How the U.S. Military Is Surrendering Battlefield Situational Awareness to Private Defense Contractors

Summary

The U.S. military has become dangerously dependent on integrated command platforms — such as Palantir's Gotham and the Pentagon's Joint All-Domain Command and Control system — whose core definitional frameworks, known as ontologies, are proprietary intellectual property owned and controlled by private contractors rather than the government itself. These ontologies determine how critical concepts like "threat," "readiness," and "escalation thresholds" are defined within battlefield decision-support systems, meaning that vendors — often software engineers lacking operational or regional expertise — are effectively shaping how military commanders perceive and respond to crises. Once these vendor-defined categories appear in operational briefings, they silently become de facto military doctrine, constraining how analysts and leaders think without those leaders even recognizing the influence. The author argues that while modular open systems approaches address technical interface issues, they fail to govern this deeper semantic layer, leaving vendors in control of the conceptual frameworks that structure military decision-making. The article calls for the U.S. military to assert "representational sovereignty" over its own ontologies — owning, governing, and maintaining the authority to modify the definitions that shape how its command systems interpret the battlefield before artificial intelligence accelerates ontological changes beyond any human review process.