Sociotechnical Debt in Systems Architecture: A Resilience Engineering Framework for System-of-Systems Supply Chain Dependencies

Modern system-of-systems architectures exhibit sociotechnical debt: strategic vulnerabilities from architecture decisions creating irreversible dependencies on geopolitically concentrated supply chains, single-vendor ecosystems, or fragile relationships that compromise system resilience. Unlike technical debt, which can be refactored through engineering effort, sociotechnical debt creates path dependencies persisting for decades and threatening organizational survival. Recent critical infrastructure crises demonstrate this vulnerability. Germany\u2019s energy dependence on Russian gas required a C200B defensive shield in 2022. China\u2019s 2024 export restrictions disrupted battery supply chains. Approximately 90% of advanced logic chips remain fabricated in Taiwan. Current systems engineering frameworks (ISO\/IEC\/IEEE 15288, INCOSE Handbook, DoDAF) lack formal methods for identifying and mitigating sociotechnical debt during architecture synthesis, leaving system-of-systems resilience unaddressed. This paper establishes sociotechnical debt as distinct from technical debt through three characteristics: irreversibility (exit costs exceed entry costs by 100-10,000\u00d7), geopolitical coupling (realization depends on forces beyond organizational control), and asymmetric visibility (costs externalized to future periods). We propose a resilience engineering framework comprising Country Stability Index, Dependency Concentration Index, Strategic Vulnerability Score, Irreversibility Index, and Relationship Stability Index with ML-validated thresholds. Baseline models on the calibration set achieved comparable accuracy; interpretable gate rules preserved explainability with 87.5% accuracy. Crisis cases exhibited significantly higher dependency concentration (Cohen\u2019s d=1.14, p < 0.001) and strategic vulnerability (Cohen\u2019s d=1.06, p < 0.001) than non-crisis cases. Bayesian network counterfactual analysis across three critical infrastructure cases demonstrates prevention costs represent 0.4- 5% of project budgets with 2.6-21.9\u00d7 ROI, quantifying that resilience engineering interventions during architecture phase prevent disruption impacts of 10-100\u00d7 magnitude. Resilience engineering for system-of-systems architectures must elevate geopolitical and social risk to equal governance level as cost, schedule, and performance.