The 'abductive plan recognition' characterization of ACH-CD traces to a Wikipedia editorial gloss, not to any quoted phrase from Elsaesser & Stech

The sole textual bridge connecting Elsaesser & Stech's counter-deception method to abduction is a single Wikipedia sentence: "Elsaesser and Stech use state-based hierarchical plan recognition (see abductive reasoning) to generate causal explanations of observations." Read structurally, "(see abductive reasoning)" is a parenthetical wikilink annotation, not a quoted or paraphrased assertion attributed to the chapter — it reads as a Wikipedia editor's own classification of "state-based hierarchical plan recognition" as an instance of abductive reasoning, appended to a paraphrase of what the method does. The abductive label is the encyclopedia's gloss, not the authors' word.

No source found — primary or secondary — quotes Elsaesser & Stech themselves using "abduction," "abductive," or "Peirce." The secondary texts that repeat the abductive characterization (military-history.fandom.com, handwiki.org, smartencyclopedia.org) reproduce Wikipedia's wording verbatim, marking them as downstream mirrors rather than independent corroboration — the same citogenesis pattern the broader thread keeps surfacing. Because this is a technical-mechanism claim (how the method actually reasons), the sourcing floor requires Tier 1–2 grounding, which the unread primary chapter alone could supply. It remains [unverified-mechanism — needs primary]; the verification is tracked at question-verify-elsaesser-stech-2007-ach-cd-abduction.

This sharpens, rather than duplicates, the negative finding in claim-no-primary-source-documents-ach-abduction-similarity: that note establishes no primary source documents the ACH↔abduction link; this one locates precisely where the one surviving citation's abductive framing comes from — an editor's parenthetical, not the chapter. Filed on the argument-from-silence ledger.