12 August 2026
By Lt Col H F Rangwala (Retd), Chief Business Officer
The single-prime habit
The comfortable way to buy is from one prime: one contract, one point of contact, one throat to choke. The habit is understandable, and it costs the buyer capability. No single prime is best at everything. When a country takes the whole package from one house, it accepts that house's second-rate components alongside its first-rate ones, because the package is sold as a package. The convenience is real. So is the compromise.
Best-of-breed is a real option, not a slogan
In most domains the strongest component and the strongest platform come from different makers. One firm builds an excellent radar and an ordinary drone. Another builds an outstanding drone and buys in its sensors. A third writes the best secure communications software and makes no hardware at all. Assembled well, these parts form a system stronger than anything a single prime offers. The engineering to combine them exists. What usually blocks it is not technical, it is commercial and political.
Do not make the customer the integrator
There is a catch, and it is the reason single-prime buying survives. Assembling best-of-breed parts leaves someone holding integration risk: making the radar talk to the drone, the drone talk to the command system, the whole thing sustainable in the field for twenty years. Too often that risk lands on the customer, a defence ministry that never asked to become a systems integrator and is not staffed to be one. A buyer forced to integrate a dozen unfamiliar suppliers will, quite rightly, retreat to the single prime.
Someone accountable in the middle
The way to get best-of-breed without making the customer the integrator is to put an accountable party in the middle: one team that selects the strongest components, carries integration and delivery responsibility, and sustains the assembled system in-region. The buyer still gets one contract and one point of contact. What changes is what sits behind that single channel, the best available parts rather than one house's full catalogue. That is the role a non-aligned prime vendor is built to fill.
What this means for buyers
For a programme owner, the choice is not between the convenience of a single prime and the capability of best-of-breed. Framed that way, convenience usually wins, and the country fields a system built around one house's weaker components. The better question is who carries integration and sustainment risk. Keep it with a single accountable channel that selects the strongest parts, makes them work together, and supports the assembled system in-region, and the buyer gets best-of-breed capability with single-prime simplicity. The customer keeps one contract and one point of contact while gaining the freedom to combine the right radar with the right drones. Governance holds throughout: classification confirmed and end-use certified before representation, with localisation arrangements scoped per programme, subject to export controls and end-use approvals.
