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Legion Command Papers

Agents are becoming infrastructure. The question is who governs them. These papers examine what changes structurally when AI moves from tool to operator in the environments national security cannot afford to get wrong, and what it takes to deploy, govern, and prove those systems under human authority.

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10 minute read

The Kill Chain Is Not a Theory of Victory

Maven compressed the targeting cycle to machine speed. But a faster kill chain wins fights, not wars. The decisive advantage goes to the force that helps commanders turn data into meaning before the decision is made.
16 minute read

Earning a Seat on the Staff

The staff has absorbed new machines for 160 years, each by meeting its standards for coordinated work. What it takes for AI to earn a seat: the five requirements, the three architectural commitments, and how leaders should evaluat
12 minute read

The Forward Deployed Engineering Model Is Backward

Does a vendor's forward deployed engineering model build customer-owned capability or permanent dependency? In defense software, a growing FDE team often signals a product that never matured, not a strength.
7 minute read

Disconnected Is the Baseline: Designing Agentic AI for the Tactical Edge

Most AI architectures treat connectivity as a background condition. At the tactical edge, the assumption fails first. Why disconnected-first design, narrow planners, and sustainment determine if agentic AI works.
11 minute read

Why Retrieval Agents Fail: It’s Not Just the Model

Retrieval-focused agents fail for reasons beyond model capability. Performance is bounded by three independent constraints: the model, the retrieval stack, and prompt guidance. Evaluation finds the real bottleneck.
10 minute read

AI Agent Evaluation: Building an Evaluation Platform That Scales

Teams deploy agents faster than they can test them. A single prompt change can silently degrade three agents while improving one. Here's how immutable datasets, purpose-driven metrics, and vendor-agnostic design make agentic evaluation reproducible at scale.
12 minute read

Agentic AI Security is an Architectural Decision

Agentic AI security is an architectural property, not a feature you add after deployment. Governed workflows, strong typing, least-privilege access, and ephemeral agents address 20 OWASP vulnerabilities by design, validated at IL2 through IL6.