The ORBAT grows all three sides

14 June 2026

At a glance — the ORBAT now carries all three sides: drop in as many own-force, threat and protected-place assets as a scenario needs, tune each one, and watch them appear on the map and the Sync Matrix — without a single one touching the route.

Red threat assets placed and tuned on the Solway map

The problem

REMIT’s entity catalogue was fixed in config and seeded only a single own force. A planner could describe where their vehicle started — and nothing else. There was no way to express the own-force pool, the adversary, or the neutral picture (the no-strike places, the civilian sensitivities) that every real scenario carries. The whole left-hand side of the order of battle was simply missing, and the serialisable shape for it had to live somewhere defensible.

Options

A new object family vs. reusing Entity. We could mint bespoke ThreatMarker / RoeZone types — or treat every asset as a first-class Entity (DEC-52) that simply carries an allegiance. A parallel family would duplicate the map / Sync-Matrix projection machinery and break the “one ontology, three stances” symmetry of DEC-60.
Free-form map drawing vs. a tunable roster. A draw-on-the-map surface is fun but illegible past a handful of assets; a grouped roster with per-instance tuners stays readable at ten-plus per side.
Where the data lives — hand-written vs. generated. The persisted ORBAT is serialisable object-core, so it is exactly what LinkML owns (Principle I). Hand-authoring the shape in app/js would be the re-listing anti-pattern.
Blue: display-only vs. wired into the planner. Should authoring a blue pool asset change routing? Not in v1 — the honest floor (NF9) forbids fabricated behaviour, and reactive adversaries / capability-matched allocation are deferred capabilities.

The strategy

Reuse Entity + allegiance and schema-define the shape, then regenerate. We added an Allegiance enum (blue|red|green) and an optional allegiance attribute to Entity, plus a new schema/orbat.yaml module (Orbat, Asset, Blue/Red/GreenParams, a Protection enum), reusing the existing Waypoint / Lineage / TimeWindow. bash schema/generate.sh re-emits the JSON Schema, the TypeScript types and the HTML reference; the app imports the generated types and never re-lists them.

All three sides are display-only authoring scaffolding under the DEC-56 horizon split and the NF9 honest floor. The model module (app/js/orbat/orbat.js) is a pure, deterministic writer — add / duplicate / tune / remove / validate / canonical / commit — and the authoring panel (app/js/shell/orbat-panel.js, the SME-Int role-tab) and the map read through it. Crucially, blue does not drive routing: the existing planned own-force (ROVER-1) is reconciled as the single canonical_own_force blue asset — protected from removal — and keeps driving the plan via the pre-existing machinery. Everything projects through the existing entity → map / Sync-Matrix path rather than a parallel renderer.

The results

Add / duplicate / tune / remove multiple independent instances of each allegiance, each an allegiance-coloured map marker (point + faint extent ring + label): blue #4493f8, red #ff7b72, green #38d39f.
Sync-Matrix tracks for time-windowed assets (a red patrol window, a blue availability window), aligned with the shared playhead; selecting a row highlights it in both views.
Persistence: the working draft mirrors to localStorage and survives reload exactly; committing mints an immutable, content-addressed Orbat with lineage.
The invariants hold, and the tests prove it: tuning anything — including a blue asset — leaves the committed Plan ids byte-for-byte identical (display-only, NF9), and equal rosters canonicalise to equal bytes regardless of insertion order (NF3). 11 new unit tests and 5 new e2e tests (one per user story) are green, alongside the existing suites.

Screenshots

The authoring panel — three allegiance groups, the canonical own-force surfaced and protected:

The ORBAT authoring panel with the three allegiance groups

Two red threat assets placed and tuned (extent + severity) on the Solway map:

Two red assets with extent rings on the map

Green neutral assets, styled distinctly from red and own force:

Green neutral assets on the map

A red asset with an active window projects as a Sync-Matrix track, synchronised with the playhead:

A red asset's active window as a Sync-Matrix track