Quwa released the twelfth episode of Pulse Check on 09 September 2026, in which Bilal Khan and Murtaza Asim Shehzad work through why Pakistan’s public procurement notices reach so few of the firms that could bid on them.
Murtaza is the chief executive of Star Strategic Systems, an Islamabad-based venture building a pipeline that collects, cleans, and classifies Pakistan’s public procurement data, then surfaces the defence-relevant contracts inside it.
The working figure is roughly 40 separate channels – federal portals, provincial portals, and military procurement notices – that a Pakistani vendor is currently expected to monitor in order to see the whole market.
Catch the full episode here: Pulse Check Season 1, Episode 12.
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The material is public. It is also spread thinly enough that a firm without a dedicated procurement desk has little practical chance of seeing all of it.
Ammunition is the clearest case, because the military is not the only buyer – provincial police forces and civil defence departments purchase from the same categories as the armed forces, which puts the relevant notices on provincial portals rather than federal ones.
The same pattern holds across the categories Murtaza’s team currently tracks, which run from ammunition to night vision goggles, drones, and construction projects.
For a vendor selling a product, the identity of the buying department matters far less than whether the requirement is visible at all.
The pipeline currently draws from the Public Procurement Regulatory Authority (PPRA) and scrapes four record types – active tenders, awarded tenders, evaluations, and contracts.
Classification then runs in two layers. The first sorts by issuing organization, including the Ministry of Defence, Military Engineer Services (MES), Heavy Industries Taxila (HIT), Pakistan Ordnance Factories (POF), the Directorate General Defence Purchase (DGDP), the Rangers, and the Frontier Corps (FC).
The second layer runs keyword signals, which catch defence-relevant tenders issued by entities outside that organizational list.
Records are then enriched from the tender PDFs, where the actual products and quantities sit – the main portal page and the newspaper advertisement rarely carry either.
A single typo in a notice is enough to keep that contract out of a keyword search, which is the cleanup problem the pipeline is built to absorb.
The output is a dashboard covering search, lifecycle tracking, supplier and organization intelligence, and deadline visibility, refreshed daily against what closes that day and what has newly surfaced.
Large contractors already manage this with a dedicated procurement desk. Murtaza’s point is that the upstream suppliers of polymers, chemicals, and metals – the firms furthest from the tender itself – are the least likely to have one.
Where DIPRA Cuts Across the Problem
The episode lands while the Defence Industrial Production and Regulatory Authority (DIPRA) ordinance is still awaiting parliamentary action.
Promulgated on 02 June 2026, the ordinance routes defence production, procurement, and research and development (R&D) through boards chaired by the Chief of Army Staff (COAS) and Chief of Defence Forces (CDF), and requires Executive Board approval for every defence procurement worth more than US$25 million.
Murtaza reads the direction as favourable, on the condition that the text is implemented in letter and spirit. Bilal frames the same threshold as a check on the services, since a service headquarters now has to justify a platform selection to the CDF rather than settle it internally.
Bilal also places DIPRA alongside the Makkah Joint Defence Agreement signed with Saudi Arabia and Türkiye in August 2026, on the reading that partners investing in capacity want to see a procurement system they can plan against.
The ordinance also gives DIPRA the authority to pursue the “restructure, reform, dissolution, privatization and merger” of its own subsidiaries, including with private partners.
That schedule of subsidiaries covers POF, HIT, Pakistan Aeronautical Complex (PAC), Karachi Shipyard and Engineering Works (KS&EW), National Radio Telecommunication Corporation (NRTC), Telephone Industries of Pakistan (TIP), and the Gwadar Shipyard.
However, one clause runs directly against the visibility problem this episode is about. DIPRA’s subsidiaries are removed outright from PPRA rules, while the rest of the sector may seek exemption only on a case-by-case basis.
Thus, an aggregation layer built on PPRA gains at the requirements end as the services consolidate, and loses coverage at the state-enterprise end. How those two effects net out will depend on rules that have not been published.
The nearest marker is survival, as the ordinance lapses by the end of September 2026 unless the National Assembly enacts or extends it.
The Case Against the State Enterprises
POF supplies the episode’s running example.
Bilal notes that a large share of POF’s revenue now comes from its plastics business rather than from ammunition or small arms, following a quiet pivot into moulds and upstream inputs.
Murtaza’s objection is the sequence. Taxpayers funded the tooling POF acquired as a state enterprise, and that tooling now keeps it solvent in a polymers market where NLC and private producers already operate.
Bilal adds Vanguard’s investment in a bulletproof glass facility in Karachi as a sign that outside capital wants into the same materials segment.
The small arms thread is the sharper version of the argument. Pakistan’s frontline units still carry Chinese Type 56 rifles, while the 2016 assault rifle competition stalled on the cost of buying the winner’s full licensing and production stack.
Both land on the same alternative. A private firm partners with a foreign original equipment manufacturer (OEM) such as CZ and absorbs the capacity cost itself, against a firm order – Bilal uses 500,000 rifles as the illustration.
Given a requirement at that volume, one can see the input suppliers forming around it – polymers, composites, alloys, and tooling – without POF sitting in the middle of the chain.
The export argument follows the same shape. Murtaza notes that Pakistan produces ammunition across several calibres and grades armour for its own agencies, yet does little with either in markets where the UAE is already selling.
Trainer aircraft make the same point about incentives, as the Super Mushshak has competed against newer European designs for decades without a successor being funded.
The talent question closes the section. Engineers reach a ceiling inside the state enterprises and leave for the UAE, the United States, and Canada – Bilal notes he knows engineers in Canada who previously worked at the National Engineering and Scientific Commission (NESCOM).
Murtaza’s qualification is that security clearance is a genuine requirement for some work, while treating every part of every sector as a security matter is what keeps the vendor pool small.
Both also grant the counter-example, since the Mirage rebuild programs needed a state enterprise to stand up a reconstruction factory for airframes acquired second-hand from across the globe.
What the Türkiye Comparison Actually Shows
Türkiye is the reference point both reach for, and the episode spends time on why the comparison is usually made badly.
Türkiye’s standing army is smaller than Pakistan’s, while its private defence industry is considerably larger. Murtaza’s explanation is that it was allowed to develop, with time, investment, and demand behind it.
The objection usually raised is that Türkiye has state enterprises of its own. Bilal’s answer is that they do different work – the largest capital programs, such as fighter design, engine development, and alloy production at scale, rather than small arms and light vehicles.
Ownership is the second difference. The Turkish armed forces pension fund sits behind these companies as an investor, which gives them a mandate to return money rather than to absorb it.
Executive and engineering teams are correspondingly civilian, drawn from Turkish Airlines, Airbus, Boeing, and the wider industrial sector, with Turkish Aerospace Industries (TAI) run by an engineer holding a doctorate.
On KAAN, TAI concentrates on design and integration while alloys, tooling, and other inputs come from private suppliers – the state company works as a channel into the private sector rather than as its competitor.
Murtaza’s caution is that the ownership model does not transfer cleanly, since Pakistan’s military welfare foundations have faced longstanding allegations of crowding the private sector out rather than investing in it.
Both close on sequencing. A private sector cannot be asked to build a fighter in its first year, and the precondition for anything larger is demand a firm can plan against.
What to Watch
The visibility argument and the DIPRA argument meet at a single question, which is whether the state publishes what it intends to buy.
DIPRA is tasked with formulating a National Defence Production Policy for government approval, and publication of that document would give Pakistani industry its first official statement of intended requirements.
An aggregation layer pays off in proportion to what there is to aggregate, so the forthcoming rules matter as much to a platform like Murtaza’s as they do to any bidder.
The platform’s own direction is the natural extension, moving from search towards customized feeds that match a supplier’s product against who needs it, in what quantity, and by what deadline.
Whether the first awards under the new structure go to open competition or back to the incumbents is the marker Quwa will keep tracking, and the test of whether visibility converts into contracts.
Episode 12 sits in a run that has worked the same file from different angles.
Episode 11 asked whether Ukraine’s Fire Point and Pakistan’s defence-industrial base have anything workable to offer each other, while Episode 10 asked why Pakistan turned down a seat on KAAN in 2016.
An earlier episode traced the first steps Pakistan’s private sector has taken into the drone boom, and another set out why Türkiye’s defence industry is real but will be slowed by scale.
Pulse Check is exclusive to Quwa Plus and Quwa Pro subscribers.
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Pro is where the reporting behind this episode sits, alongside recent assessments of why foreign arms makers are quietly walking away from Pakistani deals, how the private and state-owned defence companies could work together, why the military’s ‘no cost, no obligation’ terms are crushing private innovation, and why Pakistan’s private sector needs transparent testing regulations.
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