Abstract

This paper reads the twelve AEGIS cases that state, in a reason of their own, why each is linked to another case. All twelve are authored synthetic training cases from one programme of corrected defence policy, logistics, alliance and procurement decisions; AEGIS types each realistic synthetic, their deciding bodies are fictional and their figures are the original's or training assumptions, so the paper draws no fact about the world from them. The twelve form seven pairs, closed among themselves. Each pair is tied by one named shared resource (four budgets, two stocks of hours and one common system), and every record refuses any further link. The rest of each link's wording comes from a template that stands in nearly all of the studio's 16,255 links and that, read literally, would void all seven pairs. The two records of each pair have different owners and different deadlines, and no link names who decides what the pair shares. Seven records carry the shared resource into a deadline, a needed input, a condition for reconsidering or the author's mark; five carry it nowhere beyond the link. The paper reads these findings beside work on coordination, common-pool budgets, negative coordination, joined-up government and commons. Its contribution is a measured account of how one authored record set ties decisions together by naming what they share, while leaving the sharing without an owner.