Strategic and Organizational Conditions for Success

This chapter examines how a constrained problem and an institutionalized solution enabled the Royal Air Force (RAF) to successfully manage the air battle during the Battle of Britain. The RAF pioneered many concepts that the U.S. Air Force still uses today, including aircraft early warning, identification friend-or-foe, track management, aircraft vectoring, and operational research. The Battle of Britain is also one of the well-documented episodes in military history. Open archives, abundant data, and the electromechanical vintage of information technology make this case an accessible illustration of information practice in action. Britain won the battle because it put together a well-managed solution to the well-constrained problem of air defense. Germany, by contrast, met the inherently harder problem of offensive coercion with a more insular solution. The chapter first describes the historical development of the British air defense system, before looking at the “external problem” that Fighter Command faced during the battle and showing how the interaction produced “managed practice” that improved RAF performance.