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Stories from the field that show doctrine colliding with reality
Field notes are how I document what actually happened when systems, people, and missions intersected under pressure. Some went well. Some went sideways. All of them taught me something about how resilient systems really work.
Every messy mission system has one reliable pattern:The interfaces break first. They break: You see it clearly any time you try to connect worlds that were never designed for each other. When Systems Touch Without Consent At DHS I saw this in several places: In each case, someone tried to treat the boundary as if…
High tempo systems live or die on one simple question: “Which data do we treat as the truth when opinions differ?” If everyone has their own private truth, you do not have a system. You have a debate club with better screens. In my world, that has shown up as: In an air picture context,…
There is a joke among pilots. “How can you tell if someone is a US naval aviatorDo not worry. They will tell you.” In my case, I am not a naval aviator. I am the other guy in that story. The one who went to flight school because his day job in infrastructure protection and…
If you are responsible for a high-tempo mission system, especially one that spans nations and organizations, what are you actually hiring for when you put someone in charge of the technology stack You are not hiring a gadget person. You are hiring someone who can live with incomplete pictures, uneven partners and unforgiving timelines, and…
I have not posted here about this story before. Years ago I was granted a private tour of Hoover Dam while I was working in national infrastructure protection. It was the non public side of the dam. The place where the real work happens. We walked through the generator hall. I took fewer than twenty…
Staging areas are where you execute, not where you invent trust. When partners first meet in the parking lot of a disaster, they bring trucks, supplies, clipboards and logos. What they usually do not bring is a shared playbook. The pattern is simple: What happened at a small church in Bay St Louis during Hurricane…
In architecture circles, “decouple data from the application” often gets repeated like a spell. Say it enough times and you start to believe that separating data from applications is always good and never painful. In real systems, it is more complicated. Separation can unlock federation, resilience and swappability. It can also introduce new failure modes…
When people talk about “federated systems,” it can sound abstract. In reality, federation is what you reach for when you cannot force anyone to do anything. Before systems like iCAV matured, I saw the cost of non-federation up close (or rather, an integrated system trying to operate in a federated environment). During Hurricane Katrina, data…
Federation is my default. Integration is my exception. The clearest example of that exception is the wildland fire community in the United States, particularly through the National Wildfire Coordinating Group. NWCG brings together the Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management, National Park Service and other partners. Outside of wildfire, these agencies are quite federated. Their…
There is a quiet failure mode in complex systems. It happens when every risk becomes a gate. A gate is a hard stop. You may not proceed until you satisfy this checklist, this committee, this form. Gates have their place. Nobody wants to remove all gates from an air traffic control system or a nuclear…
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