"Tomorrow we attack the Germans" "Let me guess Sir, we climb out of our trenches and do a frontal assault" "Damn it, Blackadder, that's supposed to be a secret" "We've tried it 17 times before and always failed" "Ah, but they will never expect it an 18th time!" ***...

Air defense looks clean on a diagram. In real war, it is messy, conditional, and expensive in ways most people never see until the alarms are late and the interceptors are flying in bunches. We sit down with Daryl Cooper to translate the jargon and show what “layered...