User Innovation and System Management

This chapter investigates the Combined Air Operations Center (CAOC), the analogue to the Fighter Command Ops Room in the modern U.S. Air Force. The air force formally designates the CAOC as a weapon system, even as it is basically just a large office space with hundreds of computer workstations, conference rooms, and display screens. The CAOC is an informational weapon system that coordinates all of the other weapon systems that actually conduct air defense, strategic attack, close air support, air mobility and logistics, and intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR). One might be tempted to describe the CAOC as “a center of calculation,” but modern digital technology tends to decenter information practice. Representations of all the relevant entities and events in a modern air campaign reside in digital data files rather than a central plotting table. The relevant information is fragmented across collection platforms, classified networks, and software systems that are managed by different services and agencies. Thus, in each of the four major U.S. air campaigns from 1991 to 2003, CAOC personnel struggled with information friction. They rarely used the mission planning systems that were produced by defense contractors as planned, and they improvised to address emerging warfighting requirements.

Irregular Problems and Biased Solutions

This chapter details how the U.S. intervention in Iraq completed a full cycle through the information practice framework between 2003 and 2008. During the invasion and its aftermath, managed practice turned into insulated practice, which prompted both internal and external actors to adapt. During the subsequent occupation, adaptive practice turned into problematic practice, which in turn encouraged the U.S. military to institutionalize doctrinal reforms. The chapter explores the ways in which insulated practice still persisted at the end of this process, curiously enough, even in a tactical unit close to the fight that had ample opportunity to make sense of facts on the ground. It also surveys the Special Operations Task Force's (SOTF) information system and then compares the SOTF to other units that conducted a similar mission (Joint Special Operations Command, JSOC) or operated in the same environment (U.S. Marines) to demonstrate how different institutional choices can generate different qualities of information practice.

Strategic and Organizational Conditions for Success

This chapter examines how a constrained problem and an institutionalized solution enabled the Royal Air Force (RAF) to successfully manage the air battle during the Battle of Britain. The RAF pioneered many concepts that the U.S. Air Force still uses today, including aircraft early warning, identification friend-or-foe, track management, aircraft vectoring, and operational research. The Battle of Britain is also one of the well-documented episodes in military history. Open archives, abundant data, and the electromechanical vintage of information technology make this case an accessible illustration of information practice in action. Britain won the battle because it put together a well-managed solution to the well-constrained problem of air defense. Germany, by contrast, met the inherently harder problem of offensive coercion with a more insular solution. The chapter first describes the historical development of the British air defense system, before looking at the “external problem” that Fighter Command faced during the battle and showing how the interaction produced “managed practice” that improved RAF performance.