This organizational network would be of no avail if there were no regulations pertaining to the types of message sent. Of types of message listed in Table 1, commands and statements are the only ones sent through the vertical network shown in Figure 3. A further regulation is that commands always go down, unaccompanied by statements, and statements always go up, unaccompanied by commands. Questions and, particularly, exclamations are usually channeled along informal, horizontal lines not indicated in Figure 3 and seldom are carried beyond the nearest neighbor.

It will readily be seen that in this suggested network (not materially different from some of the networks in vogue today) greater emphasis on monitoring is implied than is usually put into practice. Furthermore, the network in Figure 3 is only the basic net through which other networks pertaining to logistics and the like are interlaced.

Not discussed here are some military problems of modern times such as undersea warfare, where the surveillance, sending, transmitting, and receiving are all so inadequate that networks and decision making are not the bottlenecks. Such problems are of extreme interest as well as importance and are so much like fighting in a rain forest or guerrilla warfare at night in tall grass that we might have to re-examine primitive conflicts for what they could teach.

This is an unsolved problem which probably has never been seriously investigated, although one frequently hears the comment that we have insufficient specialists of the kind who can compete with the Germans or Swiss, for example, in precision machinery and mathematics, or the Finns in geochemistry. We hear equally fervent concern over the belief that we have not enough generalists who can see the over-all picture and combine our national skills and knowledge for useful purposes. This problem of the optimum balance in the relative numbers of generalists and specialists can be investigated on a communicative network basis. Since the difficulty of drawing the net is great, we will merely discuss it.