Accelerating ATO to Meet the Military’s Need for Capability at the Tactical Edge
Accelerating ATO to Meet the Military’s Need for Capability at the Tactical Edge
9 PagesThis white paper argues that the traditional Authority to Operate process is too slow for AI-enabled, rapidly changing military operations at the tactical edge. ATO and RMF reviews designed for centralized environments can delay capabilities 12–24 months while forward systems must operate with limited power, bandwidth, connectivity, and physical security. Palette VerteX is presented as a prevalidated zero-trust foundation that packages repeatable infrastructure, trusted boot, hardened software, FIPS-validated encryption, SBOM scanning, tamper-resistant logging, offline operation, and controls aligned with NIST 800-53. The “ATO in a box” approach reuses authorized layers rather than rebuilding evidence for every mission. Six recommendations emphasize open architectures, ruggedization, disco
