Mid-1990s. Seoul. A joint exercise that put every service, every domain, every coalition partner in the same room. The planning was meticulous. The documents were precise. The fight we planned for and the fight that would actually happen were two different things — and the architecture we built couldn't tell the difference.

Early 1990s. A ship preparing for inspection. The information the crew needed existed — in logs, in heads, in notebooks scattered across every department. The problem wasn't access. It was architecture. Nobody had built the system that connected it.

The track was on the screen. The symbol was authoritative. The ship that generated it had stopped being able to see it twenty minutes ago. Nobody flagged it. Nobody could.