What it is. How free the commanded capital actually is — whose money it is, and what binds it. This is the correction that keeps commanded capital honest: gross command overstates power unless you say how much of it is encumbered.

The bands

How we assign it. A judgment call with a cited rationale, per actor: read the balance sheet’s encumbrances (debt load, covenants), the ownership structure (parent control, state mandate), and the legal character of the capital (fiduciary duty, policyholder liabilities). Each band claim carries its reasoning; changes go through the steering loop like any board edit.

What it is deliberately NOT. Optionality is never derived as thrust ÷ weight. That ratio measures deployment intensity, and real-options theory (Dixit–Pindyck) runs the other way: irreversible commitment destroys option value, so high thrust can mean less freedom, not more. The decisive cases prove the independence — Apple is free but nearly idle (could deploy, returns ~$94B/yr instead); BlackRock is locked despite $14T (client money); OpenAI deploys ferociously against capital that is already spoken for. A ratio would collapse all three into noise. Measured encumbrance keeps them apart.

Prior art. Beckley’s net-power correction — gross resources must be deflated by the cost and constraint of holding them — applied as a visible band instead of a hidden multiplier.