ABSTRACT
This chapter centres on C2: the key to delivering air power effectively in its aforementioned roles. The chapter explores how air forces should direct and lead modern air power campaigns as part of a larger joint effort, including battlespace management and the principle of centralised control and adaptive execution. The author presents the C2 narrative as the pursuit of ideas, and the long quest for unity, equivalency, and responsiveness. He argues that new technology has profoundly reshaped C2, with the rise of precision weapons and advanced communications shifting air power’s principal challenge from massing aircraft to massing information. However, while technology enables new approaches, C2 remains a social activity by nature, which places a premium on people across organisations with all the fog, friction, and uncertainty that such human activities entail. Air power’s technological and tactical excellence has paid dividends in improving C2 efficiency, but enhancing the effectiveness of air campaigns through better thinking has been less successful, in part because generals have tended to be too tactically oriented. The bottom line – and one to recall and emphasise as the Western world prepares for fifth-generation warfare – is that ‘the depth of relationships and the intellect of the people within the system ultimately determine its effectiveness’.
