Mission CommandMission command is a decentralized style of control in armed conflict relying heavily on local initiative. It is usually contrasted with rigid micromanagement of command intent, itself constrained by the underlying demands of a local strategic intent within an enveloping ‘grand strategy’. The full enterprise of armed conflict operates under the aegis of tactical, operational and strategic ‘doctrine’ reflecting past successes and failures. Such doctrine constitutes a characteristic cultural artifact that is usually well-studied and often well-understood by adversaries. The work here, reflecting an evolutionary perspective, parses the dynamics of such enterprises via a formal structure incorporating powerful asymptotic limit theorems from both control and information theories. We find that, on Clausewitz landscapes of fog, friction, and skilled adversarial intent, the richer mix of embedding doctrine and local initiative will generally achieve a more robust pattern of Yerkes-Dodson inverted-U signal transduction for institutional cognition rate under stress. This result has potential applications across a surprisingly broad spectrum of cognitive phenomena. A next step would be to extend this formal analysis toward practical statistical tools for evaluating the robustness of a cognitive process under different patterns of threat and affordance.                       — Von Moltke the Elder, as quoted in Dupuy (1977). — Storr (2007). — Paul Butterfield Band, ‘Born in Chicago’. — Eurisko (Wired 2016).