Product-Led Defense Acquisition Playbook
Scott Sanders, chief growth officer at Forterra, on the defense tech startup playbook
The real bottleneck in defense is not usually inventing the technology, it is getting the Pentagon to recognize a need, assign money, and fit the product into a formal buying lane. PPBE is the system that plans and funds programs across years, and JCIDS was the requirements process that defined what the military should buy. That structure works for aircraft carriers and other giant programs, but it slows software, autonomy, sensors, and radios where a usable product can be built and tested much faster.
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PPBE is the department wide budget machinery. It ties strategy to multi year program decisions and annual budget requests, which is why even strong technology can stall if no office has budget authority and a place for it in the plan.
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For newer kinds of software heavy systems, the Pentagon has started carving out faster paths. The Software Acquisition Pathway is built for rapid, iterative delivery, and official guidance says programs on that pathway are not subject to JCIDS, which shows the system itself recognizes the old requirements flow is too slow for some technologies.
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That is why defense startups try to arrive with a working product instead of waiting for a perfect requirement. Anduril, SpaceX, and Palantir all helped prove the playbook, fund R&D privately, field something real, find an operator who wants it, then work backward into a program of record and long term funding.
The direction of travel is toward more flexible pathways and more product led procurement, not less. The winners in defense tech will be the companies that can put a working system in soldiers hands quickly, while still navigating the budget and requirements machinery well enough to turn a pilot into durable program funding.