Kill Web Glossary

ACK

Adapting Cross-Domain Kill-Webs, a DARPA program that explored marketplace-style capability discovery, comparison, and reallocation across organizations and domains.

Age of information

The elapsed time between when data described reality and when a consumer uses it; a critical measure for stale-track and latency risk.

Assessment

The function that evaluates whether the intended effect occurred and returns evidence to the wider mission process.

Authority

The legal and command permission to decide, approve, delegate, or execute an action; it is separate from technical connectivity.

Capability marketplace

A model in which consumers request an outcome and suppliers advertise bounded capabilities, availability, quality, constraints, and opportunity costs.

Chain

A selected, ordered mission path that performs sensing, decision, authorization, action, and assessment functions.

CJADC2

Combined Joint All-Domain Command and Control, emphasizing joint and coalition integration across domains, organizations, and partners.

Cloud-edge continuum

A placement model spanning enterprise, theater, tactical-edge, and platform computing according to deadlines, resources, connectivity, and exposure.

Common-mode failure

A single hidden dependency—such as software lineage, timing source, identity service, cloud region, or gateway—that defeats several nominally redundant paths.

Composability

The ability to combine compatible capabilities into a mission-valid path without redesigning the entire system.

Data fabric

Distributed services for discovery, access, mediation, governance, synchronization, storage, and security of data products.

Data provenance

Information about who or what produced, transformed, signed, transported, and approved a datum.

DDIL

Disconnected, disrupted or denied, intermittent, and low-bandwidth operating conditions; wording varies across organizations.

Decision support

Tools that organize evidence, uncertainty, constraints, and options for a responsible human or delegated authority.

Effector

An abstract capability that produces an authorized kinetic or non-kinetic effect; the site uses only fictional effect nodes.

Evidence age

How long ago the supporting observation or assessment was produced; displayed separately from model confidence.

F2T2EA

Find, fix, track, target, engage, and assess, a common dynamic-targeting kill-chain formulation.

Federation

Cooperation among independently owned systems or organizations through governed interfaces and shared rules rather than one monolithic owner.

Graceful degradation

Continuation of a safe, reduced function when components, links, data, or services fail or become untrustworthy.

Human-in-the-loop

A control arrangement in which a human must affirmatively authorize a specified critical action.

Human-on-the-loop

A supervisory arrangement in which a system acts within bounds while a human monitors and may intervene.

Interoperability

The ability to exchange and correctly use information or services across technical, semantic, security, authority, and organizational boundaries.

JADC2

Joint All-Domain Command and Control, a broader enterprise approach for sensing, making sense, and acting across domains.

Kill chain

An ordered process or concrete mission thread connecting detection to decision, engagement, and assessment.

Kill web

A governed network of potential sensing, data, communications, command, support, and effect pathways from which chains can be composed.

Latency budget

The time allocated across sensing, preprocessing, transport, fusion, decision, authorization, tasking, and response before an opportunity expires.

Mission thread

An end-to-end sequence of systems, people, data, decisions, and authorities that produces an operational outcome.

MOSA

Modular Open Systems Approach, an engineering and acquisition strategy for separable modules and governable interfaces.

Option composer

The site’s neutral term for a service that screens and ranks feasible pathways without itself creating authorization.

Optionality

The ability to preserve several feasible courses of action as conditions, losses, priorities, and constraints change.

Path diversity

Redundancy created by alternatives that do not share the same important failure causes.

Policy gate

A deterministic check that excludes options violating authority, security, safety, releasability, evidence, or mission constraints.

Provenance

The traceable origin and transformation history of data, models, software, recommendations, and commands.

Recomposition

The process of discovering and validating another mission path after state, availability, or constraints change.

Selective reachability

The principle that the right qualified information and capability become available to authorized consumers without uncontrolled all-to-all connectivity.

Semantic interoperability

Agreement on meaning, units, reference frames, identity, time, uncertainty, and status—not merely transport format.

Synthetic scenario

A fictional, deterministic teaching exercise that does not represent a real system, target, performance envelope, or operational outcome.

Virtual Liaison

ACK’s public abstraction for representing and comparing cross-organizational capability offers while protecting sensitive internal details.

Zero trust

A security approach that explicitly evaluates users, devices, services, workloads, and data instead of granting implicit trust from network location.