cATO - Khan BMS Battlefield Management System
cATO stands for Continuous Authority to Operate. A field-level look at why it matters under EW and how Khan BMS folds it into a decimal command fabric.
If you have read a Joint Capabilities document this decade you have seen cATO cited as an enabler. Continuous Authority to Operate, dutifully spelled out, then buried under five layers of FAR-driven prose. The technology is not the bottleneck — the procurement model is.
Strip the marketing and cATO is exactly what the standard says: Continuous Authority to Operate. Accreditation model granting ongoing ATO based on continuous monitoring and pipeline controls. cATO replaces three-year ATO cycles with continuous monitoring, automated control evidence, and a hardened DevSecOps pipeline. It is the policy enabler that lets defense software ship at sustainable cadence and is the only realistic ATO posture for distributed C2 services that update weekly.
For distributed c2 workloads we found the right move was to make cATO a first-class verb in the intent grammar. Operators don't configure cATO; they invoke it, and the runtime decomposes it down the hierarchy.
cATO is anchored at the Arban — ten nodes under one tactical leader. Small enough to reason about by hand, large enough to absorb the loss of a node without re-planning. Authority for cATO is bounded at this tier; nothing the Arban does can poison its parent.
When the dust settles on the next contingency, the platforms that handled cATO as a design assumption will be the ones still in the fight. That is the bet.