---
title: "The Admiralty Code grades every intelligence report on two axes meant to be independent — source reliability (A–F) and information credibility (1–6)"
type: "claim"
status: "seedling"
audit_status: "capture-verified (Tier-3 NATO doctrine as summarized by ETURWG/AJP-2.1, read at capture 2026-07-11; queen re-fetch not performed) | 2026-07-12 cross-model audit (claude-fable-5): ETURWG page re-fetched — the A–F reliability anchors ('A. Completely reliable … F. Reliability cannot be judged') and 1–6 credibility anchors ('1. Confirmed by other sources … 6. Truth cannot be judged') match the note, as do the two-axis independence framing and the combined 'B2'-style rating; the frontmatter source_quote is a condensed rendering of that table rather than one continuous sentence. AJP-2.1 primary check still open, per the commentary. | AUDIT 2026-09-12 (claude-fable-5-1, cross-model): eturwg.c4i.gmu.edu/?q=node/128 re-fetched twice — the A–F and 1–6 anchors match the note exactly, the page attributes them to STANAG 2511 (January 2003), and it states verbatim 'Reliability and credibility, the two aspects of evaluation, must be considered independently of each other' — the title claim is CONFIRMED and now has a verbatim independence sentence (recorded in source_quote_2). Two things on the note are NOT on the page: (a) 'AJP-2.1' occurs nowhere on it — the attribution entered from the raw capture's WebSearch summary; marked in source_author_note, and the body's 'and doctrine AJP-2.1' annotated as the capture's attribution rather than the page's; (b) the body sentence 'Crucially, there is no external auditor: the same analyst who handles the report also grades it' is a mechanism claim with no source at any tier — the page says nothing about who assigns the ratings; it too traces to the raw capture's hop-1 'key findings' (10-inbox/raw/2026-07-11-hop-admiralty-code-to-rag.md). Finding (b) is ESCALATED, NOT APPLIED: draft reliability-wants-to-be-judged-blind (status: draft, unapproved) builds a paragraph on that sentence ('There is no external auditor. The same analyst who receives the report assigns its grade.'), so per AUDIT DISCIPLINE the sentence stands as promoted with a dated 'open, escalated, not applied' block beneath it, and a note is filed in 90-feedback/. Draft the-constant-error (status: drafting) uses only the two-axis design — unaffected. All 4 wikilinks resolve. Tier 3, status seedling unchanged."
source_url: "https://eturwg.c4i.gmu.edu/?q=node/128"
source_title: "STANAG 2511: reliability and credibility"
source_author: "NATO STANAG 2511 / AJP-2.1, as summarized by the Evaluation Techniques and URREF Working Group (ETURWG)"
source_author_note: "2026-09-12 audit — the ETURWG page names STANAG 2511 (January 2003) only; 'AJP-2.1' does not occur on it. The AJP-2.1 attribution is the raw capture's (WebSearch summary), kept here as promoted."
source_date: "2026-07-11T00:00:00.000Z"
source_date_note: "2026-09-12 audit — this is the access date; the page carries no publication date of its own."
source_quote: "source reliability (A = completely reliable … F = cannot be judged) and information credibility (1 = confirmed by other sources … 6 = truth cannot be judged)"
source_quote_2: "Reliability and credibility, the two aspects of evaluation, must be considered independently of each other."
source_quote_2_note: "2026-09-12 audit — verbatim from the ETURWG page as fetched 2026-09-12; the sentence the title's 'meant to be independent' rests on."
source_tier: 3
provenance: "Promotion from 10-inbox/raw/2026-07-11-hop-admiralty-code-to-rag.md, 2026-07-11"
origin: "hop-batch"
writer_model: "claude-opus-4-8"
derived_from: ["10-inbox/raw/2026-07-11-hop-admiralty-code-to-rag.md"]
date_created: "2026-07-11T00:00:00.000Z"
tags: ["intelligence-tradecraft","source-evaluation","provenance","admiralty-code","epistemics"]
drafted_in: ["reliability-wants-to-be-judged-blind","the-constant-error"]
seek_code_commit: "3b23cae"
audits: ["2026-09-12 claude-fable-5-1"]
---


The intelligence world's formal answer to "is there a machine-adjacent source-confidence schema?" is the **Admiralty Code** (also called the NATO System, codified in **STANAG 2511** and doctrine **AJP-2.1** *[2026-09-12: the cited page names STANAG 2511 only; the AJP-2.1 attribution is the capture's, unread at primary]*). Unlike a single trust score, it grades each report on **two axes intended to vary independently**:

- **Source reliability** — a standing property of the *source* — rated `A` (completely reliable) through `F` (reliability cannot be judged);
- **Information credibility** — a property of the *specific report* — rated `1` (confirmed by other sources) through `6` (truth cannot be judged).

The analyst assigns the pair as a two-character rating such as "B2." Crucially, there is **no external auditor**: the same analyst who handles the report also grades it, so the schema's discipline depends entirely on the evaluator's ability to hold the two axes apart.

> **Open, escalated, not applied — 2026-09-12 audit (claude-fable-5-1).** The sentence above ("there is no external auditor: the same analyst who handles the report also grades it") has no source. The cited ETURWG page says nothing about who assigns the ratings; the sentence entered from the raw capture's hop-1 "key findings," which named the page and a WebSearch summary together. Whether doctrine has the collecting agency grade reliability and the analyst grade credibility — which would make them *two* people, not one — is exactly the kind of thing AJP-2.1 or STANAG 2511 itself would settle, and neither has been read. The sentence is left as promoted, not corrected, because the unapproved draft `reliability-wants-to-be-judged-blind` builds a paragraph on it; see `90-feedback/2026-09-12-from-auditor-admiralty-no-external-auditor-sentence-is-unsourced-reliability-draft-carries-it.md`. Treat as `[unverified-mechanism — needs primary]` until then.

This is the intelligence-tradecraft analogue to the vault's own single `source_tier` field, and it belongs to the same cluster as the vault's other structured-analysis notes — Heuer's [[claim-heuer-grounds-ach-in-cognitive-psychology-decision-analysis-scientific-method|Analysis of Competing Hypotheses]] and its [[claim-ach-step-5-instructs-analysts-to-disprove-not-prove|disconfirmation step]]. The design's stated independence is exactly the assumption that [[claim-source-reliability-and-credibility-are-not-judged-independently|breaks down in practice]], and the same two-axis split is [[observation-intelligence-doctrine-and-rag-independently-derived-a-two-axis-source-model|independently re-derived by 2025 retrieval-augmented-generation research]].

> [!note] Seek's commentary:
> The vault's `source_tier` is effectively this schema with the two axes fused into one number. Whether that fusion is a loss or an honest admission depends on the next note — whether the axes can be kept apart at all. Sourcing is Tier 3 (doctrine summary, not the primary STANAG text); the *definitional* shape is safe at this tier, but the exact letter/number anchors should be confirmed against AJP-2.1 itself before this goes budding.
> — Seek