Oskar Morgenstern, The Command and Control Structure (1962)

Oskar Morgenstern’s research memorandum reproduces, with minor modifications, an invited address delivered to the Ninth Military Operations Research Symposium on April 25, 1962. It treats nuclear command and control as a problem of political organization, not merely communications engineering. Weapons support policy only if authority, information, and execution remain connected under disruption.

Morgenstern begins with confusion as an ordinary condition of warfare. Historical examples challenge the assumption that commanders can maintain continuous knowledge of their forces or reliably transmit instructions:

We know that at sea contact is lost time and again, and that great sea battles must be fought when radio silence is ordered.

Nuclear warfare intensifies this problem through unprecedented destructive power and compressed decision times. Yet command arrangements cannot be tested through combat without risking the catastrophe they are intended to prevent. Technological sophistication does not remove uncertainty about actual performance.

The entire time scale is changing and the speed of reaction which is allowed to us is shrinking continuously toward zero.

This pressure exposes the distance between formal authority and effective control. Morgenstern states the legal arrangement directly:

We know, for example, that legally the President is the only person who can authorize the use of a nuclear weapon.

The organizational question is whether succession, transmission, interpretation, and execution can preserve that authority under attack. A system must execute authorized orders while preventing unauthorized use, although safeguards serving one requirement can obstruct the other.

Morgenstern distinguishes physical failure from failures of the larger system: accidental explosions, false signals, unexecuted orders, unauthorized action, and attacks on targets already destroyed. A weapon is an installation involving people as well as machinery. A commander’s patriotic conviction may itself cause disobedience if it prompts an unauthorized attack. Governments must also anticipate the political consequences of accidental explosions, whose uncertain origins could provoke accusations and escalation. Reducing accidents cannot replace planning for their aftermath.

The argument moves from component reliability to organizational resilience. Command systems must function despite partial destruction, restore broken connections, and accommodate mobile forces. Centralized direction need not require a geographically fixed center; dispersed components can sustain coordinated action. Nor can an exhaustive blueprint eliminate judgment. Morgenstern’s analogy with judicial discretion emphasizes that institutions require interpretation and flexibility.

Information design is equally important. Drawing on Lord Adrian’s neurological “homunculus,” Morgenstern distinguishes a commander’s informational requirements from the visible anatomy of an organization. Like the brain’s unequal representation of bodily regions, a command system should weight information according to function rather than reproduce every subordinate activity. More messages do not necessarily produce better understanding.

In a command-control system we want information to pass down as well as up.

Information must circulate selectively and reciprocally. Organization charts cannot establish what decision-makers need to know. Civilian measures of efficiency can also mislead: economical peacetime logistics and optimized telephone networks offer inadequate models for systems exposed to deliberate destruction. Redundancy, alternative mechanisms, and continued operation after damage may matter more than ordinary economy.

The concluding strategic argument challenges the assumption that destroying enemy communications necessarily improves one’s security. If interrupted contact activates standing orders to attack, disabling an adversary’s command center may release rather than neutralize its weapons. Natural disasters or technical failures could produce comparable consequences. A threat that makes communication failure dangerous may deter interference, but it also creates uncertainty about what silence will trigger.

Morgenstern consequently advocates secure communications available to both adversaries, discussing Project NEEDLES, or West Ford, as a possible shared infrastructure. The principle parallels mutual survivability in deterrence: preserving an opponent’s command capacity can help preserve restraint, negotiation, and the possibility of terminating war. His contribution is to join resilient organization and selective information to reciprocal security. Nuclear control requires institutions capable of sustaining political judgment when disruption and urgency make error most consequential.