Your wiki cite suggests: > Command by negation first came into being on individual ships, where it made sense - a captain who delegated authority and exercised

Your wiki cite suggests: > 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.