Edge-Authoritative OT Enforcement Under DDIL Communications: A Mission-Command-Inspired Design and Proof of Concept

Operational technology (OT) defenses at the tactical edge frequently export telemetry and policy decisions to centralized services. Under denied, disrupted or disconnected, intermittent, and limited (DDIL) communications, a reachback-gated decision path can become unavailable at the same time an adversary activates an attack. We distinguish reachback-gated, cached-policy, and edge-authoritative enforcement; derive design requirements using mission command as an engineering analogy rather than a transfer of command authority; and define reconciliation semantics that separate authoritative policy from observations and temporary indicators. We then report a proof-of-concept evaluation of a commercial transparent Layer-2 enforcement node. Four repeated automated runs used 200-800 ms one-way latency, 5-30% random loss, and 5-30 min management-link outages across 11 disconnect cycles. The test report records that all attempted unauthorized control commands were blocked locally during outages, no valid control traffic was modified, inline enforcement latency remained below 2 ms, peak synchronization traffic remained below 1.5 kbit/s, and 4 of 87 raw events required analyst escalation. These results support technical feasibility but not statistical generality because the sample is small, baselines are incomplete, and the instrumentation has not been independently validated. We therefore specify a reproducible experiment with reachback-gated and cached-policy baselines, percentile latency, correctness, convergence, and backlog-drain measures. The central result is architectural: the management link should improve federation without being on the critical enforcement path.