CFACC and AOC are, by their very nature, located several hundred, sometimes thousands of miles from the air battle. And, as emphasized prior, we understand that technology allows command far more specific details than in the history of the military. That being said, no amount of technology can translate a blip on a screen to an actual threat, and react with the appropriate response within milliseconds. One would think, for instance, that with the thousands upon thousands of dollars the service spends on training their pilots, the number of scenarios engendered, and the amount of air time required to pilot a multimillion dollar piece of extraordinary equipment that command would acknowledge that there needs to be a certain level of trust and allowance for experience and pilot assessment of various high stress situations. While it is certainly true that, at times, the individual pilot cannot see the "big picture," and needs advice from central, individual decisions made in combat situations are clearly field based. Closing Remarks - While cycles are in place at the ATO level and others, to establish efficient employment of available resources controlled by central operations, there are several strategic and tactical reasons to establish a protocol that would allow for more robust field control in highly volatile combat situations:

Decision...

However, what isn't on the screen is often as important as what is on the screen -- and the best judge of that is the local pilot.
In a combat situation, the pilot has fewer multiple horizontal priorities than central, regardless of the talent of the personnel at command. The focus is there, the expertise is there -- training kicks in, experience modifies, and field-based decisions are more complete.

One must ask what the function of a fighter pilot is in the modern military machine. If we want to control drone planes from a central location, we should send drone planes -- so there must be a strategic reason why we use human pilots? It may be inefficient to negate that use by overemphasizing command/central control.

Ultimately, we are in a philosophical diatribe; do we use utilitarianism or deontology to make command-based