12 August 2026
By Lt Col H F Rangwala (Retd), Chief Business Officer
Two prices, one contract
When a country buys a major weapons system it negotiates hard on the number that appears on the invoice. That is the visible price. The invisible price is the set of permissions attached to the purchase: who must approve an upgrade, who may veto a re-export, whose consent is required before the system is used in a particular way. Buyers price the first number to the last decimal and rarely price the second one at all. We think that is the wrong way round.
A permission slip you cannot see until you need it
Political conditions are cheap to grant on signing day and expensive to call in later. They sit dormant in the annexes until a moment of tension, and then they decide what a system can do. A sovereign buyer discovers the real terms of the deal not at the ceremony but on the day it wants to move a squadron, sell an older fleet onward, or integrate a foreign sensor. The permission slip is written by the supplier's government, and it can be withdrawn by the supplier's government.
The public record already shows the shape of it
This is not a hypothetical. The removal of Turkey from the F-35 programme after it acquired the Russian S-400 is a matter of public record: a buyer lost access to a system it had committed to, because a sovereign purchasing choice collided with the seller's political conditions. We take no position on that dispute. We only note the general lesson it makes plain, that participation in some programmes is conditional on choices the buyer might reasonably want to make for itself.
Pricing the permission slip
Our argument is not that political conditions are always unacceptable. Sometimes the capability is worth the strings, and a buyer decides so with its eyes open. Our argument is that the strings should be priced. Before signing, a buyer should ask what it may not do with this system, whose approval an upgrade needs, what happens to spares and software support in a dispute, and whether it may sell the fleet onward. When those answers are written down and costed, the true price of the system is visible. Non-aligned sourcing is worth considering precisely because, on the systems where an independent maker is genuinely good, the second price falls close to zero.
What this means for buyers
For a defence buyer, the practical discipline is to treat the permission slip as a line item, not a footnote. Ask, in writing, what the system may not do, whose sign-off an upgrade or a re-export needs, and how support behaves in a diplomatic dispute, then cost the answers alongside the invoice. Priced this way, some conditioned purchases will still be worth it, and buyers should make that call deliberately. The value of a non-aligned route is that it removes the second price on the categories where an independent manufacturer is genuinely competitive, which keeps freedom of action in mission hands for the life of the system. Governance stays intact throughout: classification confirmed and the end-user-certificate chain established before anything is represented, with localisation arrangements scoped per programme, subject to export controls and end-use approvals.
