For defense to obtain at the scale of a political community whose protective obligation against external coercion runs alongside its cross-boundary recognition obligation (articulating the institutional conditions under which defense discharges the [§9.1](<9.1 Rights.md>) protective obligation without becoming the structural-extraction failure mode the framework derives against), the framework works up a structural-necessity inventory specific to defense as constitutive infrastructure. Each pulls weight none of the others can; what defense architecture has to deliver to count as defense architecture rather than as a permanent extractive industry dependent on conflicts continuing is the set entire.

*Defense-as-protection-of-the-political-community is legitimate constitutive infrastructure.* The framework is not pacifist. It is derived at [§9.1](<9.1 Rights.md>) that the political community is structurally obliged to protect its participants against external coercion, and defense is one of the channels through which that obligation is discharged. Defense institutions are constitutive infrastructure on the same logic as the legal system or public-health infrastructure: their legitimacy follows directly from the protective obligation rather than from any separate moral framework. The condition rules out architectures that refuse defense entirely as failing the protective obligation [§9.1](<9.1 Rights.md>) establishes against external coercion.

*Proportionality between deterrence investment and recognition-building investment is load-bearing.* Recognition-building investment (diplomacy; trade; cultural exchange; joint scientific work; refugee-and-migration capacity; treaty architecture; arms-control infrastructure) is the means by which mutual recognition scales across arrangement boundaries at all. Deterrence investment is the means by which the political community maintains its standing under conditions of recognition-failure. Both are required. Arrangements whose deterrence investment systematically outruns their recognition-building investment will systematically over-produce conflict, on the same logic that engagement-optimization over-produces information-environment degradation in [§9.4](<9.4 Information.md>). The constraint is the proportion, not either side standing alone. The condition does not pick a specific ratio; it picks the responsiveness pattern.

*Cross-boundary recognition obligation is binding (just-war constraints).* Civilians of other arrangements, refugees, populations under occupation, and future participants of any arrangement currently being put at risk are participants whose constitutive vulnerabilities the framework has already established. Operations that produce mass civilian casualties, that destroy the institutions on which other populations' continued participation depends, or that foreclose the future of an arrangement that has not itself committed recognition-failure of comparable magnitude are precluded on the framework's own terms. The just-war tradition's discrimination, proportionality, and last-resort constraints recover structurally as the recognition-failure logic located across arrangement boundaries. The condition is binding under [§8.12](<8.12 Morality.md>) and [§8.11](<8.11 Technology.md>) jointly: technological reach extends the recognition obligation across the range it covers.

This is also where the framework adjudicates the *in bello* combatant-equality dispute [§9.11.1](<9.11.1 What is Disputed.md>) stages. Liability to defensive force tracks moral responsibility for a recognition-failure threat, not the symmetric status the war convention assigns to combatants as such: those prosecuting an unjust threat are liable in a way those resisting it are not. On the deep moral question the framework therefore lands with McMahan's revisionism (2009) against Walzer's moral equality of combatants (1977): the equality holds, if at all, as a convention of positive law rather than as foundational morality. What the framework grants Walzer is functional rather than foundational: under the uncertainty and adversarial incentives of conflict, symmetric, status-based in-bello rules are frequently the arrangement most likely to preserve recognition that case-by-case liability adjudication would erode, so the war convention is retained, but as derived coordination machinery, endorsed for the recognition-preserving work it does, not as a self-standing moral system.

This locates the parting the section had previously left implicit: the constraints the just-war tradition reconstructs interpretively, from an accreted shared practice, the framework derives from the [§8.12](<8.12 Morality.md>) recognition-failure logic; where derivation and convention diverge, as they do on combatant equality, the derivation governs the deep question and the convention is kept only for its coordination value.

The same liability principle fixes its own terminus. If liability to defensive force tracks responsibility for an active recognition-failure threat rather than combatant status as such, it lapses when the threat does: a surrender that is manifest and genuine withdraws liability, because what grounded the liability was the threat being prosecuted, not the person prosecuting it, which is also why perfidy, the feigned surrender that exploits that withdrawal, forfeits the protection it counterfeits. A combatant coerced into prosecuting an unjust threat is doubly a subject of the recognition obligation (liable while the threat is live, and a participant whose standing the prosecuting regime has already foreclosed), so the surrender made real by quarter, safe custody, and eventual return is the cross-boundary form of the upstream move the framework runs within an arrangement: the unjust threat is drained by restoring its conscripts' foreclosed standing, not only by defeating them in the field.

That the coerced conscript is doubly a subject is not a separate intuition of the war convention; it is the Modally Compatibilist Responsibility result ([§9.13](<9.13 Justice.md>)) applied across the boundary. The conscript is liable for the threat they pose, because they pose it; but the field of live options under which their participation could have grounded full desert was foreclosed before they entered it, and on that result a narrowed field degrades exactly that grounding. The diminished liability is therefore derived from the framework's own responsibility theory, not borrowed from *jus in bello*.

The same analysis extends along a second axis. Where coercion narrows the conscript's field by constraining the will, deception narrows it by withholding what the act is: a soldier who consents to what they are told is national defense, while functionally prosecuting a recognition-failure of a magnitude kept from them, has had the field of options under which full desert could accrue foreclosed on the epistemic rather than the volitional axis. And because a combatant's grasp of the cause they serve is exactly what an adversarial information environment is built to shape (the [§9.4](<9.4 Information.md>) degradation turned to the purpose of the conflict) this epistemic foreclosure is the case to presume rather than the exception to be argued for: the default is that a person fights for what they have been given to believe is a cause worth fighting for, and the burden of showing genuine knowledge runs against that presumption, not with it.

The result registers the two foreclosures alike: what degrades the grounding of desert is a narrowed field of live options, whether the narrowing is worked by force or by withheld knowledge. The liability to defensive force is unchanged, since it tracks the threat actually posed and not the threatener's grasp of it; what the epistemic foreclosure reaches is the backward-looking desert, diminished in proportion to how much of what they were functionally doing was kept from them. The soldier who grasps what they prosecute and the soldier deceived into prosecuting it are equally liable in the field and unequally answerable after it.

The proportionality has a floor of its own, set by the same principle that grounds it. What diminishes desert is evidence withheld from the field, not evidence declined within it: the conscript fed a false account of the war has had the relevant option foreclosed from outside, whereas a combatant who had the means to know what they were part of and refused the uptake has narrowed the field themselves. But the means to know is itself something an information environment can be engineered to withhold, so where that field has been degraded to the purpose of the conflict ([§9.4](<9.4 Information.md>)) the threshold for a genuinely self-authored refusal is correspondingly high: the floor is not a license to presume culpable knowledge wherever some scrap of contrary evidence can be said to have been available. Because the result grounds responsibility in the uptake of available evidence, a self-authored refusal of what was within reach degrades nothing (the foreclosure that mitigates has to be worked on the subject, not by them), but what was genuinely within reach is exactly what an engineered field puts in question, so the floor marks the rare case of evidence declined within a field that was actually open, not the ordinary case of a field engineered closed.

Willful ignorance is thus the inverse of the deceived soldier's case rather than a weaker instance of it: the deceived soldier's desert falls because the truth was kept from them, while the soldier who keeps it from themselves retains the desert their refusal itself exercises. The mitigating variable is the involuntariness of the ignorance, not its presence; the gradient between the two (how much could have been known, and at what cost to the one who might have known it) is left to the same cross-boundary adjudication that carries the surviving accountability, not fixed in advance.

Two limits hold the result in place. Surrender ends the forward-looking license to use force against the one who has laid it down; it does not extinguish backward-looking accountability for the recognition-failures already committed, which survives the cessation of the threat. But the register that survives is not the within-community adjudication of [§9.13](<9.13 Justice.md>): it is the cross-boundary accountability the framework marks at [§9.14](<9.14 Convergence.md>) as a determinate but not-yet-fully-derived extension. What the surrender line fixes is that register's lower edge: liability for the threat ends with the threat, while answerability for what was done under the license persists into the cross-boundary register rather than dissolving with the license that occasioned it. And force pressed past a genuine surrender inverts the liability it claims: the party continuing to prosecute force against the non-threatening becomes the responsible recognition-failure threat, and the just cause that licensed defensive force expires at the line the surrender draws.

*For-profit defense-industry capture is precluded as extraction at the protective floor.* Defense-industry political-economy configurations whose contractor margins, lobbying spend, and revolving-door movement of officials all grow during peacetime (when the threat assessment that originally justified the investment has receded) are the case the framework is structurally against. Configurations where defense investment outruns the threat assessment, where contractor margins and revolving-door movement exceed democratic oversight, where ongoing-conflict postures are favored because the industry depends on conflicts continuing: in each of those cases defense has been turned against the arrangement it was built to protect. Specific reform paths (in-house government production; cost-plus-contracting reform; revolving-door restrictions; concentration limits; non-profit-foundation-style contractor governance) satisfy the alternative; the framework precludes the extraction-at-the-protective-floor configuration and does not pick among framework-compatible reform paths.

*Defense-spending responsiveness to threat-assessment, with democratic-oversight independence from industry pressure.* Defense spending is constrained to track threat-assessment-derived requirements rather than industry political weight. Threat-assessment institutions must function with independence from industry pressure; budget-process systems must register threat-assessment changes (both upward and downward) without industry-driven floors that prevent scaling down. Specific institutional design among framework-compatible alternatives (centralized intelligence-and-assessment architecture; multi-source assessment with cross-validation; congressional-oversight architecture with industry-recusal requirements) is underdetermined; the constraint that these institutions function with independence from industry pressure is binding.

*Veterans care as non-substitutable floor with elevated structural weight.* Veterans care is healthcare for participants who took on extraordinary structural obligations on behalf of the political community. The framework derives the non-substitutability of veterans care as a healthcare-floor item with elevated structural weight, coupled to the [§9.10](<9.10 Healthcare.md>) healthcare-floor architecture. Privatized veterans-insurance configurations that produce extraction at the veterans-care interface are precluded on the same logic that precludes privatization of the healthcare floor generally. The under-investment-in-veterans-care-tracks-over-investment-in-contractor-capture pattern is the empirical signature of failing the condition (Stiglitz and Bilmes 2008; Bacevich 2010). Specific institutional configurations (integrated veterans-healthcare system within broader healthcare-floor architecture; specialized veterans-healthcare system with floor-equivalent funding guarantees; hybrid designs) remain underdetermined within the constraint.

Together, these six conditions are what defense as constitutive infrastructure structurally requires: none of them sparable, substantive defense architecture holding only with all six in place. Those six conditions are what [§9.11.3](<9.11.3 What is Predicted.md>) puts to predictive test.


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← [9.11.1 What is Disputed](<9.11.1 What is Disputed.md>) | [9.11.3 What is Predicted](<9.11.3 What is Predicted.md>) →
