---
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."
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_date: "2026-07-11T00:00:00.000Z"
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_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 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**). 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.

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