARLIE WINDOWS’ (CA through CI) that the shortwave-listening community documented some time ago. The mildly surprising part is that the frequencies documented back in the mid-to-late 2000s are still the same ones in use today66.

I have heard most of these in use myself. I’ve also heard operations mention a ‘CL’, without ever pinning down which frequency it refers to. All of the CHARLIE WINDOWS appear to be reserved for E-6B-to-E-6B communication.

What are the ZULU frequencies?

The ZULU frequencies are a set of channels STRATCOM uses, each one identified by a code-name designator of the form Z-number (Z100, Z170, and so on); collectively they are possibly known as the ZULU NET. The older public lists of ZULU frequencies (the ones the shortwave-listening community put together in the mid-2000s) are badly out of date, and full of entries that don’t line up with anything in current use. Several of the ZULU designators look like they descend from the older MYSTIC STAR network. These channels don’t appear to be held in absolute reserve. For instance, Z100 (13907 kHz) is also used by the U.S. Coast Guard.

What is ESTEEM HIGHLY ALPHA?

Most of what crosses the HFGCS is EAMs and routine station business, but every so often you catch something else entirely: a phone patch, where a unit asks a ground station to bridge it, by actual telephone, through to some particular number. In March 2024 I caught one between two units signing 4HA and 1YG, and the audible half of it ran: ‘4HA, this is 1YG. Roger. Esteem Highly Alpha. [My cell?] 2051, over.’67.

I was initially perplexed, with none of the self-appointed experts appearing to be familiar with the term ESTEEM HIGHLY ALPHA at all. However, answers could be found on Russian-language monitoring forums, and in old issues of Monitoring Times68. The trail runs a long way back: there is a 1992 recording (a shore control point and a submarine working HF authentication off password tables, then a time-of-receipt readback) archived with a full transcript on cubanos.ru69. English-speaking monitors were logging it in Monitoring Times in the 1990s, and on the forums the English-language trail runs at least to 2016. The Russian record reaches at least as deep, between that 1992 recording and forum logs running from 2013 on. The 2013 Russian log is the tidy one, with ANDREWS phone-patching a unit signing 8LX through to 5JE, the whole exchange explicitly ‘EXERCISE ESTEEM HIGHLY ALPHA’, and that log notes, almost in passing, that 8LX was a submarine70.

The number on the other end is worth a look too, though I will point rather than print. It is an ordinary commercial line, and a strikingly persistent one: the same number gets dialed in the 2024 patches and in monitoring logs going back well over a decade. Those logs are public, and the number sits in them in full, there for anyone curious enough to go and read it71. Run it through a search and it lands squarely on U.S. Navy directories around Norfolk, Virginia: Fleet Forces Command, Naval Support Activity Hampton Roads. So what you are actually hearing, when ESTEEM HIGHLY ALPHA goes by, is a Navy unit (often, on this evidence, a submarine that has surfaced to do it) using the HFGCS as a switchboard to telephone a shore command and report in on an exercise. It’s a decent reminder that the system is more than just EAMs.

Is eam.watch a reliable source?

Not really, and the more weight you put on it the worse the data gets. eam.watch is a community-driven log of HFGCS traffic, and like any crowd-sourced archive it inherits the strengths and weaknesses of whoever happens to be paying attention on any given day. The most obvious failure mode: a blank day on eam.watch does not mean no EAMs were broadcast that day, it usually just means nobody logged them. There are a great many such days in the record.

Transcription quality is the more serious problem. The site has no working quality-control process, and the miscounts can be substantial. For example, I recently saw them log a 75 character EAM as a 51 character EAM, off by 24 characters on a message where the operator even stated the length out loud72. The smaller, more familiar case from the callsign Q&A — Diego Garcia test counts logged as DIEGO GARCIA when the recording plainly only says DIEGO — is a symptom of the same systemic lack of care and curation.

I would have liked to use the eam.watch database. It is large, and a large database is genuinely useful for the kind of structural analysis I have spent years doing. But the data isn’t clean enough to use without auditing every individual submitter, and the most prolific submitters tend to be the ones who never audited their own entries. When I suggested, years ago, that structure-based quality control could flag plainly impossible message lengths and similar errors, I was accused of trying to violate the U.S. Espionage Act and told this was unacceptable conversation. The institutional memory is correspondingly thin: when I posted 8888 message recordings in November 2022, the admins reacted as if no similar traffic had ever been documented, even though earlier contributors had already logged 8888 messages on the site itself.

The broader lesson applies to any HFGCS source, not just this one. Insider claims by site admins and self-styled experts should be checked, not trusted — a point worked through at greater length in a dedicated video.

How can I follow this work?

The NEET INTEL project is effectively shutting down in 2026, but all the archives, recordings, and writeups remain available. A surplus of information, including EAM structural analysis, has been published to neetintel.github.io. Longer-form articles are at neetintel.substack.com. As well, videos with commentary, explanations, and analysis are accompanied by hundreds of hours of actual HFGCS recordings over on the NEET INTEL YouTube channel.

If you want to monitor any of this yourself, 11175 kHz tends to reward attention from North America, because it carries the most additional aircraft and ad-hoc voice traffic on top of the simulcast EAMs. The UTwente SDR is convenient, and a lot of people default to it. The problem is, it misses a lot of North American traffic, particularly E-6B broadcasts, and this is major reason as to why so much of the genuinely interesting activity went undocumented for years by the wider listening community.

If you have read all the way to the end and found this useful, this took me a bit to write and represents untold hours spent both monitoring the HFGCS, recording and transcribing EAMs, and looking up information and previous transcriptions across the internet, including scouring Russian-language forums, finding dead Discord servers, etc. Likes, retweets, ko-fi contributions, etc. let me know it’s appreciated. Cheers.

What happened today

At 20:52 UTC on April 24, 2026, an EAM was broadcast on the HFGCS with the callsign RADFIELD. This message is 21 characters long, and it’s the third 21 character EAM I have documented.

The first two were broadcast an hour apart on on August 22, 2025. Today’s RADFIELD is the first 21 character EAM observed outside that August 2025 cluster. It arrived during a period I have previously identified as a likely exercise window. That’s the news. The rest of this article is about what to do with it.

Why “rare” is the right word

I have published the majority of my HFGCS transcriptions to a public GitHub site at neetintel.github.io. The catalog is organized by EAM body length. The page for 21 character EAMs is at neetintel.github.io/structure_heatmap_21char.html. It now contains three entries.

For anyone who wants to verify that this is genuinely the third such observation rather than a retroactive insertion, three independent verification paths exist;

1. The first path is the Internet Archive. I captured the 21 character page on archive.org on April 10, 2026, two weeks before today’s transmission. The archived snapshot shows only the two August 2025 entries. A number of other pages are also archived, and so you can check and see which ones are credibly “rare”, which are not, and make determinations for yourself along these lines.

2. The second path is my YouTube channel, https://www.youtube.com/@neetintel. It contains hundreds of hours of HFGCS recordings spanning the monitoring period. The vast majority of the transcriptions on the GitHub site can be cross-referenced against those recordings.

3. The third path is open. If anyone reading this has independent recordings or documentation of a 21 character EAM, from any date, I want to know. More data is better than less data. If there are 21 character EAMs in the historical record I missed, that is genuinely useful information, not a threat to the analysis.

Three documented 21 character EAMs across four years of monitoring is such that descrbing them as “rare” is not a rhetorical flourish, but a literal description.

Exercises are messages

The United States military conducts large nuclear command-and-control exercises on a regular cycle. Some of these are publicly named. Some are not. They involve real airspace reservations, real aircraft sorties, real radio activity, real Emergency Action Message traffic. They are observed by allies. They are observed by adversaries. They are observed by some hobbyists with shortwave radios and/or SDRs.

The United States military has very wide latitude in how it conducts these exercises. The choice of geography. The choice of which assets are deployed. The scale, the duration, the message structure, the callsigns, the timing relative to other geopolitical events. All of these are choices, made by people who know they are being observed.

When you make a choice that you know will be observed, that choice is communication. That remains true even when nothing kinetic happens. It remains true even when the exercise is, in every formal sense, routine training. The exercise can be entirely a rehearsal and still be a message, because the choice to rehearse this thing rather than that thing, in this place rather than that place, at this time rather than that time, is itself a signal to anyone watching.

This is what the dismissive frame collapses. “It’s just an exercise, bro” pretends the signaling layer does not exist. It treats the exercise as inert. It treats the choices made by US planners about scale, geography, asset deployment, and tempo as though they were random, or natural, or not choices at all – but they are choices! They are designed by people who understand exactly what those choices look like to a Russian intelligence analyst, a Chinese intelligence analyst, a NATO partner, a domestic political audience, and yes, even you and me.

For us to be able to read an exercise as communication, we have to know what normal looks like. We have to know the parameters. We have to know what the typical scale is, what assets typically deploy, what geography is typically practiced over, what message lengths typically appear, how often, and under what conditions. Without that baseline, we cannot tell whether a given exercise is more bellicose than usual, less bellicose than usual, or exactly as bellicose as it always is. And many of you cannot tell whether a 21 character EAM during this window means anything, because you do not even know how often 21 character EAMs are sent in the first place.

The dismissive answer requires no work. The interesting answer requires years of monitoring. That is why people prefer the dismissive answer. It is not because it is correct. It is because it’s easy.

Reading August 2025

In August 2025, the US military conducted a SKYMASTER event. A Mercury E-6B operated in the airspace around Pituffik Space Base in Greenland. A B-52 conducted a 24-hour flight over the continental United States during the same window. I noted at the time that the Greenland E-6B was unusually difficult to track and that figuring out which aircraft was operating where required more work than usual.

On August 22, two 21 character EAMs were broadcast within an hour of each other.

A reader applying the “just an exercise” frame to this activity at the time would have classified it as routine STRATCOM training, possibly with an Arctic exercise component. That classification was technically correct. I was one of the people providing that classification.

My past commentary is relevant to this argument. For most of my time monitoring HFGCS, my standard public posture in response to “is this real or an exercise?” was to encourage the audience to understand exercises as exercises. That posture was itself a corrective response to bad-faith grifting in the prepper-adjacent space, where every loud transmission becomes evidence that the world is ending and you need to buy survival supplies. Pushing back against that grift in good faith required me to deflate the panic, repeatedly, with “these are scheduled training events, calm down.” I stand by having done that.

What I am increasingly less sure of is whether “these are scheduled training events” was or is the whole story. The timing of certain exercises relative to certain geopolitical events. The behavior of certain countries during or just before certain exercise windows. The geographic concentration of activity in places that became politically salient months later. None of these correlations is individually decisive. Several of them are likely artifacts of selection bias, or of confusing cause for effect, both of which I have spent considerable time pushing back against in this space and continue to push back against. But there are now enough of these correlations that I cannot in good faith continue to dismiss the possibility that some of these exercises also function as messages in the sense developed in the previous section.

Approximately five months after the August 2025 exercise, Pituffik Space Base became the geographic and strategic center of the most acute US-Denmark-NATO crisis of recent years. The Trump administration’s pressure on Greenland escalated sharply in late December 2025 and through January 2026. Pituffik and its strategic value were central to the public discussion. The administration’s stated rationale turned on the base’s role in early warning, missile defense, submarine monitoring through the GIUK Gap, and Arctic posture more broadly. The crisis was resolved, at least for the moment, at the World Economic Forum on January 21, 2026.

I am not claiming the August 2025 exercise predicted the January 2026 crisis. Rather, I think we do need to be able to discuss the possibility of whether or not the August 2025 exercise may have been a message to that end, and that the conversation needs the analytical room to take that possibility seriously, rather than always closing it off. The choice to put an E-6B in the airspace around Pituffik, in the same window as a 24-hour B-52 flight over the continental United States, was a deliberate set of operational choices, made by people who understood the combined activity would be observed. Whether or not those choices were specifically intended as a signal about US Arctic posture, they were visible against a backdrop of strategic priorities that became impossible to ignore five months later. The exercise and the crisis emerged from the same set of priorities. The exercise was visible first.

What I would hoped to have seen from OSINT by now – and what I want to see from the public for it to make sense for me to continue to engage with a wider audience at all – would be the willingness to hold this possibility open rather than collapse it into one of the two answers the current discourse permits. The grifter answer is “every transmission means imminent war.” The dismissive answer is “every transmission is just routine training.” Both answers are wrong in the same way, which is that they refuse the analytical work. The honest position is that the August 2025 exercise may have been a message about Greenland, that this is a real possibility worth examining, and that the work of examining it is exactly the work the binary frame forecloses.

I do not think every exercise carries a discrete message. I do not think the messaging interpretation should be applied indiscriminately. The risks of overinterpreting, of seeing patterns that are not there, of confusing cause for effect, are real, and I have written extensively about them elsewhere. However, the floor of seriousness has to rise above “is this guy grifting or not.” If the conversation cannot get past that question, it will never get to the actual analytical work, because I will continue to waste too much of whatever time I can afford to this to arguing with you all in the replies of posts or writing these huge treatises begging you to get with the program.

Today’s activity

The April 2026 exercise window is currently active. Today’s RADFIELD message occurred during it.

A note on terminology before I continue. I reserve the term SKYMASTER for events where the SKYMASTER callsign is documented on the HFGCS. Events that produce the kind of activity I would expect to accompany a SKYMASTER, but without the documented callsign evocation that would confirm one, I label NOTHINGMASTERs. Either they are similar-scale exercises that are operationally different, or the callsign was used and I missed it. As of this writing, I have not personally heard a SKYMASTER evocation in this period. I am confident that nuclear command-and-control exercise activity is currently underway. I am not yet in a position to call this a confirmed SKYMASTER event by my own classification rules. April 21, 2026 was a date I had flagged in advance, and I classed it as a NOTHINGMASTER for the same reason.

Nonetheless, the activity profile remains consistent with a nuclear command-and-control exercise. A 21 character EAM appearing during this kind of period is consistent with what I would expect, given that the previous two appeared during the confirmed SKYMASTER event in August 2025. That observation is the smallest defensible claim about today’s message, and it’s the one I am most confident in.

At the time of broadcast, the airspace reservation CARF 04/536, designated ASHEN with the codename OAK CHARLIE, was active over the western Atlantic between Norfolk and Bermuda. The reservation runs surface to FL250 for a three-hour window. I am flagging it because the geographic and temporal coincidence is interesting, and because the western Atlantic is a plausible operating area for the kinds of assets involved in this kind of exercise.

What this exercise window is communicating, and to whom, will become clearer in retrospect. That is how this always works. Keeping a list of which exercises happened where, and watching what becomes contested in the news cycle that follows, is a more reliable analytical practice than trying to read individual EAMs as omens. The signal becomes legible later. The work in the present is to record the signal accurately.

The audience problem

My traditional response to being called a grifter has been to welcome the skepticism. I have actively encouraged it. The YouTube channel, the Twitter account, the GitHub catalog, the archived snapshots, the methodology notes, the public forecasts that can be checked against later observation, were all built specifically to provide the receipts a serious skeptic should ask for. A reader who asks “how do I know you did not make this up” is asking the right question, and I have spent four years constructing the infrastructure that answers it.

What I am responding to now is something different. The grifter accusation continues to arrive even when the receipts are sitting on the table next to it. A reader who could verify the rarity claim by clicking the archive.org link earlier in this article, and chooses instead to call me a grifter, is not engaging in skepticism. They are venting. I used to welcome inquiry. I do not, anymore, when it arrives without any.

The screenshot on this article, taken from my X monetization dashboard, should clarify what is materially at stake. Three consecutive two-week reporting periods, all marked “Below minimum earnings.” No payout has been triggered in any of them.

If I am running a grift, I am running the worst grift in the history of grifts.

A meaningful slice of my audience demands a particular content format. They reward posts that lead with “BREAKING,” red alert emoji, and ALL CAPS. They ignore posts that do not. I have spent the past week or so empirically confirming this by varying the formatting on otherwise comparable posts and watching the engagement curves diverge. The data is unambiguous. The audience tells me, through its actions, that it wants the alert format.

The audience also contains a slice that calls me attention-seeking, sensationalist, and a grifter when I use this.

These two groups overlap more than the second group seems to realize. Many of the same accounts who reward BREAKING posts with engagement also occasionally complain about the broader culture of BREAKING posts. Their complaint is roughly that the algorithm rewards low-quality alarmist content and that serious analysts get drowned out. This complaint is sincere as a stated preference. It is also contradicted by the same person’s actual scrolling behavior, which is what trained the algorithm in the first place1.

But the BREAKING dynamic is the surface of the audience problem. It is not the deepest part. The deepest part has to do with the framework the audience is using when they evaluate my output, and that framework has a clear upstream source.

The OSINT problem

The audience does not invent its analytical frameworks from nothing. The audience inherits them. Most of the readers who arrive at my work through a viral post are arriving from somewhere else in the broader open-source intelligence ecosystem, and the framework they are bringing with them is the framework that ecosystem has supplied.

I should be specific about what I mean. There is a wide range of work that gets called OSINT, and some of it is excellent. People who do serious primary-source research, who maintain reproducible methodologies, and who treat their analytical claims as falsifiable. Their work is valuable and it is not what I am critiquing. I am critiquing the much larger population of accounts that use the OSINT label to monetize live-blogging, breaking-news aggregation, and aircraft-tracking commentary. This is the OSINT that most general audiences encounter, and it is the OSINT whose framing has set the audience’s expectations.

That OSINT continues to operate with a binary frame on this front. Exercise or not-exercise. Routine or significant. Boring or BREAKING. The binary is rhetorically convenient because it produces clean engagement-friendly takes. It is also analytically inadequate, because the underlying activity is not binary. Exercises are messages. Operations have exercise components. Routine activity carries non-routine signals. None of this fits the binary.

The corner of SIGINT I work in (HFGCS monitoring, EAM transcription and structural analysis, exercise pattern correlation) requires more sustained effort than the dominant OSINT business model rewards. Years of recordings. Catalog maintenance. Cross-referencing. The willingness to publish forecasts that can be checked, and to be wrong in public when they are. None of this scales the way reposting flightradar24 screenshots scales. As far as I can tell, the dominant OSINT accounts have either not been able to develop this capacity or have not been interested in doing so. I assume the latter, because the effort required is not hidden. The methodology is not secret. The tools are commodity. What is missing is the willingness to do slow work for years before it pays off in any visible way.

A concrete example of the work OSINT could be doing but largely is not. Airspace reservations, particularly NOTAMs and CARF messages, contain meaningful information about scheduled military activity. When a peculiar Emergency Action Message broadcasts during the same window as an unusual airspace reservation over a strategically interesting location, the correlation is worth investigating. None of the inputs to that investigation are privileged. The reservations are public. The EAMs are public. The geographic and temporal correlations are observable to anyone willing to read both feeds. This is exactly the kind of pattern work that would distinguish serious analysis from aggregator commentary, and it is exactly the kind of work the binary exercise/not-exercise frame allows the practitioner to skip. If everything is just an exercise, there is nothing to correlate. The frame excuses the work, which is conveniently aligned with the work being effortful and not scaling.

This is the upstream cause of the audience problem. The audience uses the binary frame because the binary frame is what the loudest OSINT accounts have given them. When I post that a 21 character EAM is rare, that it is associated with previous exercise activity, and that I have published the underlying catalog and the verification trail, the audience tries to fit that claim into the binary. It does not fit. There is no slot in the binary for “rare in a quantifiable sense, associated with a documented prior pattern, observed during a forecast exercise window, possibly meaningful and possibly not, currently a NOTHINGMASTER under the framework I publish.” The audience receives a claim shaped like analysis but processes it through a framework shaped like news. The result, predictably, is that the claim reads either as routine (in which case “why is he posting BREAKING about it”) or as a major event (in which case “he is grifting for engagement”). Neither reading corresponds to what I actually said.

I don’t think this is fully the audience’s fault. They have been handed a framework that does not allow the analytical claim I am making. Inside that framework, my output reads as deceptive. Outside that framework, my output reads as straightforward and well-evidenced. The framework is doing the deceiving. The framework is what the dominant OSINT accounts have supplied. The audience has not been given better tools, because the loudest accounts in this space have not built better tools.

This is also why the grifter accusation lands the way it does. Within the binary frame, my output looks louder than the apparent stakes warrant. I post BREAKING about something the binary frame classifies as routine, so I must be inflating. The frame cannot accommodate the claim that the activity is non-routine in a specifically analytical sense (rare event during a forecast window, structural pattern, geographic context that may matter later) without abandoning the binary. The frame defends itself by classifying me as the problem, instead of itself.

I provide more effort, more receipts, and more evidence than the OSINT baseline most readers are calibrated against. That is not a flex. It is a description of how low the baseline is. When someone offers analysis that exceeds the baseline by an order of magnitude, the reader trained on the baseline does not recognize the analysis as analysis. They recognize it as someone making more noise than the topic warrants, because their calibration is wrong. The calibration is what OSINT failed to teach them.

What the conversation needs

The conversation will never progress and our collective understanding of these events will never improve as long as the dominant register is “it’s just an exercise, bro.” That phrase is a thought-terminating cliché. It treats analytical work as unnecessary. It assumes the only interesting question is the binary one, real or rehearsal, and refuses to ask the more useful one, which is what the activity is communicating, and to whom.

What the conversation needs is more readers willing to develop the literacy. Track the patterns over time. Notice when something is unusual. Notice when something is routine. Notice when an exercise’s geography matches current geopolitical priorities and when it matches old ones. Notice when message lengths cluster in unexpected places. Notice when callsigns recur. Notice when an exercise is bigger or smaller than it usually is. Notice when activity persists past its expected window or terminates early.

A reader who has done some of this work can ask better questions. They can tell whether a given exercise is at the bellicose end of the normal range or the routine end. They can anticipate how an adversary might read it. They can anticipate how a partner might read it. They can anticipate which audiences are likely to react and which are likely to dismiss it. They can do all of this without confidential access, because the underlying activity is observable and the patterns are stable enough to study.

None of this work generates “BREAKING” posts. None of it goes viral. All of it is necessary if you want to be able to tell a posture statement from a training scenario, a signal from a non-signal, a deliberate provocation from a routine cycle. Without this work, you are downstream of whoever talks loudest about whatever happens to be on screen.

The infrastructure for this work is already built. The catalog is public. The recordings are public. The methodology is documented. The forecasts are public, and they are public specifically so they can be checked. There is no gatekeeping, except the gatekeeping that requires you to do the reading.

Closing

I am not under the illusion that this article will produce a sudden epidemic of close attention to HFGCS traffic. Most readers will scroll past. Some will engage. A few will check the verification paths. Fewer still will start tracking the patterns themselves. That is how it has always gone.

What I am not interested in, going forward, is the loudest version of the audience reaction. The grifter accusation is empirically false in the dumbest possible way, as the screenshot demonstrates. The BREAKING criticism is contradicted by the same person’s scrolling behavior. The “just an exercise, bro” frame is a refusal to do the analytical work the topic requires. None of these objections is serious, and none deserves more time than this article has already given.

There is also a question of venue. Twitter is where most of these audience reactions happen, and Twitter is where I have been answering them. It is also where the conversation has so far stagnated, where OSINT accounts have shown no interest in sharing the analytical workload, and where, as the screenshot above demonstrates, the time invested produces no compensation. None of that is the reason I do this work. It is, however, increasingly relevant to where I do it. Substack is more conducive to articles like this one. Whether to do more of this work here is a question I am still working out.

There is a related question of access. Time spent answering audience misreadings is time taken away from higher-order analysis. If the audience is going to consistently misread what is provided to them openly, then some of the higher-order work probably belongs behind a paywall. Previous attempts at softer filtering have not been sufficient. The “dancing kpop girl” aesthetic of the channel and the account, the jpop/kpop invocations across posts and videos, the entirety of the Daily Timecard Project, and so on – these were all meant to function as filters.

I mean, who’s watching this unless they’re either me or one of the all of three other guys I’ve met who also both like the HFGCS and jpop/kpop? Probably someone who actually understands there’s something else at play here.

These antics did produce some self-selection, but weren’t sufficient filters to reach the “nightmare scenario” of an X account with 25,000 followers whose interest in the account sincerely operates from a “🚨CODE RED IT’S HAPPENING” / “lol dw abt it” code switch. A paywall is the next-coarsest filter available, and its function would be filtration more than monetization. Readers willing to pay a nominal amount to read serious analysis are, by selection, the readers more likely to engage with it seriously2. The catalog and the recordings remain public regardless. The question is which kind of analytical writing belongs in which venue.

The catalog is public. The recordings are public. The methodology is documented. The forecasts are public. The receipts are above. The work that has been done is on the record, and the record is already durable enough to outlast my interest in defending it.

In the previous article, I noted that we had reached a point where I no longer feel obliged to prove myself to anyone. That observation feels even sharper today than it did last week, hence we reach these questions – if I keep doing this, do I paywall? If I’m going to get called a grifter, I may as well. etc. etc. etc.

Meanwhile, that nuclear command and control exercise is likely still ongoing.

Written April 15–16, 2026. This is the written companion to a livestream I recorded on April 15. It is for readers who prefer text over video, and for readers whose first language is not English. The prose is direct so as to help machine translation handle it cleanly. Claude was provided a summary of the livestream transcription and assisted with drafting and editing the information from that livestream into this article.

A large-scale U.S. nuclear command-and-control exercise is staging in mid-April 2026. This article explains what I am seeing, how I am reading it, and why most of the open-source intelligence community is looking the wrong way.

Before the analysis, one note on framing. When I describe a large nuclear exercise, some readers default to panic and others default to dismissal. Both reactions are wrong. The exercise is real. It is also not an emergency for any reader of this article. This article discusses both halves of that claim.

Two Wrong Reactions

The first reaction is panic. Certain YouTube and X accounts will tell you that any unusual military activity means nuclear war is about to begin. They profit from fear. They sell emergency supplies. They yell “This is not a drill!” over ordinary radio traffic. If you stop and think for ten seconds, their claims fall apart. Ignore them.

The second reaction is the opposite. The moment you hear the word “exercise,” you assume it is routine and unimportant. You stop paying attention.

This is also wrong, and it is the reason I am writing this article.

The United States military runs exercises continuously. Exercises are a major component of its job. But exercises vary enormously in scale and consequence. Small training events barely register outside a single base. Large nuclear command-and-control exercises rehearse the opening movements of a nuclear war. Both are technically “exercises.” They are not the same kind of event.

If you only have two mental categories, “real war” and “irrelevant,” you cannot think clearly about this topic.

Why Scale Matters: Able Archer 83

The clearest historical illustration is Able Archer 83.

Able Archer was a NATO exercise in November 1983. On paper, it was routine. NATO was practicing what it would do if the Soviet Union attacked. But Soviet intelligence services watched the exercise unfold. They observed its realism and its scale. Some Soviet officials concluded that the exercise might be cover for an actual first strike. For several days, the risk that Moscow would misread a rehearsal as a real attack was not trivial.

I’m not claiming that this exercise is another Able Archer. I’m pointing out that the category exists. A drill can be strategically significant even when it is not dangerous to any individual civilian. Adversaries and allies watch these exercises, and the exercises affect how they estimate American intentions and capabilities.

This matters more in 2026 than it did five years ago, because the arms-control framework that used to constrain and explain these exercises has collapsed.

The Strategic Context: A Post-New START World

The New START treaty was the last major arms-control agreement between the United States and Russia. Russia suspended its participation in 2022. The treaty formally expired earlier in 2026. There is currently no mutually agreed cap on deployed strategic nuclear weapons, and no inspection regime.

This changes the meaning of every large nuclear exercise. During the treaty period, both sides had incentives to be somewhat transparent about their force structure and their training activities. That incentive is gone. The United States now has reasons to obscure the true scale and tempo of its nuclear drills, not primarily to confuse hobbyists like me, but to complicate estimation by adversaries and allies.

There is a second and more disturbing shift. During the Cold War, the dominant view among senior decision-makers was that nuclear war was unwinnable in any meaningful sense. Once the threshold was crossed, civilization would essentially end. Robert McNamara, the former U.S. Secretary of Defense, articulated this view clearly in his later interviews, particularly in the documentary The Fog of War. McNamara was a deeply flawed figure. He oversaw the firebombing of Japanese cities and escalated the Vietnam War. But on the specific question of nuclear weapons, he was thoughtful and unambiguous. Nuclear war must never be fought, because it cannot be won.

I do not believe that view is dominant anymore. My impression is that a significant portion of senior U.S. military leadership, and a significant portion of the general public, now suspects that a limited nuclear exchange might be survivable. Maybe not clean or cheap, but survivable enough to plan around. It is no longer unthinkable.

This is the belief that shapes the environment in which these exercises now take place. That is why they matter. They rehearse the system that would be used if someone ever decided nuclear war was winnable enough to try.

What I Mean by “SKYMASTER”

I use the term SKYMASTER to describe large nuclear command-and-control exercises visible on the High Frequency Global Communications System, or HFGCS. HFGCS is the network of shortwave radio stations through which the U.S. military sends Emergency Action Messages (EAMs) to its nuclear forces.

SKYMASTER is my label, not the Pentagon’s. Most of these exercises do not have public names. A few do. GLOBAL THUNDER, which runs each October, is one example. I classify GLOBAL THUNDER as a SKYMASTER-scale event. But many comparable exercises have no known public name, so I needed a category word to capture all exercises that appear to be conducted at this scale.

Since 2022, I have been collecting data on these events. My work includes:

• Recording and logging hundreds of Emergency Action Messages, sorted by length and internal structure.

• Cross-referencing message traffic with E-6B Mercury aircraft movements, airspace reservations, and publicly announced base activity.

• Building timelines and tables, available at neetintel.github.io, that show when SKYMASTER events occur and how often.

• Streaming them live, so that listeners can hear what the command-and-control system sounds like during a rehearsal.

Before I compiled this data, people in the hobby described these events as “quarterly,” if they described them at all. The data does not support that. When I showed this, some people said they were “monthly.” The data does not support that either.

The actual pattern, visible in the SKYMASTER tables on my site, is irregular but structured. Certain months produce reliable recurring events: January (always the second Wednesday), April, September, and a GLOBAL THUNDER event in late October. Other months are less predictable: February produced events in 2023, 2024, and 2026.

April is the most relevant month for this week’s forecast. The April pattern is not one “event”, but a cluster. In 2024, two large events occurred on April 12 and April 18. In 2025, April 16 and April 30. This week falls inside the same seasonal window, and past behavior suggests that a single event in mid-April may not be the only one. Whatever happens in the next few days, there is a reasonable chance of a follow-up event later in the month.

One thing worth flagging about the tables. The site records two additional categories alongside confirmed SKYMASTERs.

• A FAKEMASTER is an event that produces unusual HFGCS activity or aircraft movements, but the traffic patterns and supporting indicators do not match a true command-and-control rehearsal.

• A NOTHINGMASTER is an event that produces the kind of activity you would expect to accompany a SKYMASTER. Such activity could include notable aircraft or asset movements, or novel radio activity. However, a day without any documented use of the SKYMASTER callsign on the radio is treated as an unconfirmed SKYMASTER event, and therefore is classified as a NOTHINGMASTER. Either it is a similar-scale exercise that is operationally different, or the callsign was used and I missed it.

These categories exist because pattern recognition without a record of ambiguous and near-miss cases is not pattern recognition. It is confirmation bias. The framework has to account for its own edges in order to be worth anything.

The February 2026 Experiment

By February 2026 I had already stepped back from active monitoring. Based on the pattern from previous years, a SKYMASTER window was approaching. I could have set up recordings and posted commentary on the day. I chose not to.

The open-source intelligence community frequently tells me that my work is unnecessary, that others are doing the same thing, and that several private forums contain far more expertise than I have. I wanted to test this claim. I publicly hinted that a SKYMASTER was coming, and then stayed out of the way.

On February 11, 2026, a major nuclear exercise took place. I was not monitoring live. I am working from the traffic recovered afterward.

The open-source intelligence community largely missed it. The assumption seemed to be that I was wrong, and there had been no exercise after all.

As it later turned out, Jessi Davin (@jessithebuckeye), did capture audio from the exercise and posted it on the very same day, but this was not discovered until some time later. There had been an event after all, and my experiment successfully proved what I’ve been read as belligerent in asserting was proven right after all – all these well-followed accounts that claim deep expertise in military monitoring, or esoteric members of secret forums, produced no meaningful analysis on the day. The YouTube channels that normally broadcast “this is not a drill” content during real exercises were silent, because their business model is scraping my posts and repackaging the findings for their prepper audiences without credit.1 (When I do not post, they have nothing to recycle, and the pretense of independent monitoring collapses.)

One well-followed account saw a B-52 bomber over the Pacific on February 11 and concluded it was heading to Guam as part of preparations for a strike on Iran. Operation MIDNIGHT HAMMER, the United States strike package against Iranian nuclear facilities, had taken place in June 2025, and speculation about follow-up operations continued to saturate social media into early 2026. In this case, their interpretation was incorrect. Nuclear exercises follow a recognizable pattern that I have been documenting. The pattern can involve E-6B Mercury aircraft repositioning to forward locations, often in Europe or Greenland, several days before the main event. It does not involve a B-52 making a same-day transit to a forward base. The account confused a nuclear exercise with a Middle East strike package, because the Middle East was the topic everyone was focused on that week.

The same pattern is playing out this week. As the April 2026 exercise window opens, a respectable account read B-52 activity over the continental United States as possible Middle East redirection, rather than as activity more likely to be relevant to a nuclear exercise which is clearly being staged. This is not a case of parasites or fear-mongers. Here I am discussing respectable accounts that even I follow But on the specific category large nuclear command-and-control exercises, they are repeatedly failing to identify them. This failure is structural, not personal. Nuclear exercises produce a particular signature that they have never learned to recognize. When they encounter signals that could fit either a familiar narrative like Iran or an unfamiliar one like a SKYMASTER, then they default to the familiar one. The signatures I describe in this article are not secret. I have published them and discussed them at length.

Analysts look at new data and ask, “Does this fit the narrative I am already tracking?” This is the central failure mode of open-source intelligence as it currently functions. If Iran is the current obsession, every aircraft movement becomes evidence about Iran. The pattern of the nuclear exercise, which does not fit that narrative, becomes invisible.

The Evidence for an April 2026 SKYMASTER

The April evidence is visible in three sources.

First, Offutt Air Force Base, which hosts U.S. Strategic Command, has publicly announced a large-scale exercise this week. This is the most concrete public anchor. When an installation like Offutt announces major exercise dates, and the behavior of the command-and-control system changes in step with those dates. The connection is not hard to make.

Second, airspace reservations. There are specific blocks of airspace, in the North Atlantic and the Pacific, that are routinely reserved for Mercury E-6B operations. Under normal conditions, these reservations are short. A plane goes up, does its work, and the airspace returns to ordinary use within a few hours. Before and during large nuclear exercises, the pattern changes. You begin to see 24-hour reservations, stacked across multiple days, in multiple blocks of the E-6B training airspace. The arrangement does not look like ordinary operations. It looks like infrastructure being held open for sustained activity.

I have built a visualization that plots these reservations on a map and lets you manipulate a timeline to see which blocks are active at any given moment. The purpose is not just display. It is to let you make your own educated guess about when the event is likely to take place, using the same evidence I am using. You can tab through the coming days, watch the reservation patterns change, and draw your own conclusions. You are not reliant on me to tell you what the signal means. You are looking at the same signal.

Access to the map is gated behind passwords that I have been distributing through a small puzzle trail on X. This is partly for amusement and partly to filter the audience down to readers who are actually interested in the details. (The game is not meant to be hostile or inaccessible, though. If you are not fluent in English and cannot solve the puzzles, contact me on X and I will provide the passwords directly.) When you move the timeline across mid-April 2026, you see a cluster of unusually long reservations appearing in the same seasonal window that has produced large SKYMASTER events in previous years.

At the moment I recorded the livestream, on the evening of Wednesday April 15, the active pattern was suggestive but incomplete. Some long reservations were visible. Others, particularly on the U.S. East Coast, were not yet active. My reading was that Wednesday night was unlikely to be the main event, and Thursday was also unlikely. April has historically been a messy month for these events, with activity spreading across more than a week.

Third, the HFGCS traffic itself. During the week prior to this one, unusual radio checks were heard on the HFGCS. The callsigns heard performing radio checks were SPELLCASTER and BELLPEPPER. It is a technical and subtle point, but there appears to be an effective limit to how long a callsign is. Most callsigns are no more than 9 characters long. EMANATION, HEADBOARD, and TREASURER are examples of such callsigns. SPELLCASTER and BELLPEPPER are longer callsigns.

For anyone who diligently monitors and documents activity on the HFGCS, these callsigns would be recognized as conspicuous. The evidence is circumstantial and the correlation is not great, but such unusual radio checks may have been signs of preparation for a large-scale exercise.

None of these three sources is conclusive on its own but together, they point toward a SKYMASTER event being lined up.

Why the E-6Bs Are Harder to Track

Mercury E-6B aircraft were once easy to follow on public flight-tracking websites. During some of my earlier streams, I kept a live map open showing exactly where the E-6Bs were while EAMs were being broadcast. I was, in retrospect, a little too pleased with myself about how predictable the pattern was.

Starting in late 2024 and accelerating through early 2025, the visibility decreased. E-6Bs began to appear under false hex codes more often. They disappeared from public trackers entirely more often. During some exercises, radio traffic suggested more aircraft were airborne than appeared on trackers.

A few people have suggested that I embarrassed the Air Force into tightening visibility. This idea is tempting. There was a live stream where I was openly amused at how easy E-6B tracking had become, confidently predicting hourly behavior on air. Visibility tightened soon after.

The timeline is suggestive. However, I do not believe it. The scale is wrong. The U.S. military does not restructure its emissions control posture around a single YouTube channel with a few dozen concurrent viewers. When agencies actually decide to harden a signature, they are responding to adversary collection, to congressional inquiry, to formal recommendations from their own analysts — not to whatever mildly popular content drifted across someone’s feed that week. The more likely explanation is the one I described earlier. In a post-New START environment, the United States has reasons to reduce the granularity of signals it emits about its nuclear forces. This is not primarily aimed at hobbyists. It is aimed at adversary and allied intelligence services. The decrease in public visibility is a symptom of a broader strategic shift, not a reaction to any individual monitor.

It is also worth being honest about why the self-aggrandizing version appeals. If I were the protagonist of the story, then my work would be important enough to prompt a reaction from the state. That is a flattering frame, but it is not likely to be true. The more accurate reading is that I was briefly on the surface of a larger change I had no role in producing.

This matters for analysis. The baseline we built during the easier years remains useful. But any current estimate about aircraft numbers and movements during an exercise is now less certain than it was two years ago. We have to work from more indirect evidence.

Technical Questions That Come Up Repeatedly

Two technical questions arrive in nearly every Q&A session.

Are Emergency Action Messages one-time pad encryption, and is it pointless to analyze them?

No, not in the strict sense. A genuine one-time pad requires single-use key material, a single sender, a single recipient, and careful destruction of pads after use. This model does not fit HFGCS traffic. Many messages are explicitly addressed to multiple recipients. Some days contain dozens of messages. The logistics of distributing fresh pads at that scale would be impractical. Modern cryptography provides enough security without the constraints of strict one-time-pad procedure.

Is there a specific EAM that would genuinely alarm me?

Not on its own. A real Emergency Action Message, sent in anger rather than in training, would probably look and sound very similar to an exercise message. The difference would be context. In a real crisis, every major news outlet would be covering a nuclear emergency in plain language. Official channels would be warning of imminent escalation. You would not need to be listening to HFGCS to know that something was wrong.

Why I Am Frustrated with Open-Source Intelligence

There are creators who know these events are exercises and still publish “this is not a drill” content because fear produces higher engagement than nuance. There are well-followed accounts that confidently misread basic patterns, like assuming every B-52 movement during a declared exercise week must be preparing to attack Iran, and who receive credit for expertise because they claim expertise. The internet has more than a few people asserting decades of HFGCS monitoring experience, yet they’ve consistently failed to identify entire nuclear exercises unless someone else flags the events first.

So that I am not upset about being excluded from their clubs. Rather, I am disappointed that these clubs are not better at the one task they have assigned themselves.

In the weeks before the February 11 SKYMASTER that the open-source intelligence community missed, Major Claire Randolph of U.S. Air Forces Central, speaking at the Mitchell Institute’s MIDNIGHT HAMMER lessons-learned sessions, described social-media analysts as “Twitter randos tracking and publishing our locations in ways we would consider top secret.” Many people in OSINT took offense at the “Twitter randos” framing. What I found genuinely confusing was the reaction. I am not invested in the idea that Randolph had me specifically in mind. Probably she did not. But as a thought experiment: watching respectable OSINT accounts take offense at her description, I kept thinking that if anyone had standing to be uncomfortable here, wouldn’t it be me? Someone building multi-year tables of nuclear exercises and tracking command aircraft — that is what I do — produces exactly the kind of consolidated picture she was describing. An aggregate feed retweeting press releases does not. Yet the aggregate feeds were furious, and I was not.

Part of why I was not furious is that I thought about this question years ago and settled it. When I started the project, I used to include a disclaimer on some of my content: the U.S. military could DMCA my work down if they wanted, but if anyone at a credible .mil address ever contacted me and explained that specific material was a meaningful security problem, I would take it down voluntarily. I did not anticipate my work ever rising to that level, and in practice nothing I have published has drawn that kind of response. But my disposition was settled from the start.

Accounts that took offense seemed to hold something like the opposite position. They felt entitled to do the work, entitled to the audience it brings, and affronted by the suggestion that any of it might complicate a real operation. That inversion is what I find perplexing. The people least likely to actually consolidate sensitive signals were the most defensive about being described as people who do. Meanwhile, the sort of person whose work arguably matches the description best had already decided, that the appropriate response to a credible concern would be to comply with it anyways.

On Vagueposting

Careful analytical work does not produce engagement. A tweet that says “here is a 164-character EAM from today, and here is its structure” reaches a few hundred people. A vaguepost that says “something big is happening this week” produces hundreds of replies, accusations of fear-mongering, and substantial reach.

Vagueposting is a low-effort method of signaling that something interesting is developing, nudging the readers who actually care toward the detailed material I have already published, and filtering out the audience members who only engage with crisis language. If you are annoyed by vagueposting, the rational response is to ignore it. Replies feed the algorithm. Outrage generates reach.

Meanwhile, if you feel I am withholding information, the SKYMASTER tables, the EAM length charts, and the airspace visualization have been online for years. They contain more than enough material for anyone who wants to understand what is happening this week.

Where This Leaves Us

The point of this article is not to induce panic and not to encourage complacency. It is to give you a more accurate sense of what “something big” actually means in this narrow context.

At the time of writing, the evidence suggests the following:

A large U.S. nuclear command-and-control exercise has been publicly signaled by Offutt Air Force Base. The airspace reservation pattern in the E-6B training blocks resembles the setup for previous SKYMASTER events. Conspicuous airspace reservations (NOTAMs) have now been issued through April 18, and more could still be published. The most likely window for the main event could be Friday or Saturday of this week, though April has historically produced multi-day sequences rather than single peaks, and the current NOTAM footprint is consistent with that.

I have already documented more SKYMASTER events than I planned to when I started this project. The tables, charts, calendars, and visualizations are all online. My forecasts for the remainder of 2026 are also public. If those forecasts miss, they will miss in public. I feel like I have little left to prove. The exercises themselves remain fascinating to me, and in some ways more fascinating now than when I started, given how the strategic environment has changed around them. But after monitoring and documenting as many as I have, I no longer feel compelled to try to catch every one. And when I do catch one, I may not take the additional time to publish this information online. The publishing is where most of the work is. Writing timecards, preparing visualizations, answering questions, moderating comment sections — the monitoring itself is the easy part. The incentive structure does not support the rest.

This week illustrates the point. I have been watching the situation develop for several days now, sharing information on X and YouTube as it comes. With NOTAMs already issued through April 18 and the possibility of more, the window could stretch out considerably. Some of what happens this week I may capture. Some I may not. That is the honest expectation to set.

I will post when I have time. I may keep the stream running when circumstances allow. I will probably continue vagueposting when it amuses me. I have already stepped back from the role of full-time monitor. The tools are there for anyone who wants them. You need a browser, some patience, and a willingness to treat “just an exercise” as worth understanding on its own terms.

Everyone’s favorite guy Curtis Yarvin has been writing some thoughtful posts about Bitcoin in the last few months. He says he has no vested interest in it, but whether he does or not, he’s never been a big shill (and still isn’t) and you may find his posts on it interesting whatever your opinion on what he’s better known for (i.e. his politicsposting).

I have some thoughts in response to this specific post;

This is a straight-forward explanation of Bitcoin valuation. If, like me, you’ve heard a lot of people say “Bitcoin is the world’s future currency” when advocating it the past 15+ years, you’ve been listening to people who never quite knew what they were talking about. All the old posts from people who really “got” Bitcoin positioned it not as a currency but as a store of value – i.e. while skepticism of USD might inform the creation and adoption of Bitcoin, it does not follow that it means BTC supplants USD. That skepticism alongside an actual understanding of BTC would mean it follows that BTC supplants gold and other ‘stable’ things that are appropriate for long-term and scaled storage or backup of ‘value’.

I’d like to respond to this in two ways. First, I’d like to respond in a way that accept’s Curtis’s thesis that Bitcoin either goes to infinity or to zero, depending on whether or not people accept Bitcoin as a store of value. I’d then like to respond in a second, separate way that reject’s Curtis’s thesis – that Bitcoin is by its design eventually going to go to zero.

On Bitcoin as an option on hyperbitcoinization

Bitcoin is shilled hardest by people who want to be rewarded for being early to Bitcoin. This is made obvious by the contradiction of their most frequent statements – “we’re so early” (in reference to being among some fractional percentage of global population that holds it) vs. “Bitcoin’s value is in its 15+ year social consensus as a store of value”.

Bitcoin is a proof-of-work system, with contributions from people that’ve had their GPUs burning electricity through the 10s and 20s. It’s an expensive and difficult endeavor to replicate, but the end result is not a productive asset, but a ledger. A ledger that points to guys that’ve had GPUs running. (Okay? Why is it in our interest to value that?)

Bitcoin’s position is based on provenance, but if the powers that be decide tomorrow that provenance should point to a different chain (whether that’s Ethereum, a central bank digital currency, or some yet-to-be-created protocol with better energy efficiency or privacy or programmability) then Bitcoin’s 15-year head start means nothing. Provenance is only valuable if people continue to care about that specific provenance.

The guys who Bitcoin’s ledgers point to keep telling us we need to care about that provenance, but they’re only a fractional percentage of the global population. They assume that when USD crashes, we’ll all suddenly accept their insight and the provenance of Bitcoin will become our new foundation. But if they fancy themselves as the successors to those who forced the world to adopt gold as a store of value, they fundamentally misunderstand history: nobody willfully conceded to those with more gold as superior. The world was coerced to accept gold over centuries. They were coerced by armies and by empires and by men with weapons who demanded taxes in gold and killed those who refused.

Bitcoin’s early adopters have provenance. They have a ledger. They have cryptographic proof. What they don’t have, and what actually mattered for every successful monetary system in history, is the power to force anyone to care.

On Bitcoin as an intelligence trap

Ultimately, I disagree with Curtis's posts because I think framing BTC as "it's either a store-of-value if people accept it, or eventually goes to zero if they don't" is too naive. It ignores the elephant in the room – that Bitcoin was created by the NSA as a simple trap meant to coerce adversaries to reveal when they've 'cracked' quantum computing. Refer to Exhibit A (Satoshi’s wallets are the cheese);

Of course, “the NSA created bitcoin” sounds like a ludicrous conspiracy theory but it’s a conspiracy theory that is validated the higher the price of BTC goes and the longer Satoshi’s wallets remain dormant in spite of it.

If we accept this, then bitcoin is by virtue of its design and intention eventually going to go to zero. That doesn’t mean it’s going to go to zero – not because we can safely assume no one has ‘cracked’ Bitcoin yet, but because even if we accept they have, they may not want to grab the cheese from the NSA’s cheese trap.

Anyone holding Bitcoin is playing a relatively difficult game of game theory.

Suppose China has already achieved quantum computing capability sufficient to crack Bitcoin's elliptic curve cryptography. They face a choice: steal Satoshi's 1.1 million coins, worth roughly $110 billion1, and reveal their quantum capability to the world, or maintain strategic silence and preserve that capability for higher-value targets. The calculus is straightforward. Among other things, military communications, nuclear command and control systems, financial infrastructure, and satellite encryption all of these rely on cryptography that quantum computing could potentially break. The intelligence value of secretly possessing this capability while adversaries remain unaware of it isn’t easy to figure out. On the other hand, $110 billion is pretty simple math – it’s less than a percent of China’s GDP. Imagine revealing you have a nuclear weapon nobody knew about by using it to rob a bank.

Russia faces similar incentives, though their threshold is lower given economic desperation under sanctions. At current prices, Satoshi's coins represent about 5% of Russia's GDP. It’s meaningful, but would still not worth be worth burning their quantum advantage if they have one.

We’ve mentioned China and Russia, and now we might as well mention North Korea? Probably not. North Korea is having agents pose as IT workers for American companies to steal salaries, and draining cryptobro wallets with rather uncomplicated schemes. If they’re engaged in these sorts of games, we can safely conclude the current price of BTC is already several times over worth it for North Korea to reveal any quantum capability they had. They are optimizing for immediate cashflow, not R&D moonshots.

The threshold where rational state actors actually worth talking about might be tempted to steal Satoshi’s wallets likely sits somewhere around $400-500 billion for Russia (requiring Bitcoin to reach roughly $400,000 per coin) and several trillion for China (requiring Bitcoin to reach $2-3 million per coin).

Bitcoin is a piece of cheese designed for these guys to grab it. Whatever your thought on either or both of these countries, it seems unreasonable to assume neither of them will ever be capable of it, and while they’d generally be incentivized not to reveal that capability, Satoshi’s wallets are a bounty that’s also incentivizing to them, and there are prices where they’ll admit they can claim it.

But focusing on foreign adversaries misses the more immediate domestic threat. If you’re holding or interested in buying Bitcoin, you should not take the above analysis to mean “Bitcoin can safely run to at least $399,999 per coin, or even $1.9 million if we dismiss the idea Russia will ever be capable of it.” Google, IBM, and every quantum computing startup are all credible threats incentivized to crack Bitcoin, and there’s no mechanism for coordination with the NSA on this matter. Even if these companies wanted to cooperate, the individual engineers working on quantum computing have their own incentives entirely.

Consider IBM’s position if they achieve a breakthrough tomorrow. They could short Bitcoin through every available instrument, crack Satoshi’s wallets, and be done by close of business. The NSA won’t stop them. It’s not worth revealing or admitting whether they invented Bitcoin, and even if they didn’t, everyone is better served if the cheese remains in place for adversarial states to eventually grab anyway. And if somehow the NSA did try to stop IBM as a company, the engineers who figured it out would simply go rogue. Or more likely, they’d have quit two weeks earlier to do exactly that.

Russia. China. Israel2(!) IBM. Google. Individual engineers past and present in any of these countries and/or at any of these organizations. All of them are incentivized to work on this, all of them are capable of it to varying degrees, all have different price points at which revelation makes sense. The game theory gets exponentially more complex and unpredictable with each additional actor.

Right now, as you read this, someone is probably working on cracking Bitcoin. They might succeed tomorrow. They might have succeeded yesterday. At current prices around $100,000 per Bitcoin, if Satoshi’s wallets drain while you’re holding, you won’t get a warning. The price would crash instantly, exchanges would halt trading, and you’d be left holding a bag that just became worthless.

Conclusion

Both of my responses to Curtis lead to the same conclusion, just through different paths:

• The provenance argument: Bitcoin has no coercive power to force acceptance. Its value depends entirely on voluntary consensus that could shift to any alternative at any time. Early adopters mistake documented scarcity for inevitable value, when monetary systems have historically required armies to enforce acceptance, not just good record-keeping. They’re not just asking the rest of us to voluntarily make them rich for having good GPUs that are really good at record-keeping, they’re asking us to voluntarily concede they’re our new superiors. This would be without precedent in the entire history of monetary systems.

• The intelligence trap argument: Bitcoin has a cryptographic expiration date determined by quantum computing advancement. That date is unknown but approaching, creating a time-bomb that rational actors should want to exit before it detonates. The fact that it hasn’t exploded yet tells us nothing about whether it will explode tomorrow.

It is a general, cringe-y practice online to conclude posts like these with “this is not financial advice, do your own research”. Well of course it isn’t and of course you should. I will note that I believe a lot of people who’ve made a lot of money speculating on Bitcoin have done so with no correct understanding of Bitcoin and correctly incorrect theses about what it is or what it could be, and a lot of people have probably lost money to the same end despite a better understanding. Michael Burry of “The Big Short” fame made a lot of money sanely betting against the markets – a lot of other people made the same bet and lost money, because the market stayed irrational longer than they could stay solvent. (While I am fairly confident Bitcoin will go to zero, that doesn’t mean I have the slightest idea when it will.)

This was originally published to Twitter on January 14 2026.

This article was prepared in advance to respond to any accounts on X, YouTube, or other SNS platforms sensationalizing any “SKYMASTER” voice communications heard on the United States military’s shortwave radio communications network, the HFGCS on January 14 2026.

(In the interest of clarity, the article will not discuss my suspicions that the exercise was delayed by 7 hours and my guesses about a ‘motive’ for this. For that, interested parties may review the discussion in this thread: [link]. This article focused primarily on ensuring the audience has a correct understanding of what “SKYMASTER” is.)

Summary

“SKYMASTER events” appear to be a part of routine exercises run by US STRATCOM. They do not correspond to real-world events. Anyone who claims otherwise must explain how I was able to predict a ‘real-world event’ taking place today weeks or even months in advance. I previously made statements that I expected to hear SKYMASTER on either January 04 or 14 2026, as explained either implicitly or explicitly in the following posts;

• Implicitly on a forum post onhfunderground.com dated September 27 2025:

  https://www.hfunderground.com/board/index.php/topic,101303.msg460488.html#msg460488

• Explicitly on a GitHub gist dated January 04 2025; https://archive.is/30LMK

This article will provide 3 additional examples where I have forecast SKYMASTER activity days, weeks, or months in advance. (While there are many more examples that demonstrate my ability to successfully anticipate them before they take place, 3 have been selected to keep the article from being overly long.)

Full explanation

I have listened to the HFGCS since early 2022. The HFGCS is regularly used to broadcast Emergency Action Messages (EAMs). The network appears to be used for both real operations, but unsurprisingly, for non-urgent routine communications, as well as for exercises of varying degrees.

I noticed that the “SKYMASTER” callsign was heard on the HFGCS during periods of unusual communications. Without getting lost in the fine details, “SKYMASTER” would only be mentioned a few times a year and during periods of irregular activity on the HFGCS.

I also noticed that these events, when the “SKYMASTER” callsign was heard, seemed to be routine. If this was correct, I would be able to ‘forecast’ or ‘predict’ these exercises in advance. This appeared to be the case, and I have demonstrated this at least a few times in the past.

Example 1: August 2024

In the above livestream which broadcast August 05 2024, I comment;

Keep an eye on this YouTube channel later this month, and note the following dates. I’ll give you three possibilities, and they’re all going to be Wednesdays. August 21st, August 28th, September 4th. If I was a betting man, of those three dates I would pick Wednesday August 28th, but I am forecasting what is known as a SKYMASTER event [...and a proposed explanation of what a ‘SKYMASTER event’ is follows]

It is good I am not a betting man, since SKYMASTER calls were not heard on place August 28th. However, the first of the three proposed dates were correct, and SKYMASTER calls were heard on the HFGCS on August 21st;

Example 2: January 2025

Forecast video link:

On January 5 2025, myself and the JANG WONYOUNG SKYMASTER SURVEILLANCE COMMITTEE published a video forecasting a SKYMASTER event for either January 08 2025 or January 15 2025.

SKYMASTER calls were heard on the HFGCS on January 08 2025, as recorded here:

Example 3: September 2025

A forecast was published on September 21 that SKYMASTER traffic would be heard on the HFGCS on September 24 both on YouTube and here on X;

Actually, this more ‘sensational’ version of a forecast published on September 21 was preceded by a simpler comment on August 31st, suggesting either September 21st or 24th as possible;

SKYMASTER traffic was heard on the HFGCS on September 24th, as recorded in a livestream here;

In the above examples, you will notice that the process of forecasting slowly becomes more accurate. You will also notice that the method of communicating these forecasts becomes increasingly obfuscated – hidden in replies, buried in videos the average person finds confusing or intimidating. This is because in each case, despite the forecast being made public in advance, sensationalists on various SNS claimed that the SKYMASTER activity corresponded to real US nuclear activity. In more than one case, a prominent YouTube channel claimed that nuclear missiles had actually been launched because of the the SKYMASTER event. Incidental to the fact no missiles launched, neither the channel nor the channel’s audience bothered to reconcile how a small Twitter and YouTube channel that seemed to be pretty flippant with these forecasts – sometimes pairing information with Japanese or Korean pop music and posting them alongside AI generated images of idol-like women – would be able to anticipate these in advance. This led to the forecasts being published in increasingly ridiculous ways. This brings us to the current example, where I forecast the January 14 2026 SKYMASTER activity months in advance, and the forecast was published using even more obfuscated methods.

Example 4: January 2026

On December 29 2025 I made a confusing image and posted it to my X account;

This image translates as “[26] [01] [14 xor 07]”, or 2026.01.14 or 2026.01.07”. The rationale for how the individual members of the kpop girl group tripleS represent numbers was slowly explained in a series of replies to the post over a period of about two weeks, concluding with a full explanation;

However, I recognize that this could be seen as ambiguous, so I made posts that would make this forecast more explicit in advance. The first is a post to the forum hfunderground.com on September 27 2025;

Anyone who reads the post will note that SKYMASTER activity took place on the 2nd Wednesday of January 2023, the 2nd Wednesday of January 2024, and the 2nd Wednesday of January 2025.

However, since some might argue that the September 2025 forum post does not make an explicit prediction, and they do not understand the forecast posted to X on December 2025, I decided to make an explicit post on January 04 2026, which is titled “SKYMASTER FORECASTS FOR 2026”.

As with a majority of my videos, posts, and other content, I use YYMMDD. So again, “January 07 2026 or January 14 2026”.

Posting the forecast to GitHub is particularly useful, since the website tracks the version history of the article, allowing you to track edits to the article and see that the forecast was originally posted January 04 and was not edited in afterward:

Of course, if you are still unconvinced, I also made sure it was saved by an internet archival site; https://archive.is/30LMK

So, anyone who is claiming that the “SKYMASTER” callsign on the HFGCS on January 14 2026 is necessarily claiming I have psychic powers. These psychic powers would allow me to predict major US military activity days, weeks, or even months in advance, with an increasing degree of accuracy. I do not understand why I would not already be arrested by the US military since I would represent a major danger to their cause. Alternatively, I do not understand why I would not already be kidnapped by a foreign country since I would represent an invaluable asset for their cause. (Actually, did you know I haven’t even been interviewed by any news agency about these posts? How is it possible SKYMASTER is a major military event that I can predict but I am still able to freely pursue it as a hobby?)

You may ask the people who say SKYMASTER is “real” about this and see how they respond.

The increasing number of hysteric reactions to these events has led to me making increasingly obscure methods of publishing these forecasts. I have then been using increasingly convoluted methods to verify these forecasts for anyone that is reasonably skeptical afterwards. This is increasingly unenjoyable for something I originally pursued as a hobby where I hoped to meet intelligent people, and perhaps assist in some interesting project.

Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect works as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray’s case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward-reversing cause and effect. I call these the “wet streets cause rain” stories. [Newspapers are full of stories like these.]

In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story-and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read with renewed interest as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about far-off Palestine than it was about the story you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.

I invite you to keep the concept of Gell-Mann amnesia in your mind throughout these entries. It was certainly something which I kept in mind throughout my efforts these last few years.

By the way, I did not intend to write a blog entry. As I was writing things I intended to discuss, it turned into a full-blown retrospective. I expect this to have poor audience retention because of the choice of format. However, many ideas discussed here are important, and I believe the writing style ended up the way it did for a reason.

I began to listen to the HFGCS in early 2022. After quarantines related to COVID-19 had brought so many people online, and these people spent more time online than ever before, I had the impression that all of my online hobbies and interests were suffering and becoming unenjoyable. The choice of topics were poor and the quality of conversations were poor. After taking the opportunity to reflect on it seriously I considered this was at least somewhat my fault. Some of my hobbies and interests were rather childish and so they had no resilience against any sudden influx of an event such as this. It seemed to be a belated opportunity to grow up a bit and pursue interests that would be more idiosyncratic. An idiosyncratic hobby might have selection criteria leading to the average person being more intelligent, and I could read or even participate in more interesting conversations.

I am not an orthodox person. I enjoy making things a challenge for myself. With this in mind, I decided I would look for something like this in an unexpected place. I remembered that 4chan’s News & Politics board had had conversations about some sort of unusual disease coming from China several months before the news about COVID-19 broke globally, so I thought that checking /pol/ for signs of something interesting among the flood of stupid and conspiratorial converations otherwise might be an interesting exercise.

Sooner than later, I noticed a thread called “SKYING GENERAL” (also known as /skg/). This thread was effectively a “4chan version” of the general continuity of OSINT posts on Twitter (X), with users posting flight data they saw as interesting and would also mention hearing messages on the US military’s shortwave radio communications network, the HFGCS. I found the radio messages more interesting, and I also found interesting the insistence of some users that the HFGCS messages were strongly indicating that a war between Russia and Ukraine would begin. Although I had seen many news sources and other SNS accounts discussing this possibility, I was seeing vague statements about “buildup” and what I felt was unserious analysis of the Russian president’s body language, public statements, and so on. I was given the impression that this was more theatrical than analytical, but the HFGCS messages seemed to be something material, quantifiable, and real. If what they were saying was true, then the HFGCS had a sort of ‘predictive’ ability and therefore would be among the most important data points in the world. Why hadn’t I ever heard of it before? Why were so few people talking about it? Much like 4chan had tipped many off about COVID-19 months before it occurred, it seemed 4chan was now a serendipitous bread crumb to something significant. I began to listen to the HFGCS regularly, and took notes and recordings of what I was hearing and sharing it to 4chan.

I quickly noticed something unusual, however. 4chan’s interest in HFGCS messages seemed to be conditional. Rather, it did not seem to be the primary focus. For example, only a few days after I started, I noted hearing 30 Emergency Action Messages (EAMs) broadcasting on the HFGCS. Earlier in the week, people on 4chan had been excited hearing 10 or 15 messages on the HFGCS in a single day. They said this was a remarkably high number and meant that war was imminent. So a day with 30 EAMs must be rather urgent, right? When I posted my observation on 4chan, however, nobody seemed to care. This was confusing to me. A few days later, however, people got excited on a day with only 10 or 20 messages again. I was developing the impression that their monitoring efforts were unserious, so I began to look elsewhere. I had already been posting information to X, but now began to look for other places to discuss the HFGCS.

I suppose some people might be reading this article and identify 4chan as the issue. Many people have a low opinion of 4chan and think of it as a site for idiots. It might have eventually ended up that way, but at the start it was actually an effective selection for people generally more intelligent than average, and now and again even today there are still conversations on the site that are significantly better than what you will find anywhere else. Regardless of your opinions on 4chan, however, I can report that conversations about the HFGCS were considerably worse.

From the informational links on 4chan and from searches online, I found a few communities that focused on shortwave radio as a hobby, and would regularly discuss the HFGCS. One was eam.watch, a site I have written multiple dedicated criticisms of these last few years. Another one would be the chatbox of the University of Twente’s online shortwave radio receiver, the world’s most popular shortwave radio receiver. There were regularly active members of this chatbox. They would answer questions from anyone, but would also correct anyone who posted anything not quite to their liking. They were very particular people who insisted had been involved in shortwave radio as a hobby for a very long time, and therefore knew the correct information about everything. Particular to the HFGCS, they would be inconsistent in questions I asked. They said that the HFGCS was not particularly interesting to them, but when I would share information about what I had noticed in case anyone else might find it interesting, these “elders” would regularly correct me. But their ‘corrections’ would be contrary to what I myself had heard. While incidental corrections about the text of a message would have been appreciated, it was bizarre to be corrected about the number of messages I had heard one day, especially when the discrepancy would be my hearing 30 and they would ‘correct’ it to 10.

I became familiar with these people and their names, and as I searched elsewhere for information about the HFGCS and people interested in it, I saw some of these people were members of the eam.watch or priyom.org Discord, some had YouTube channels, and various BBSes and other types of forums and message boards. I searched the history of these communities and their contributions and noticed they would rarely volunteer information themselves, but would show up to ‘correct’ people. Given my own immediate experience, I expected other people would point out inconsistencies or problems with their corrections, but the opposite was true. They introduced themselves as respected and knowledgeable experts on the HFGCS, and people accepted them in this way.

Around the same time as I was realizing all this, I was still interested in the HFGCS, because the war between Russia and Ukraine had started after all, and my continued monitoring of the HFGCS did suggest that radio activity had been unusual around the time the war began. However, for reasons I cannot remember, I ended up having my attention diverted or otherwise distracted. Since I kept notes of things like this, you can see a large gap in time in my monitoring efforts, with a break between February 24, 2022 and September 29, 2022;

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLVmgc_OQTMfxRGl6j5st045iCS9h6eu6J

For the initial period, my monitoring efforts and what I uploaded were somewhat incidental. I was not trying to listen to all the messages 24 hours a day because I was not sure how to go about doing that. It would take until June 2023 to get an effective method of doing so, but in late 2022 my intention in returning this hobby was to reckon with all the inconsistencies and irrationalities I had heard from the “respected members” of the HFGCS monitoring community.

Since 2022, many people have either misunderstood or otherwise misconstrued my intentions or expected outcomes of monitoring the HFGCS. Many people believed or claimed I said it would be possible to eventually ‘crack’ and solve the meaning of any individual Emergency Action Message. For example, the text of an EAM, when transcribed from the radio, might look something like this;

C7AZI7TEOPOW4UALJA5JFQYLDW2NIP

They are encrypted messages. I do not have a strong background in computer science or cryptography, and never suggested otherwise. I never actually said it would be possible for myself to ever “crack” any of these messages. I’d like to go over a few of the things I can recall having as an intended goal when I resumed monitoring the HFGCS in September 2022.

• I personally suspected there was no correlation between the quantity of EAMs broadcast on the HFGCS and geopolitical events. In other words, I doubted that the number of EAMs in January 2022 were necessarily related to a pending war between Russia and Ukraine. However, since the day the war began I thought there had been ‘unusual’ EAM traffic, I could not make a conclusion with certainty. I felt a long-term monitoring effort was a good use of time.

• I felt SNS was not doing a good job of capturing HFGCS activity. My thoughts on the University of Twente, 4chan, or other shortwave radio communities in 2022 are not the whole of this concern. Looking back on old recordings posted to YouTube and other websites, users would post partial recordings of a single message on the HFGCS. These videos would do very well, but for anyone attempting to do any serious research, it was completely useless at answering basic questions like “how many other messages broadcast on the HFGCS that day?” and therefore “what is the typical number of messages we can expect on the HFGCS on any given day?” It was not just 4chan or the average user who was unable to answer this question, the proposed average as offered by the ‘respected elders’ seemed to be incorrect. Even if it was, they had already discredited themselves in my mind by giving me false ‘corrections’ earlier in the year.

• The ‘respected elders’ of talking about the HFGCS were taking advantage of a niche interest to appear knowledgeable about something they knew nothing about. It seemed obvious to me that these ‘elders’ would be pretty easy to bring into a state of disrepute, because so many things they had already said seemed easy to prove wrong. In addition to the above, they claimed it was illegal to record EAMs. They also claimed it was illegal to transcribe EAMs. Since I had done both of these things across January and February of 2022, uploaded them to SNS such as YouTube and X, and had had nothing happen to me, I was immediately emboldened. When I challenged themselves on these points, they would cite things such as the Communications Act of 1934. I suspected they had done this to other people and they would become nervous and stop asking questions, but the conditions in 2022 were such that COVID had left me without meaningful work. As implied by my name, I had become a NEET. A NEET has a lot of time with their only question being what they might do with it. I had more than enough time to read not just the USA Communications Act of 1934, but also US FCC Regulations, Espionage Act (18 U.S.C. §§ 793–798), and various other regulations they claimed were relevant. I am generally competent in most things, and it did not take long to become familiar with these rules and regulations. When I asked them to explain how they interpreted these laws to mean what they claim they did, it became obvious to me that they were only pretending to have ever read any of them. From this, it became possible to question everything they insisted was true.

• While I never asserted I would be able to “crack” any EAM, I sincerely doubted that EAMs are encrypted with “one-time pads”. Rather than being impossible to crack, EAMs could be possible to crack with sufficient compute time and or compute power. This is theoretical point. A one-time pad is a completely secure encryption method that cannot be cracked with any known cryptographic method. Any method which falls short of a one-time pad theoretically can be cracked. This does not mean they are not secure. For example, not even bitcoin uses one-time pads, but many people feel comfortable putting significant sums of money into its system. This is because it currently takes an impractically large amount of computational time and power to “crack” any bitcoin. It is not worth the time and energy to try it. Why doesn’t bitcoin use a one-time pad anyways? It doesn’t quite work and isn’t practical. Similarly, a one-time pad system didn’t seem like it would work or be practical for the HFGCS and EAMs. The last few years, I’ve provided numerous examples of how EAMs would appear to not use one-time pads. Each time, some people would get confused and think I am suggesting this is a practical entry to “cracking” these messages. This was never once the case. Rather, my suggestion was that “For all these ‘respected elders’ who have said all these ridiculous things and you still take them seriously, here is another example of a ridiculous thing they are saying. Why do you take them seriously?”

To orient the audience, I did not begin to encounter “preppers” until early November of 2022. They were never my initial target or challenge. My hypothesis was that most people who had been interested in the HFGCS had done an extraordinarily poor job of monitoring the HFGCS, if they had made any attempt at all, and were saying nonsense that made them sound smart and was difficult to challenge. As someone who had become a NEET not because of incompetence but because of the current global situation, it seemed I was uniquely positioned to challenge this and set the record straight.

How did I do? On any given day, I will invite you to go to places like the University of Twente chatbox. Though they’re not always there, the “respected elders” like Zabastov/FirstToken and CD will still be there insisting EAMs are encrypted with one-time pads, and other users will defend them. The eam.watch Discord will still become instantly hostile to anyone suggesting methods to try and identify any sort of structure or routine to messages. They say it is illegal. Since I have input my legal name and address into YouTube, X, and other websites to set up various things, the US government can easily know who I am and where I live. I have offered multiple times to voluntarily comply with any takedown requests. Whether by way of a sudden content takedown, personal coercion or intimidation, or personally imprisoning me, there are any number of ways people like evapilotikari or moderator Matt/caperace could have been proven right. My continued presence proves them wrong and should disgrace them. Instead, they simply ignored my continued presence. From there, these community did not challenge these particular things which are obviously not true, and did not second-guess many other things they said which were untrue.

These “respected elders” made a mess of information about the HFGCS for years. My own best efforts to undo the damage they caused ended up distracted only a few weeks later when preppers became aware of my efforts, and the low-intelligence informational ecosystem they brought with them quickly turned things into a mess. I now had two groups of people I felt compelled to prove wrong. In any other situation, I would’ve recognized this hobby as becoming the total opposite of why I had selected to pursue the HFGCS as a pastime. However, the global pandemic made it the case that it was hard to simply “log off and find something else to do”. Looking back, my judgement was obviously impaired, but as someone who felt obliged to make a positive contribution to the world especially as a NEET, I decided to pursue this effort even more.

As mentioned, this is a very different article from what I had originally intended to write. I don’t know if it will keep people’s attention, but it is arguably more valuable anyways.

In 2023, I refocused most of my efforts towards X. This ended up being a good choice. This is not to say it was perfect. If I do go on and write more retrospectives for 2023 and/or 2024, I will most likely discuss examples like redanblacattack, shortwave78, and other “respected elders” who were present on X and equally useless and unreliable as the previous examples. They have mostly gone unquestioned here, too. I am not going to actively castigate or go after any OSINT account, asking them “why don’t you denounce these accounts, instead of quoting them as if they are a reliable source?”. However, as I continue to mention, the concept of Gell-Mann amnesia is necessarily invoked in my mind. If these accounts use unreliable sources for the HFGCS, they probably use unreliable sources for other points of information. It becomes much more difficult for me to take someone seriously as soon as I find out that they considered these people reputable, which makes me lose interest in remaining part of this community and doing it as a pastime.

For the most part, we have functionally reached the end of 2022, but I don’t want to end this entry with a negative feeling even if the year itself really did end that way. Though there are similar problems, the overall quality of conversation on X in 2022 was significantly better than it had been on YouTube, 4chan, Discord, and most other forums and chatboxes. (Unfortunately, X has now become just as bad as all these other SNS became back then.)

A few months starting to listen to the HFGCS in early 2022 and sharing information to YouTube and X, an online community of people known as “preppers” became aware of NEET INTEL. This community of people has been the greatest inconvenience and source of difficulty for me throughout my time listening to the HFGCS. Preppers are generally a source of problems for many people involved in any sort of military or geopolitical spaces. You will often see them in the replies of breaking news stories, announcing that the event is just as they expected, and since they are correct, it means they will be correct about the other things they post about. If you check their profiles, they will mostly post and share information about news stories claiming World War 3 is imminent and other things like this. It is a little bit different from conspiratorial thinking; they do not post about aliens (UFOs/UMAs), mythical creatures, or ideas like the humans in government secretly being lizards, but they will often fixate on conspiracies suggesting the world governments cannot be trusted and the world is a hostile place where any number of major geopolitical disasters are imminent. From recognizing the many risks to their way of life, they perceive a societal collapse to be imminent at any moment, and therefore they claim to believe it is important to be prepared to be self-sufficient and ready for such catastrophes. The name “prepper” comes from this idea of “preparation”.

I have provided a relatively unbiased explanation of what preppers are. From the explanation, it is not obvious why they have posed such a problem to me, or why I believe they will continue to be a problem for military and geopolitical information accounts and hobbyists for a long time. Also, this general idea of preparation does not sound like something unique to the English-speaking world, so why do I claim that the prepper phenomenon is unique to the English-speaking world? I’d like to explain all this more directly.

I am familiar with the fact that emergency preparedness is not unique to America or the English-speaking world. For example, many regions in Japan are at risk of earthquakes and tsunamis. Japanese people are taught from childhood to prepare for these disasters. Schools conduct regular drills. Many households keep emergency supplies. The government distributes information about evacuation routes and emergency procedures. This is all reasonable and proportionate to a real, well-documented risk.

The American prepper is different. The disasters they prepare for are not specific or well-documented. They prepare for "collapse". While their behavior on social media regularly identifies any number of events that represent a pending disaster and these pending disasters never come to pass at the scale they suggest, they still insist collapse is imminent. Therefore, rather than a real, well-documented risk such as an earthquake or tsunami, a prepper’s “collapse” is a vague concept that could mean economic collapse, nuclear war, civil war, pandemic, or some combination of all of these. Because the threat is vague, the preparation has no natural limit. A Japanese family might keep a few days of emergency water and food, a flashlight, and a radio. An American prepper might stockpile months or years of food, weapons, ammunition, medical supplies, and equipment for generating power or purifying water. Some build underground shelters. The scale of preparation often exceeds what would be useful for any realistic scenario.

More importantly, the psychology is different. A typical person preparing for an earthquake does not want the earthquake to happen. They prepare because they recognize they live in a region where earthquakes occur, and they want to survive if one happens. They would prefer if no earthquake ever came.

On the other hand, many American preppers appear to want their “collapse” to happen. When you observe them online, they do not seem afraid of the disasters they claim to prepare for. Actually, they seem excited. When a news story suggests instability or conflict, they share it eagerly. When tensions decrease, they do not seem relieved. They seem disappointed, and will often insist that the tensions have not actually decreased, or that the real threat is still coming. They describe the current world as corrupt, decadent, or unsustainable. A collapse would prove them right. It would also create a world where their preparations give them status and power, rather than making them seem strange to their neighbors.

I mentioned in my previous article that I find most preppers to be bitter. Let me explain what I mean by this. In the event of a natural disaster, if I had extra resources in my home and a stranger came to my house looking for extra resources, I believe I would provide them those resources. From conversations I’ve had with preppers, they have said they would not do the same. Their explanation for this is that the general public did not listen to them when they warned everyone to prepare. Therefore, the general public deserves whatever happens to them. The prepper has no obligation to help people who ignored their warnings.

This attitude reveals something important. Preppers are not simply someone who wants to survive a disaster. They are someone who resents the people around them and looks forward to a situation where that resentment is justified. In normal times, if you refuse to help your neighbor, you are considered a bad person. In a collapse, refusing to help your neighbor is reframed as vindication.

I do not think most preppers are aware of this about themselves. If you told them directly that they want civilization to collapse so they can feel vindicated, they would deny it. But their behavior is consistent with this interpretation. They have constructed an identity around being the person who saw the danger when no one else would listen. They seek out evidence of imminent collapse.

This is why preppers are drawn to accounts like mine. The HFGCS broadcasts Emergency Action Messages from the US military. To someone who wants to believe that nuclear war is imminent, this sounds like exactly the kind of thing that would provide evidence for their belief. When I post a recording of an EAM without context, they can share it and tell their followers it is a sign of imminent war. When I post an EAM with context explaining what it actually is, this does not help them, so they ignore it. When my context directly contradicts what they want to believe, they become hostile.

Rather than accepting the evidence and recognizing that EAMs do not represent evidence of imminent collapse, they disregard the evidence and maintain the idea that EAMs represent evidence of imminent collapse. This sounds like it should be impossible, but it is easily accomplished by constructing alternative information systems. Although rejecting mainstream and conventional media resources is not something unique to preppers, preppers are uncommon for also rejecting a majority of alternative media resources (e.g. large OSINT accounts, independent journalists with large followings) to construct their own information ecosystem from scratch.

Given everything we know about preppers, we know this information ecosystem is not inspired by a desire to share information more accurately, but to create an information system which rejects information that suggests anything other than a collapse being imminent. We can also intuit that the preppers who take it upon themselves to establish these information systems are not necessarily capable of the job. I personally believe it is unreasonable to suggest anyone who did not obtain credentials (e.g. a college program, professional working experience in established news organizations) cannot manage independent news and information reporting. I also do not think you necessarily need to be very intelligent to manage this. However, as a general statement, the type of person who rejects all existing information systems and decides to build their own is rarely doing so because they have superior judgment. More often, they are doing so because every existing system told them something they did not want to hear.

This creates a predictable outcome. The prepper information ecosystem does not filter for accuracy. It filters for alignment with the conclusion that collapse is imminent. Sources are considered trustworthy if they say alarming things, and untrustworthy if they provide context or reassurance. Over time, this ecosystem becomes worse rather than better, because anyone who develops better judgment and begins to provide accurate context will be rejected for the same reasons I was rejected. The only people who remain are those who continue to tell preppers what they want to hear.

I have watched this happen in real time. When I first began posting about the HFGCS, some preppers treated me as a valuable source. When I began to provide context that contradicted their expectations, I became a target. They did not conclude that their expectations were wrong. They concluded that I was wrong, or lying, or had been compromised in some way. They then sought out other sources who would tell them what they wanted to hear. The new sources were less knowledgeable than me, but this was not a problem for them. It was actually preferable.

It is preferable for a number of reasons. One of which is that I am hardly a singular incident. Each instance of rejecting a credible source of information creates a selection event among the prepper community. Anyone in the community who recognizes in that moment that their behavior is unreasonable will usually be unsuccessful in convincing others. They will be ostracized and leave. Anyone still in the community after such an event falls into one of two categories. The first are those who genuinely did not recognize the rejection of information as unreasonable. The second are those who recognized it, but decided their bitterness was more important than accurate information. Each selection event filters out people capable of self-correction and retains those who are not. Anyone who is filtered out is typically left powerless to stop the overall momentum of the community. I have often read posts from people that describe online prepper communities as cult-like. I agree with this assessment, since this repeated process of selection events is a clear similarity.

Also similar, from my experiences talking with some preppers, are some people who recognize there is something wrong with all this, but they have no real-world social connections. As unfortunate as it is, preppers offer these lonely people a sense of community. Being aware of the backwardness of it is not a protection against the fact that preppers are also cult-like in terms of exploitation, and even those who are part of these communities simply to pass the time are also exploited.

Some of these forms of ‘exploitation’ are ambiguous and some would say do not meet the definition. If you tune in to a prepper’s YouTube stream night after night and watch for hours, you have wasted your time, but it is hard to say how you have been exploited. However, if you watch these streams, you will see people regularly donate preppers money. Preppers will also regularly sell “preparation supplies” through their custom storefronts. Preppers will claim no one is coerced into doing either of these things, but it is preferable for them to present it as a voluntary choice to send or spend money with these channels, than it is to admit they’re being emotionally manipulated. Channels take advantage of the bitterness of committed preppers and the loneliness of less committed preppers with nowhere to go.

Another thing preppers do that is cult-like is police what information their community follows. After many large prepper accounts declared NEET INTEL an unacceptable source of information, some individual members of the community still followed me on Twitter or on YouTube. Other preppers would stay back and silently monitor to see who was interacting with my content. Since the community is already established, they would already have the contact information of the members they saw still interacting with mine or other unacceptable sources of information. They would either DM, email, or in the case of someone who had purchased something from the prepper’s storefront. These are not hypotheticals, these are events told to me by people who were part of this community.

Preppers have to maintain tight control over their community for two reasons. The first is that if any of their members are allowed to follow coherent information sources, it creates a cognitive dissonance and a challenge for the other members who are working on creating narrative information networks mean to supplant those. Their community needs to be unified in amplifying their alternative accounts that report “every EAM means war is about to happen” and not an account like NEET INTEL that provides rational context for what EAMs actually are used for. As well, there is an immediate financial concern. Preppers are their own primary customer, and any time or money spent elsewhere is time or money they believe should’ve been spent with preppers.

I have provided a very dark explanation of preppers. For any one prepper who says “I am not like that” and is telling the truth, my experience has been that they represent a fraction of the overall picture. Even the preppers who do not behave like a cult in terms of exploitation will behave similarly insofar as effective consolidation of only referring to each other for information. This nature of self-contained information retrieval is incredibly effective in an SNS environment of algorithm-driven propagation. If any large prepper account can guarantee himself a number of views, likes, reposts, and link shares for any information he puts out, he has created a consolidated basis of support for his ‘information’. From this stable baseline, the prepper is now able to have consistent opportunity for his information to be amplified to a general audience, every time, without question.

And from what I have seen, this appears to be working.

For example, one of the large prepper accounts who is guilty of the exact sort of exploitation and manipulation I describe above is also regularly putting their “own information” out onto YouTube and X. These posts are almost always self-evidently ridiculous. Almost all of their posts are written IN ALL CAPITAL LETTERS to create a false sense of urgency, often accompanied by emoji such as ⚠️🚨😳 and the like. To people familiar with the topics they post about, their information is nonsensical. They write hysterically about things we know are regular events. The overall tone, writing style, and general presentation reminds me of how a small child might pretend to report the news. Their ‘process’ of being proven right would appear to be a parody of selection bias. If the day before they write “I think something big will happen tomorrow in Europe” then the day after something happens in South America, they will quote their original writing and say the event in South America proves their prediction was right. To be honest, it is difficult to tell whether this person is simply pretending to be stupid because it gets them more attention, or really are that stupid.

Whatever the case, these posts irritate a large number of people, and the replies and quotes will be full of people angrily attempting to correct them. This process has been completely ineffective, and in the span of a few months, they went from a few hundred to over 25000 followers. All these replies are doing is giving them stronger social media presence, and they use this stronger social media presence to go back to their core prepper audience and say it is proof of their relevance. Their core preppers are now emboldened than ever – their narrative which they intend to replace reality with appears to be coming true. Their bitter worldview is being vindicated.

Since 2022, my problems with a variety of preppers like these were inevitable. I was sharing honest and accurate information about a topic area they had effectively monopolized to replace information with an antisocial narrative. I did initially attempt to try and reach some kind of normalized relationship, with a secondary motive of gradually supplanting them and getting their audience to stop talking nonsense. Our communications were sporadic, brief, and mostly strained. I was mostly struggling to understand whether these people were as stupid as they seemed, and maybe I was being arrogant. By early 2024, I was provided information about cult-like behavior as I described above, and quickly recognized I was out of my element and immediately ended and renounced any association and any communication. At that time, a prepper community, which had been mixed, rejected me across the board. Mentioning “NEET INTEL” at all in many of these communities will instantly get you banned from their chatboxes, BBSes, etc. At which point many of these people would come to my channel and say “I just got banned from XXXXX channel”, and share stories about how “XXXXX is such an idiot" and so on.

I have tried to explain and begged people like this to understand the situation in full. If XXXXX is as stupid as these people say, they must be even stupider for going around and providing free advertising for them. Without censure, many people are going to be curious and look up to see what an account like this is seeing. People actively going out of their way to find their content is a free boost for them in the algorithm. This hyperbolic situation is not simply to be complained about online, it is an outright scam.

When Americans find out that people from India have taken advantage of their elderly and vulnerable population by calling them with scams to provide them their credit card numbers, buy and send them gift cards, and so on they are rightfully angry and seek restitution. However, when Americans find out that someone from their own country is scamming their elderly and vulnerably population, they seem to be unsure of how to do anything but complain about it. As exploitative as Indian phone scammers or Somali day care providers in Minnesota are, the preppers on English social media are just as bad or even worse, but as far as I know nobody has ever tried to call the police or any other authority on the matter. Instead, they complain on end, which is exactly what they want you to do.

Until someone takes this seriously, the topic areas which preppers have decided fall under their jurisdiction – whether it’s a niche area like information about the HFGCS and EAMs, military events, or global news and geopolitics – will continue to have alternative information sources which the English-speaking community has so far failed to try and seriously combat. The wider community will simply continue to see accounts with large numbers of followers, views, and replies. Since nobody is explaining they are a cult, they will simply understand them as ‘controversial’. The international community, which is not necessarily going to recognize why a post like ⚠️⚠️⚠️ A MISSILE IS ABOUT TO STRIKE ⚠️⚠️⚠️ is being taken so seriously, is going to be confused about which sources are credible and which are not.

For myself, all this is being turned into a game. It has not been a game I enjoy. When I look back and consider why I decided to get into listening to the HFGCS as a hobby in the first place, I think one of the reasons must have been that I expected this would be a hobby that generally attracted more intelligent people. In the case of preppers, my opinion is that they are generally stupid – with a handful of people who might be intelligent either letting their emotion make them stupid, or are intentionally pretending to be stupid.

As for the portion of the audience that is interested in HFGCS but is not a prepper, they allowed them to dominate the conversation. My YouTube livestreams and chatboxes were regularly filled with nothing but complaints about preppers and at first I tried to accommodate this. If I blocked them from mentioning the accounts at all, I might be accused of suppressing their freedom of speech, or misinterpreted as protecting the accounts they complained about. However, since all they were doing was providing those accounts free advertising, I eventually grew sick of it and asked them to discuss the HFGCS and EAMs or stay quiet. (Those people then vanished entirely. I was left with the impression they were not interested in the HFGCS at all. How had they ever gotten involved in any of this to start with?)

In the last four years of listening to the HFGCS, it is not that I have had many intelligent conversations about the HFGCS, but they are difficult to recall. They are completely outnumbered by a number of stupid complaints from stupid people who were too stupid to realize their complaining was actively working against them. Similarly, whether they realize it or not, they were actively working against me, too.

Many people think of “NEET INTEL” as “against preppers”. I am against preppers but I cannot effectively work against preppers. Although my SNS presence is reasonable, I do not have enough support or resources to go after preppers the way they can go after me. I also do not have any effective way to replicate their own strategy against them. They can follow my SNS to find information they can rewrite to suit their narrative, but there is no point in me following their accounts to try and reverse engineer their “narrative-based news” and turn it into actual information.

Now imagine this dynamic at large for all of these topic areas. If you are finding it miserable to go on SNS because it feels like everyone is acting stupider and the news and information is becoming less accurate, you will understand why the preppers go onto SNS and feel they are being vindicated.

Since even to someone fluent in English, my writing style is elaborate and sometimes even tedious, I’ve made efforts to write in simpler English so that AI models like ChatGPT or Claude can have an easier time translating them. I’ll also write a series of relatively shorter articles rather than one large article. Whatever your language, if you are interested in this but find some portion of it difficult to read or understand, please let me know.

In early 2022, I began to listen to the US military’s shortwave radio communications system. It is officially known as the High Frequency Global Communications System (HFGCS). The US military uses it to broadcast Emergency Action Messages (EAMs). When I started listening to the HFGCS in 2022, information about the HFGCS and EAMs was limited in quantity and hard to find. Four years later, it somehow remains limited in quantity and hard to find. Actually, it may even be worse.

This is not a result of a lack of ability or a lack of effort on my part. I have done a competent job listening to the HFGCS and sharing information about it. While I have not been continuously listening to the HFGCS 24 hours a day every day these last four years, I have comprehensively listened to it for extended periods of time within these last four years. Some of my unique accomplishments include;

• hundreds of hours of HFGCS recordings [link],

• transcriptions of over 9,000 EAM broadcasts [project 1, project 2],

• the only evidence of various nuclear exercises that people seem unaware even took place [GLOBAL STORM 23 and likely GLOBAL STORM 24],

• the first to publish any kind of recordings of activity during major nuclear exercises to the internet [link]

• The first to publish a recording of a 292 character EAM [link]. (At this time, that appears to be the maximum length for any EAM.)

These accomplishments would appear to have a potential audience. My SNS accounts have a decent amount of followers. At time of writing, my Twitter (X) account has over 18000 followers, and my YouTube account has over 6800 followers. However, most of my posts or video uploads get a low amount of views given the size of my followers. Particularly for those posts or videos where I take time to explain and provide a greater context for something I heard on the HFGCS and am familiar with, these posts get less views. When I say something simpler like “here is an EAM” because I either do not have time or do not know how to contextualize it, these posts get more likes, views, and reposts. Actually, posts like these can sometimes go viral, getting tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of views. This is the exact opposite of my intention.

A major part of the problem is caused by a portion of my followers that are known as “preppers”. While there is some diversity among preppers, a large contingent of the preppers online are people who hate the world and want it to end within their lifetimes. To satisfy their wish, they look for evidence that the world is going to end soon. While bitter and paranoid individuals exist across the world, the creation of a community of bitter and paranoid individuals under a banner of self-sufficiency seems to be a phenomenon mostly exclusive to the English-speaking world. Since I am writing these articles with an international audience in mind, I may need to explain them in more detail in a future article. For now, we can understand that preppers are not exactly interested in learning or sharing information about the HFGCS. If I simply post “here is an EAM”, they will embrace a post like this. This is because they can share the post to their friends and a wider audience and tell them it means that the world is about to end. However, if I post a recording of an EAM and provide information properly contextualizing it, this is not just not of interest to them, and it actively frustrates them. They want all EAMs to mean the world is ending, and will ignore any post I make explaining what EAMs actually are. Actually, if they’re especially angry, they’ll accuse me of lying. Sometimes they’ll even make their own posts, with a recording of the same EAM, so they can say that it does mean the world is ending after all.

Among my English-speaking audience that are not preppers, most of them are familiar with preppers and do not like them. When I complain about preppers, it is quite popular. However, I did not start listening the HFGCS to complain about any group of people, no matter how much I dislike them. As well, complaining about preppers is a convenient scapegoat, because I do not think anything I’m complaining about here is unique to preppers. The wider general audience has also rejected informational posts about the HFGCS and EAMs in favor of vaguer posts about the network. Although they do not necessarily want all EAMs to mean “the world is about to end”, they do also want all EAMs to necessarily mean something they might not, and will also ignore or reject posts suggesting otherwise. They will also embrace posts that have less information. Particularly when talking about the behavior of a general audience, it doesn’t seem to make sense that people would reject the provision of additional information.

However, when my account is understood as being a part of an “open-source intelligence” (OSINT) community on X and other SNS, it make sense. When we review posts from other OSINT accounts with large followers and social presence, posts with less information are more successful. This is because less information in a post allows them to create an impression that this is “breaking news” – that is, something which is happening in the present moment, thus creating a sense of urgency. The people following these accounts will instinctively prioritize “breaking news” over other types of news, causing those types of posts to be more successful. Without elaboration, we see a feedback loop will quickly be created. It’s important to recognize that “open-source intelligence” is a misnomer; sharing intelligence has become secondary to the impression of sharing intelligence.

This is best exemplified by what people are calling “PIZZAINT”. Accounts like PenPizzaReport have capitalized on an old rumor that the traffic of pizza shops near the US military’s headquarters are a sign of imminent military activity. Such accounts have credited themselves with several examples of success. Recent examples include their reports of pizza shops being busy the nights of Operation MIDNIGHT HAMMER and the American attack on Venezuela. This is completely unserious. It is ridiculous if you think about it for more than two seconds. The hypothesis regarding pizza shop traffic near US military headquarters means we make a series of assumptions. These assumptions would include, but would not be limited to (1) the US military are the only customers of these pizza shops, (2) the US military necessarily orders pizza whenever any imminent military activity is planned. Also included in these assumptions would be (3) the US military necessarily goes to pick these pizzas up in person, since accounts like PenPizzaReport track pizza shop traffic using Google, which does not track the store’s orders directly, but makes estimates based on tracking user’s cell phone positions. If there are more cell phones at a given pizza store location, then Google estimates that the pizza store must be busy. Therefore, the US military must be picking these pizzas up in person if our hypothesis is true. They are too busy to ever make their own food, but never too busy to pick up their own pizzas instead of requesting a delivery?

I expect that anyone with a high school education will be familiar with the scientific method. Epecially at a time when more Americans than ever have a college education, the idea of creating and testing a hypothesis should be well within the average person’s ability. However, we can think about it in even simpler terms. If you follow these pizza tracker accounts accounts, you will know they report the pizza shops are busy most nights. Their indicator is not significantly different from an account which proposed you could anticipate imminent military activity based on whether or not the sun has set. Anyone that consider the situations seriously will come to recognize that “PIZZAINT” is entertainment at best. And yet much of OSINT and a majority of the audience is apparently unable to recognize this. Or maybe they just do not want to recognize it this way, because it’s more fun for them to pretend otherwise.

A concept I cite regularly is “Hanlon’s razor”. It suggests to not ascribe to malice what can adequately be explained by stupidity. It is easier to understand that the situation that exists did not come about because anyone is intentionally seeking to mislead or be misled. Instead, they are simply too incompetent to do any better. Though it is less flattering to the accounts in question or the many people that follow them, they have had a long time to give me an impression otherwise. They never did.

I had my suspicions about all this when I began to listen the HFGCS. However, I believe myself to be too cynical a person and when I recognize that cynicism actively look to prove otherwise to myself. I allowed the possibility I was wrong up until June 21 2025, when it all became too ridiculous for me to take serious anymore, and I became confident of the conclusions I am sharing with you here.

The public spectacle of OSINT tracking the decoy mission over the Pacific and thus missing the real mission over the Atlantic (better known as Operation MIDNIGHT HAMMER, when the US struck Iranian nuclear facilities) should have been conceded as a point of embarrassment for everyone involved. It demonstrated an active weakness of this community – their breathless, excited reporting on the activity of B2s and other aircraft over the Pacific Ocean, which were publicly visible on flight trackers and active on public radio frequencies, we now know came at the expense of tracking the real mission over the Atlantic. OSINT did not have anyone present, taking a wider holistic view of the situation and all the signals, with sufficient knowledge or familiarity to recognize it as “fake”. Even if they did, it wouldn’t have mattered anyways. They would be ignored and lost in the noise.

Nobody came out after the fact and chalked it up as a loss. If they had, I would’ve accepted it and taken it as evidence that I was mistaken in my impression. Recognizing the failure would be a sign that someone would look to avoid it in the future. However, to the contrary, this embarrassing spectacle was celebrated by OSINT. How is this possible? If their explanation had been that this was an exception to be ignored in favor of a strong track record otherwise, I would have disagreed. However, their explanation was somehow even worse. They actually suggested that the US military had gone out of its way to trick them in specific. This is absurd. I do not think any language has the words by which I could explain how unbelievable this is. In private messages with one individual, my reserved suggestion they had misunderstood the situation was rebuffed.

It is hard to understand what there was for OSINT to celebrate anyways. Though they had provided a lot of entertainment, they had provided no intelligence. If they renamed themselves open-source entertainment (OSENT) from that point on, I would understand it. (No one could seriously keep calling themselves OSINT after an embarrassment like this, right?)

Please keep Hanlon’s razor in mind here. I do not mean to accuse these accounts of intentionally misleading anyone. Nor do I accuse them of intentionally giving a false impression to anyone from that date on. Rather, I accuse most of them as simply unable to appreciate the reality of the situation, and so are most of their followers. However, if they do not appreciate being called stupid, then I will retract this accusation and accuse them of intentionally misleading people. I will insist it must be one or the other. There is something embarrassing about all of us having access to an increasing number of amazing tools unprecedented in human history, including the internet itself, and yet there has been no corresponding increase in the intelligence of the information we put out with it. For the global community, it’s understandable how they could overestimate the quality of what the English-speaking community has put together. However, for those of us naturally fluent in the contemporary lingua franca, I do not know what our excuse is for any of it.

A frequent suggestion from friends I’ve tried to talk to about this is that I am too focused on my own topic of interest. They ask me to consider that even if OSINT doesn’t do a good job of listening to the HFGCS, it is good at monitoring geopolitics otherwise. In addition to “Hanlon’s razor”, I’d like to introduce the idea of “Gell-Mann amnesia” to anyone unfamiliar with it. This is a term coined by the American author Michael Crichton, who explained it as follows;

Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect works as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward-reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them.

In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story-and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read with renewed interest as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about far-off Palestine than it was about the story you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.

I believe if I had written this initial article with more detail and exclusively focused about my personal experience with the HFGCS, and then suggested to the reader “If OSINT cannot effectively monitor the HFGCS, why would you trust them with anything else?” it would not be compelling since it might focus on something people would be uninterested in. This is why I chose to use the Operation MIDNIGHT HAMMER as an example, because OSINT itself points to it as an example of the system at its best. My discussion explains how if that is their system at its best, then it is too flawed to be useful for its stated purpose. So now the suggestion to the reader is, “If OSINT cannot effectively monitor the things it claims to be good at, why would you trust them with monitoring anything at all?”

I think we’ve reached a natural stop point for this article. I intend for the next article to be specific to my experience with the HFGCS. I will give examples of how when I read other OSINT accounts posting about the HFGCS it felt like “reading an article so wrong it actually presents the story backward-reversing cause and effect”.