Contact drills increasingly reserve a dedicated witness stack from the beginning instead of improvising one only after a signal enters quarantine.
That matters because the witness role is no longer seen as optional procedural padding. If interpretation accelerates before a clean witness path is present, the exercise immediately risks collapsing analysis, logging, and proto-response into the same technical channel. Operators have learned that this shortcut is cheap only until review begins.
A witness stack has become standard because contact governance now assumes institutional memory must be built in parallel with interpretation rather than after it.