Arlington, VA | July 21, 2026 — The Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies announces a new entry in its Forum Paper series, Shared Understanding, Distributed Judgment: USAF Command and Control in Complex Operations, by Maj Gregory Galey, USAF.

After three decades of operating in largely permissive environments, the United States now faces adversaries specifically organized to deny its traditional operational advantages. Rather than contesting American forces in a single domain, these competitors seek to disrupt the information, communications, and decision-making processes upon which U.S. military effectiveness depends. Under these conditions, legacy command and control systems become increasingly brittle and vulnerable to disruption, delay, and complexity. To combat these risks, U.S. Air Force command and control must deliberately separate information from decision authority by tightly coupling information through shared awareness across the force while loosely coupling decisional authority by distributing judgment to subordinate commanders within the bounds of commander’s intent.

Organizational theory and doctrine provide a conceptual basis for effective operations that relies on distributing decision authority to the point of action while maintaining a shared understanding across the force. Historical air campaigns, including the Battle of Britain and Operation Overlord, demonstrate that successful command and control architectures consistently combine tightly shared information with decentralized decision making. Planners and commanders must treat coupling as a deliberate design variable, using distributed control to pre-delegate authority, simplify plans, and preserve initiative in contested environments.

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