STANAG 2022 Source Evaluation Card | Worked Example

Prepared by Steven Sawyers MIExpE VR, Sawyers Global Solutions Limited. Open source, unclassified. Prepared with AI assistance and checked by the author. Not legal, regulatory or safety advice.

Every factual claim in an SGS or ISC Defence Intelligence product carries two grades: how reliable the source is, and how credible the specific piece of information is. The scale is the one in NATO's STANAG 2022 (often called the Admiralty Code). This card sets out the grades and shows them applied to a real, public story.

Source reliability (the source)
Grade	Meaning	Typical example
A	Completely reliable	The promulgating authority for a standard; a government department publishing its own decision
B	Usually reliable	A parliamentary research briefing; an established specialist publication
C	Fairly reliable	A trade publication reporting a company statement
D	Not usually reliable	A standards aggregator presenting superseded editions as current
E	Unreliable	A source with a record of error or undisclosed interest
F	Reliability cannot be judged	A new or anonymous source

Information credibility (the claim)
Grade	Meaning
1	Confirmed by other independent sources
2	Probably true
3	Possibly true
4	Doubtful
5	Improbable
6	Truth cannot be judged

The two grades are independent. A completely reliable source can pass on a doubtful claim (A4), and an unknown source can report something already confirmed (F1).

Worked example: the UK energetics factory programme

Three claims about the same programme, as graded in the ISC Defence Intelligence standards register of 5 August 2026:

Claim	Source	Grade	Why
The Ministry of Defence placed contracts with 22 companies, worth up to £300,000 each, to study sites for new energetics factories (29 July 2026).	Ministry of Defence announcement on GOV.UK	A1	The department is announcing its own decision.
The UK will build at least six new energetics factories by 2030.	Defence Investment Plan, 30 June 2026	A2	Authoritative source, but a stated intention about the future rather than a completed fact.
A £1.4 billion commitment to Stratus.	House of Commons Library briefing CBP-10935, 2 July 2026	B2	A reliable secondary source; the figure does not appear in the plan document itself, so it cannot be confirmed from the primary.

Rules we apply

Grade the claim, not the article. One article can carry claims at three different grades.
A secondary source never raises a claim above the grade its primary source would earn.
Commercial aggregators may corroborate a date; they never establish an edition.
Anything that cannot be graded above 3 is reported as uncertain, or not at all.

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