Book excerpt: One of the challenges facing the writer is keeping up with developments in the information age. While Command, Control, and the Common Defense provides a historical perspective on a contemporary problem, it was written in the late l980s; since then, the end of the Cold War and the American experience in the Gulf War have provided some fundamentally new perspectives of their own. Re-written history has its own pitfalls; a better solution was to leave the original content intact and to add as an epilogue a chapter which originally appeared in a 1995 anthology on the Gulf War. Both works have, of course, been edited for consistency. Finally, there is reason to ponder in the light of more contemporary developments one of the major points in that original work: that the tight integration demanded by emerging command and control technologies often runs afoul of existing command structures and theories of warfare. As I completed the revisions to this edition while serving on special assignment with the NATO Implementation Force in Bosnia, there were daily reminders of the truth of that statement.