Terminology atlas
These are bounded editorial definitions used by KillChains.com. Where governments, international organizations, manufacturers, and researchers use a term differently, the definition identifies the site’s analytical scope rather than claiming universal agreement.
Answer-first summary
Terms such as autonomous, human-on-the-loop, and meaningful human control are not used identically by every institution, so each definition states the bounded meaning used on KillChains.com.
Read the supporting sectionAutonomy of a specific function—such as navigation, tracking, or recognition—is different from authority to select and engage a target.
Read the supporting section“AI-enabled,” “automatic,” “autonomous,” “human-supervised,” and “fire-and-forget” answer different questions. A system can navigate independently while requiring human weapon release; a defensive system can automatically engage incoming materiel without using machine learning; a human can remain formally present while lacking a meaningful review window.
Governance
The diffusion or deflection of responsibility across officials, developers, vendors, integrators, operators, and an algorithm until no participant appears to own the decision.
Link to this termCore models
A family of models describing how an adversary progresses from knowledge or access to manipulating an AI system’s data, model, context, tools, infrastructure, memory, or users and then creates an impact. The term is not one universal standard.
Link to this termAutonomy and AI
A chain in which AI or machine learning assists, automates, or autonomously performs at least one consequential function. It is not necessarily an autonomous weapon.
Link to this termEvidence and governance
The preserved chain showing whether a monitored condition generated an alert, whether the alert was preserved and delivered, whether a competent reviewer examined the underlying evidence, and whether the bounded conclusion was independently verified.
Link to this termTechnology
Automated behavior implemented through software such as signal processing, estimation, optimization, or rules. The term does not by itself establish the use of machine learning or artificial intelligence.
Link to this termPrediction and analysis
Structured analysis that estimates how observable physical, environmental, organizational, or systemic conditions may develop while preserving competing hypotheses, provenance, uncertainty, and a separate human decision about any response.
Link to this termHuman control
The U.S. Department of Defense policy standard requiring autonomous and semi-autonomous weapon systems to allow commanders and operators to exercise context-appropriate judgment over the use of force.
Link to this termF2T2EA stages
Estimate whether the intended outcome occurred, what uncertainty remains, whether the track persists, and whether another action or investigation is justified.
Link to this termEvidence and governance
A structured, reviewable argument connecting a bounded claim to supporting evidence, explicit assumptions, known defeaters, version identity, operating conditions, and a responsible review owner. It is not automatically a certificate, legal approval, or proof of effectiveness.
Link to this termEvidence and governance
Evidence or a material change showing that an assumption needed by an assurance claim no longer holds, requiring qualification, investigation, suspension, or withdrawal rather than silent inheritance of the earlier claim.
Link to this termEvidence and governance
A control that suspends a previously supported assurance or authority claim when a material change to evidence, model, software, configuration, policy, dependency, interface, or operating conditions invalidates its recorded basis.
Link to this termEvidence and governance
A bounded packet containing claim scope, exact versions, supporting records, assumptions, missing evidence, active defeaters, accountable owner actions, residual unknowns, and required next review. It is not automatically a certificate or operational authorization.
Link to this termEvidence and governance
An immutable, version-bound representation of assurance claims, evidence, assumptions, owners, active defeaters, review completion, and release-authority status for one identified system state. A successor may supersede reliance without rewriting the prior snapshot.
Link to this termEvidence and governance
The current bounded status of an assurance claim—supported, qualified, unresolved, suspended, or withdrawn—based on the evidence, assumptions, defeaters, version identity, operating conditions, and responsible review decision.
Link to this termEvidence and governance
A comparison of two independently preserved assurance snapshots showing changed evidence, model, software, configuration, policy, authority, interface, environment, owners, assumptions, and claim states without silently rewriting accepted history.
Link to this termAutonomy and AI
Software compares sensed features with programmed or learned categories to recognize or discriminate an object. ATR does not by itself establish unrestricted target generation, legal validation, or authority to engage.
Link to this termHuman factors
Over-reliance on automated advice, including commission errors from following incorrect recommendations and omission errors from failing to act when automation does not alert.
Link to this termAutonomy and AI
A system determines or adjusts its movement without continuous steering commands. It does not imply authority to classify, select, or engage a target.
Link to this termAutonomy and AI
A weapon that, once activated, can select and engage targets without further operator intervention under the functional definition used by the U.S. Department of Defense. Other institutions use related but nonidentical language and regulatory positions.
Link to this termAutonomy and AI
Independent performance of a bounded task such as navigation, sensor management, tracking, recognition, route selection, or assessment. It must be distinguished from authority over the use of force.
Link to this termPrediction and analysis
A structured, case-specific, multidisciplinary process for gathering contextual evidence about a concrete safety concern, developing a management plan, and reassessing over time. It is not necessarily an actuarial probability of future violence.
Link to this termEvidence and governance
A deterministic grouping of admitted immutable branches by one allowlisted shared value, such as affected stage, fixture, recurrence state, exception class, or closure state. Cohort membership does not establish event independence, representativeness, shared dependency, common cause, or systemic scope.
Link to this termEvidence and governance
A reviewed analysis of the evidence, transformations, model and software state, policy, authority, interface, human judgment, action, outcome, and organizational controls that may have contributed to a consequential result. It identifies possible contribution without automatically assigning guilt or a blame percentage.
Link to this termEvidence and governance
A bounded map of evidence-supported technical and institutional influence across policy, data, model, integration, assurance, operation, review, and correction roles. It does not assign guilt, liability, blame percentages, or exoneration.
Link to this termEvidence and governance
A receipt or acknowledgement that creates the appearance of human review without establishing competent evidence access, an independent verifier, a bounded disposition, or authority to suspend, correct, or retire the state.
Link to this termHuman control
A nominal human approval step that does not materially change evidence access, deliberation time, authority, intervention capability, or the machine state before an outcome becomes irreversible.
Link to this termEvidence and governance
A read-only derivation of which source, claim, case, page, answer, simulation, discovery, and durable owners require review after a bounded change event. A preview does not mutate publication truth.
Link to this termEvidence and models
Several apparently separate reports trace back to the same underlying observation or claim, creating the illusion of independent corroboration.
Link to this termEvidence and governance
The trace connecting observations and source statements to later inference, synthesis, prioritization, recommendation, authorization, action, public reuse, review, correction, or supersession.
Link to this termEvidence and governance
A bounded dispute disposition that records what was resolved and what remains unknown. Closure does not establish certainty, legal responsibility, certification, or operational release authority.
Link to this termEvidence and governance
The practical ability to inspect a decision or claim, understand its basis, challenge errors or assumptions, obtain review, and seek correction or reversal from an empowered authority.
Link to this termEvidence and governance
The person or institution empowered to correct source data, a model or rule, a public claim, an operational record, or a downstream consequence. Correction ownership can be divided among several institutions.
Link to this termEvidence and governance
An append-oriented history connecting each bounded correction, suspension, retirement, or closure action to the evidence, owner, prior state, and residual unknowns that justified it.
Link to this termEvidence and governance
A version-preserving review that begins with an immutable dispute and recorded corrective action, then separately evaluates implementation, implementation evidence, independent verification, bounded effect, later invalidation, retirement, closure, and residual exposure.
Link to this termEvidence and governance
A version-bound process that checks whether the evidence, implementation, authority, interface, dependencies, and operating conditions supporting a prior corrective-action effectiveness conclusion remain current.
Link to this termSimulation
A comparison between the user’s chosen intervention and a predefined alternative while preserving the same underlying scenario evidence and timing.
Link to this termEvidence and governance
A separate deterministic synthetic branch that begins with one immutable monitoring-coverage record, applies one released remediation, injects bounded failures, and tests the complete alert path without editing the source history or claiming real deployment.
Link to this termPublication
A typed, read-only map connecting one recurring concept to existing simulations, labs, evidence explorers, methods, correction history, and ecosystem handoffs without duplicating the underlying factual records.
Link to this termCore models
Lockheed Martin’s intrusion-oriented sequence: Reconnaissance, Weaponization, Delivery, Exploitation, Installation, Command and Control, and Actions on Objectives.
Link to this termSimulation
Replaying the same scripted observations, timing, and scenario seed so that different decisions or policies can be compared without hiding the consequences behind new randomness.
Link to this termPublication
The explicit scope split that routes one-sequence education to KillChains.com, governed multi-path education to KillWebs.com, and production accountability software for deployed systems to Evulgare.com.
Link to this termEvidence and governance
The required fail-closed result when implementation evidence or competent independent verification is absent. An assigned action, policy statement, ticket closure, training record, or sign-off is not substituted for proof that the action worked.
Link to this termF2T2EA stages
Apply an authorized effect. On KillChains.com this may be shown abstractly as warning, containment, interruption, interception, or no action rather than weapon-employment procedure.
Link to this termEvidence and governance
Integrity establishes which artifact or record is being examined and whether it changed. Factual support asks whether the record is accurate, independent, sufficient, relevant, and capable of supporting the bounded claim under current conditions.
Link to this termEvidence and models
The strength of support for a claim, considering source reliability, independence, provenance, freshness, relevance, contradiction, directness, and the conditions under which the information was produced.
Link to this termEvidence and governance
A reviewed change to how material is labeled—such as manufacturer-described, independently corroborated, disputed, historical, or publicly unknown—without rewriting the underlying source or inventing a new fact.
Link to this termEvidence and governance
The distinction between naming and requesting a missing record and actually receiving a preserved, reviewable record. Neither state by itself establishes factual support.
Link to this termEvidence and models
A visible classification of how a claim is supported, such as officially documented, independently corroborated, manufacturer-described, alleged, disputed, or publicly unspecified.
Link to this termEvidence and governance
A structured statement of which causal questions are answerable, partially answerable, or unknown, which records are missing, and which production evidence area must supply the next defensible record.
Link to this termEvidence and governance
A bounded, version-preserving process that identifies missing evidence, custody, independent review, challenge, suspension, correction, or retirement authority and creates a new synthetic review branch without rewriting the source packet.
Link to this termEvidence and models
The use of fluent machine-generated rationale to make weak, circular, unsupported, or hallucinated evidence appear causally complete and trustworthy.
Link to this termCore models
Find, Fix, Track, Target, Engage, Assess: a familiar military dynamic-targeting sequence used on this site as a high-level analytical model.
Link to this termTechnology
An architecture in which participating nodes retain local custody of raw data while exchanging bounded queries, results, representations, or model updates. Federation can reduce central concentration risk but does not eliminate privacy leakage, poisoning, or accountability problems.
Link to this termF2T2EA stages
Detect or discover a potentially relevant object, signal, event, or activity through sensing, intelligence, or observation.
Link to this termEvidence and governance
The first published KillChains.com version that carried an accepted corrected, withdrawn, superseded, or reclassified state. It is a repository release boundary, not necessarily the date when an external program changed.
Link to this termF2T2EA stages
Establish sufficient confidence in location, identity, observation quality, and relevance for continued tracking and evaluation.
Link to this termEvidence and governance
A versioned, repository-authored register of accepted corrections, withdrawals, supersessions, and evidence reclassifications that preserves both the prior bounded state and the accepted current state.
Link to this termEvidence and governance
The explicit instruction governing how an earlier statement, source, program state, or interface failure remains available for chronology and audit after a current correction or successor is accepted.
Link to this termHuman control
The rejected assumption that a final human approval action automatically makes that person solely responsible, even when the surrounding system denied meaningful time, evidence, understanding, authority, or intervention capability.
Link to this termHuman control
An affirmative human action is required before the system performs a designated consequential function for a particular engagement or action.
Link to this termHuman control
A system performs delegated functions automatically while a human supervises and may have authority and time to intervene, abort, override, or deactivate.
Link to this termHuman control
After activation, no target-specific human approval is required for the system to select and engage within the delegated envelope. Earlier human design, policy, mission, and activation decisions remain part of the causal architecture.
Link to this termEvidence and models
Determining whether records, names, aliases, documents, devices, biometrics, or observations refer to the same real-world person or entity. It is analytically distinct from predicting what that person will do.
Link to this termEvidence and governance
A later review branch created after new evidence or change invalidates continued reliance. It preserves the earlier audit, closure, statement, evidence basis, version identity, and hash rather than overwriting them.
Link to this termHuman control
The formal power held by a person or organization to define objectives, configure a system, authorize a consequence, supervise execution, correct records, or accept responsibility.
Link to this termEvidence and governance
A source-reconciled comparison that identifies documented machine functions, institutional authority owners, intervention and correction paths, lifecycle status, and public unknowns without producing a score or ranking.
Link to this termCore models
A staged model connecting an initial observation, access, or preparation step to a later objective. Its defensive value is the identification of dependencies and interruption points.
Link to this termCore models
A distributed network in which sensing, fusion, command, and effect functions can be composed across many nodes and rerouted rather than proceeding through one fixed linear path.
Link to this termHuman control
A communications condition in which live command or telemetry is unavailable. It does not determine its own meaning: the system may halt, loiter, return, continue reversible tasks, or follow another predeclared policy.
Link to this termEvidence and governance
The capacity to reconstruct and evaluate what a consequential machine system knew, did not know, was authorized to do, actually did, showed to human operators, and caused—using evidence strong enough to support accountable review.
Link to this termEvidence and governance
A bounded system change intended to alter evidence quality, authority, timing, execution, recovery, or reconstructability after a demonstrated failure. The term does not imply guaranteed prevention, certification, compliance, or legal exoneration.
Link to this termEvidence and governance
A fixed-ground-truth reconstruction in which progressively richer evidence changes what can be defensibly explained without changing the fictional event, outcome, or historical record.
Link to this termEvidence and governance
The design principle that a system acting at machine speed should preserve the machine-held evidence needed to explain its own technical history, rather than leaving the nearest human to reconstruct an opaque decision after the fact.
Link to this termGovernance
The delegation of institutional leadership functions—sensing, interpretation, prioritization, planning, coordination, execution, or evaluation—to software while people may retain formal office and responsibility.
Link to this termEvidence and governance
An immutable, bounded record of a challenge, requested and produced evidence, review ownership, corrective action, preserved prior state, current disposition, and residual unknowns. It is not a legal verdict or blame allocation.
Link to this termEvidence and governance
A bounded map identifying the records, owner roles, challenge paths, acceptance decisions, suspension authority, correction duties, and retirement authority required to support one version-bound assurance claim.
Link to this termHuman control
A normative concept emphasizing sufficient information, understanding, predictability, authority, time, and intervention capability for human judgment. It is influential in policy debate but not one universally codified treaty standard.
Link to this termEvidence and models
A score produced by a model under its data, categories, calibration, and current inputs. It is not automatically evidence quality, positive identification, legal correctness, or ground truth.
Link to this termEvidence and governance
A material evidence source, version, dependency, authority state, interface condition, alert path, operating condition, or institutional duty that falls outside the monitor’s observable and independently reviewable boundary.
Link to this termEvidence and governance
The version-bound map of evidence sources, components, dependencies, authority states, interfaces, operating conditions, owner roles, and alert paths a monitoring architecture can actually observe. Coverage does not establish factual truth or universal safety.
Link to this termInstitutional authority
A fail-closed result used when no competent released owner can perform a required review, suspension, correction, retirement, or closure action. The duty remains unresolved rather than being assigned to the nearest human by assumption.
Link to this termHuman factors
A person is formally assigned an approval or supervisory role but lacks the time, information, authority, interface, or functioning intervention path needed to exercise independent judgment.
Link to this termMachine leadership
A system authorized to execute bounded routine actions and adapt within a predefined envelope while humans retain activation, exception, override, and review responsibilities.
Link to this termMachine leadership
The transfer of a bounded analytical, coordination, screening, navigation, or execution function to software while a person or institution may retain the objective, authorization, override, correction duty, and legal responsibility.
Link to this termEvidence and governance
A production capability that preserves the inputs, model and software versions, authority state, operator-visible information, actions, outputs, and causal records needed to reconstruct a real system decision or failure.
Link to this termInstitutional authority
The separate legal and organizational power to authorize a real system for operation or use. It must not be inferred from evidence integrity, factual support, an assurance state, or completion of an assurance review packet.
Link to this termPrediction and analysis
Estimating an identifiable person’s future offending, victimization, recidivism, or involvement in a defined outcome. The output may persist across encounters and influence scrutiny even when formally advisory.
Link to this termPrediction and analysis
Estimating where and when a designated event category may concentrate in a future period. It does not identify a particular future offender and should be evaluated separately from patrol dosage and underlying event prevalence.
Link to this termPrediction and analysis
A full chain linking collection, identity resolution, inference or prioritization, human interpretation, intervention, retention, and review or redress before a new offense has been adjudicated.
Link to this termHuman control
A human-defined permission established before the event that allows a system to perform a bounded action when specified evidence, mission, geographic, temporal, and safety conditions are satisfied.
Link to this termPrediction and analysis
A decision architecture connecting past or administrative data to identity resolution, inference or prioritization, human interpretation, intervention, retention, and review or redress. It includes but is not limited to machine-learning systems marketed as predictive policing.
Link to this termEvidence and models
A cycle in which a forecast or priority changes observation and enforcement exposure, producing records that can be reused as input in the next analysis. The loop must be separated from changes in underlying event prevalence.
Link to this termEvidence and governance
The point where public education and synthetic simulation stop and a real deployed system requires operational evidence capture, software and model lineage, authority reconstruction, operator-view reconstruction, assurance, incident causality, or change-impact analysis at Evulgare.
Link to this termEvidence and models
Information about where data, a claim, model, document, or inference came from and how it changed. Provenance helps detect circular reporting, stale inputs, tampering, and unsupported summaries.
Link to this termMachine leadership
A system that interprets broad objectives, decomposes work, allocates resources, and coordinates operations while a human board, officer, administrator, or legal entity retains formal authority and liability.
Link to this termGovernance
A report-derived model in which synthetic systems perform substantial administrative or executive work through human or institutional legal proxies.
Link to this termGovernance
The explicit assignment of human or organizational responsibility for a machine-mediated decision when the machine cannot itself bear legal or moral responsibility.
Link to this termEvidence and models
Reviewed public evidence does not establish the relevant operating mode, authority, threshold, configuration, or status. Unknown information must not be silently converted into either human-controlled or autonomous.
Link to this termEvidence and governance
The explicit bounded disposition distinguishing recurrence not observed in one retest, transient failure not observed, recurring exception, systemic blind spot, or an indeterminate result caused by missing comparability, evidence, complete-path testing, or independent verification.
Link to this termGovernance
A process through which an affected person can seek correction, review, explanation, removal, or another remedy concerning a record, designation, match, or decision. Redress may differ from an ordinary appeal and may provide limited disclosure.
Link to this termEvidence and governance
A bounded observation suggesting that a previously reviewed control, assumption, dependency, authority state, interface, or operating condition may no longer hold. A signal is a trigger for review, not proof of regression.
Link to this termEvidence and governance
A known limitation, unresolved condition, future invalidation risk, missing authority, or untested operating condition that remains after a corrective action or audit branch closes.
Link to this termEvidence and governance
The explicit assignment of responsibility for producing, preserving, verifying, challenging, accepting, suspending, correcting, and retiring the evidence and claim being reviewed.
Link to this termHuman control
A predefined, bounded system condition entered when assumptions, communications, sensors, authority, or operating limits fail. Safe for the platform does not necessarily mean risk-free for every affected party.
Link to this termEvidence and governance
A bounded rerun using the frozen conditions and comparison identity of the source fixture. A pass can show only that recurrence was not observed in that run; it does not establish durable non-recurrence, production safety, or elimination of residual exposure.
Link to this termEvidence and models
Combining observations from multiple sensors or reports into a track, estimate, or shared picture while accounting for timing, uncertainty, source dependence, and contradiction.
Link to this termInstitutional authority
A governance arrangement in which evidence production, preservation, verification, challenge, acceptance, suspension, correction, and retirement are not all controlled by one unchallengeable institution. Separation can reduce conflicts but does not guarantee competence or accountability.
Link to this termSimulation
The browser submits bounded user intent, while PHP validates the command and determines the official stage, evidence visibility, outcome, sequence, score, and debrief state.
Link to this termEvidence and governance
A public record, page, answer, or interactive feature whose bounded claim relies on a particular source ID. Dependency does not upgrade the source or prove that every reuse is independently corroborated.
Link to this termEvidence and governance
A condition in which a source or claim can no longer serve its former current-support role. Withdrawal requires review of replacement evidence and downstream use but does not automatically prove the opposite proposition.
Link to this termHuman control
A conceptual architecture separating Retrieval, Cognition, deterministic Control, bounded Action, and auditable Memory so probabilistic reasoning does not directly own execution authority.
Link to this termEvidence and governance
A reviewed relationship in which a newer source, program, policy, or claim becomes the current-state owner while the earlier record remains available for chronology and audit.
Link to this termEvidence and governance
The bounded sequence from a synthetic changed condition through observation, alert generation, transport, receipt, competent review, independent verification, reliance qualification or suspension, correction or retirement, and preservation of residual unknowns. Passing it does not establish production safety or factual truth.
Link to this termSimulation
A fictional setting, event stream, evidence set, timing, score, and outcome created solely to teach structure, uncertainty, control, and causality. It is not evidence about a real system.
Link to this termEvidence and governance
A typed bounded synthetic state describing whether admitted observations support no pattern, correlated symptoms, bounded pattern support, or an indeterminate result. It is not a provider ranking, product score, safety grade, blame percentage, risk score, legal finding, or operational-release decision.
Link to this termF2T2EA stages
Validate and prioritize a candidate, evaluate applicable constraints, select a course of action or effector, and determine the required authority. It is not merely an AI classification label.
Link to this termEvidence and governance
The capacity to reconstruct a consequential system decision from authentic evidence, versions, uncertainty, policy, authority, interface state, human actions, execution, outcome, and later changes. It supports causal and institutional review but is not itself a legal judgment or transfer of liability to software.
Link to this termWeb technology
The JavaScript 3D rendering library used for the site’s WebGL and WebXR visualizations, with semantic HTML and Canvas fallbacks for essential content.
Link to this termF2T2EA stages
Maintain continuity of identity and movement over time while accounting for uncertainty, missed observations, and competing association hypotheses.
Link to this termEvidence and governance
A plain-language explanation of how an input became a different analytical object—for example, how observations became a forecast, a forecast became a priority, or several sources became an editorial synthesis.
Link to this termHuman factors
A decision architecture in which automation filters evidence, ranks hypotheses, and narrows options before the human recognizes that the choice set has already been constructed.
Link to this termEvidence and governance
A count of exact admitted synthetic branch observations classified as independently verified recurrence, qualified non-observation, unverified recurrence label, or missing observation. It contains no denominator and is not a rate, probability, trend score, or risk estimate.
Link to this termGovernance
The movement of practical policy choices from front-line human judgment into objective setting, data selection, proxy design, thresholds, procurement, model updates, and workflow integration.
Link to this termEvidence and governance
A separate append-oriented synthetic record opened from one immutable validation result. It preserves the original result and hash while recording the affected stage, exception class, requested evidence, corrective response, retest, recurrence classification, reliance disposition, escalation, closure, and residual unknowns.
Link to this termPrediction and analysis
Maintaining records or screening designations for named people or identities that can redirect attention, screening, investigation, or partner treatment. A watchlist record is not automatically a warrant, charge, or proof of misconduct.
Link to this termWeb technology
A web standard that gives compatible browsers access to immersive virtual- and augmented-reality devices. On KillChains.com it is progressive enhancement rather than a content requirement.
Link to this termUse and citation
When a term is contested, cite both the KillChains.com definition and the underlying official or institutional source. Do not remove qualifiers such as “after activation,” “operator-supervised,” “manufacturer-described,” or “publicly unspecified.”