Stand Up Delegated Autonomy Directorate (DAD) as a Joint Control Plane Authority

DECISION.

Approve immediate standup of a Delegated Autonomy Directorate (DAD) as a joint authority chartered at Secretary level and overseen by the Deputy Secretary, and direct a 90-day rollout of an Agent Control Plane baseline for high-consequence agentic operations [1].

BLUF.

This is not a software cycle. It is a warfighting control shift.

Properly designed, DAD is not a brake on innovation or speed, but a force accelerator that increases capability and operational tempo by making delegated autonomy trusted, repeatable, and safe to scale.

The Department is moving from force multiplication (human-hours amplified) to force creation (agent-hours delegated) [2]. Force creation removes human reaction time as the bottleneck; operational scale decouples from personnel and scales through compute, access, and permissions. In contested conditions, decision tempo and action density can exceed human relevance windows. The side that can delegate authority safely at machine speed will set operational tempo.

ORGANIZING CONSTRUCT.

DAD should be dual-homed and backed by acquisition leverage:

Technical enforcement: CIO-IE (identity, ABAC, gateways, policy-as-code, cATO alignment)
Operational doctrine: Joint Staff / C2 authority (consequence tiers, escalation triggers, degraded-mode doctrine)
Acquisition leverage: A&S / procurement hooks (no funding without conformance)

REQUIRED AUTHORITIES.

The Directorate must be empowered to:

Mandate Trust Scope Manifests
Block deployment for non-conformance
Revoke scopes across enclaves
Impose degraded-mode posture
Require eval-pack conformance before scale
Run red-team drills on autonomy
Suspend tool registries or inter-agent channels

90-DAY EXECUTION ORDER.

0-30 days: Sign joint charter; designate authorities; publish minimum ACP baseline profile.
31-60 days: Field enforcement plumbing and doctrine gates; run two controlled fieldings.
61-90 days: Enforce no-conformance/no-scale rule; execute containment and red-team drills; publish command scorecard.

This is not an “AI program.” It is the institutionalization of machine-executed authority. That authority must live where control doctrine and enforcement infrastructure intersect, above any single functional lane. The control plane is the new nervous system; it cannot be owned by a single organ, and any domain where governed force creation is not achieved first is a domain where enduring advantage is at risk.

References

Agent Control Plane Reference Architecture (ACP-RA). https://www.adamboas.com/writing/acp-ra/
From AI Force Multiplication to Force Creation. https://www.adamboas.com/writing/agentic-force-creation/