Building a Cryptographic Flight Recorder for Military AI: The Defense AI Profile (DAP)

900 Strikes in 12 Hours. Zero Verifiable Audit Trail. On February 28, 2026, Operation Epic Fury launched. AI — reportedly Anthropic's Claude, embedded in Palantir's Maven Smart System — generated approximately 1,000 targeting recommendations in the first 24 hours. GPS coordinates, weapons recommendations, automated legal justifications. Approximately 900 strikes executed in 12 hours. The auditor will call eventually. Not a corporate auditor this time. A war crimes investigator. A congressional oversight committee. The International Criminal Court. "Can you prove a human actually reviewed each target?" "How long did that review take?" "Was the AI's collateral damage estimate seen before authorization?" The answer, right now: there is no cryptographically verifiable way to answer any of these questions. This article introduces the Defense AI Profile (DAP) — a new domain profile within the VAP (Verifiable AI Provenance) Framework that applies the same cryptographic accountability infrastr