Assumption: External trust anchors will be available when needed.
Modern security architectures often rely on trust established elsewhere: cloud identity providers, centralized policy engines, external verification services. These work—until they don’t.
Under contested conditions, those trust anchors fail before the system is compromised. No intrusion is required. Denial alone is sufficient.
When trust lives outside the mission boundary, the mission inherits the weakest link. Operators are forced to wait, bypass, or guess—none of which preserves decision advantage.
In warfighting, trust must be enforced where the mission executes—not borrowed from an environment that may not exist.
Inevitability: Trust must become local, sovereign, and enforced inside the operational boundary—or it becomes an operational liability.