There’s no one source of truth because much like in bitcoin we have to assume everyone is lying all the time and you have to work out the incentives and game theory for yourself. Here’s a heuristic worth remembering though: the pentagon is lying about its capabilities nearly 100% of the time. For example if you read in the news that the pentagon have no interceptor missiles then you should assume they have a fuck ton of interceptor missiles. So why would they lie about that? Three fold and you can track the incentives. The lie pulls three levers for the pentagon. Lever one: makes adversaries feel overconfident. Lever two: get more money from congress. Lever three: prevent allies from asking for more interceptors so that you can stockpile them yourself. If they tell the truth they pull zero levers. So the lie buys them more. Now imagine that every piece of global news information from every country, military, intel agency etc… is equally complex and equally fake and you’ll see why it’s hard to get to a single source of truth on anything.