We are proud to present the third edition of the Annals of Command and Control, published by the NATO Command and Control Centre of Excellence (NATO C2COE) in collaboration with the Canadian Joint Warfare Centre (CJWC). This edition brings together eight contributions exploring how Command and Control must evolve in an increasingly complex, multi-domain and rapidly changing security environment.
Inside this edition:
- Holonic Architectural Paradigm for Complex Modern C2 and A Control-Theoretic Unification of Defensive and Offensive C2 — Dr. Abder Rezak Benaskeur rethinks C2 as a recursive “holarchy” of cooperating units, then applies control theory to argue why defence, not offence, is the harder and more decisive problem.
- Clausewitzian Friction in Multi-Domain C2 — Antonio Legaz Sanz shows how cyber, social-media and algorithmic disinformation have turned the old “fog of war” into a “hybrid fog,” and what integrated countermeasures can do about it.
- Russian Command and Control in Information Warfare and Reflexive Influence: Implications
or NATO and Counter-Reflexive Control — Dr. Ivana Stradner and RADM (Ret.) Mark Montgomery unpack how Moscow targets NATO’s decision-making process itself, and propose counter-reflexive control as a response. - Accountability under Autonomy: Human Oversight in AI-Enabled Command and Control — Kjell Schipper, MSc, examines a Royal Netherlands Army case study to ask where accountability really lives when target selection is partly delegated to autonomous systems.
- A Cognitive Framework of Assessing Leadership: In the Context of Multi-Domain Operations — Col (Ret.) Mehmet Akif Morkaya fills a gap in NATO doctrine on identifying the leaders who can operate at the speed and complexity multi-domain operations demand.
- Masked Speech Recognition among Multinational Talker and Listener Cohorts — a NATO Trident Jupiter study on how language proficiency shapes intelligibility in noisy, multinational environments. A reminder that every C2 architecture ends with a human who has to hear the message correctly.
- Set a Goal, Allocate Resources, Don’t Get in the Way: 7 Principles for effective acquisition of C2 support systems — the authors offers seven hard-won principles for acquiring C2 support systems, challenging the assumption that requirements must be complete before work can start.
In the coming weeks, we will publish the articles individually as well. We would like to thank all the authors and reviewers involved for their valuable work.
