Assurance is the bottleneck.
Autonomy is arriving faster than the means of trusting it. That gap is procurement's problem before it is anyone else's.
Why an independent range, and why now
Self-certification does not travel
A supplier's own evidence is gathered in a simulation the supplier built, so another nation's programme office cannot audit it, cannot reproduce it, and will not accept it.
NATO TEVV exists to make evidence comparable across suppliers and across member states. Comparability requires a common adversary and a common scoring method, which requires somewhere neutral to run both.
Simulation only tests what you predicted
Range operators go after the failure modes you did not predict, and are not paid by the programme that would prefer they found none.
A commercial stake in the result disqualifies an evaluator. Verax sells one thing, the evidence, and holds one relationship, with the programme office that commissioned it.
What changed
Then
Systems were deterministic enough to specify
A requirement could be written, tested against, and signed off. Behaviour outside the specification was a defect.
Now
Behaviour is learned, and the envelope is not fully known
A system can satisfy every written requirement and still act unpredictably against an input nobody wrote a requirement for.
Consequence
Evidence has to be gathered adversarially
You cannot enumerate the failure space in advance, so you have to pay someone to go looking for it, under conditions the supplier does not control.
Position
Every assurance file lists the runs a system failed. A file that lists none goes back to the red team before it goes to the programme office.
Range standing order, printed on every assurance fileAsk how we are funded and who can change a finding.
Programme offices fund the range directly. Once a finding is in the file, no vendor and no member of range staff can alter it.