Five Questions to Ask Any Autonomous C2 Vendor
A short, honest, vendor-agnostic interview script for any autonomous command-and-control system. Engineered to expose the architectural decisions that matter.
Most BMS sales engagements are won or lost on demo polish, not on architectural truth. A program officer with thirty minutes and these five questions will get further than a six-month source-selection committee with a sixty-page SOO. The questions are vendor-agnostic. The answers are not.
Question one. What happens to your system the moment the satcom is jammed? If the answer is 'we fall back to line-of-sight', the architecture is not decentralized. If the answer is 'every tier continues executing within a signed envelope', the architecture might actually survive the next war.
Question two. What is the maximum span of control your system has demonstrated in operational test, and what is the recursive structure that achieves it? If the answer is a number without a structure, the test was scripted. If the answer is a recursive hierarchy with a small constant branching factor, you are talking to someone who has read Genghis Khan's general staff manual and turned it into software.
Question three. What does it take to integrate a new airframe? If the answer is a software release, an SETR cycle, or any contract modification, the architecture is not hardware-agnostic. If the answer is a capability-bundle manifest registered in hours, the architecture will keep up with the drone economy.
Question four. Show me the cryptographic trace from a single autonomous lethal action back to the named human who authorized it. If the trace does not exist as a graph in the system, the system does not provide auditable AI accountability and will not survive the first JAG review of the first incident.
Question five. What is the smallest contracting vehicle on which I can deploy your system to a unit in ninety days? If the answer is anything but an Other Transaction Authority, the procurement cadence is too slow for the fight your operators will be in.
KhanBMS answers these five questions in this order: signed envelope, decimal hierarchy, capability manifest, cryptographic provenance graph, OTA. The architecture is the answer. The Mongol pattern is the moat. The interview is over.