This is why a Navy battle groups use https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Command_by_negation
In summary, leaders of major slices of the effort run their own show, merely informing the HMFIC, who retains veto power, regarding status.
In summary, leaders of major slices of the effort run their own show, merely informing the HMFIC, who retains veto power, regarding status.
> Command by negation first came into being on individual ships, where it made sense - a captain who delegated authority and exercised command by negation could easily monitor his staff and communicate with them because it was a small environment.
...which is more or less asymptotic to the pragmatism behind Agile methods advocating for smaller teams of competent individual contributors.
Followed by:
> Within wider naval engagements, however, the Officer in Tactical Command (OTC) still maintained a rigid control structure, because communications systems simply couldn't work efficiently enough to make loose and autonomous doctrines viable.
> The introduction of AEW&C systems, SOSUS and satellite-fed data risked overwhelming the OTC, and so forces were forced to shift towards granting individual commanders more autonomy - something that improved communications made possible.
I interpreted this as an intercommunication scalability problem exacerbated by adoption of new tech. Fred Brooks in The Mythical Man-Month expressed this hazard as the n(n-1)/2 notional communication channels within a given team, to which effective segmentation (i.e. where command by negation comes into play) helps mitigate.