The Logic of Interoperability: Anticipatory Alignment, Infrastructural Lock-in and New Zealand’s Integration with Palantir

Since the 2025 Defence Capability Plan, New Zealand’s defence procurement framework requires every investment business case to begin by asking what Australia does. The framework stipulates interoperability with Five Eyes partners and discourages bespoke systems, yet the specific commercial platform choices through which that interoperability is achieved have received almost no public or parliamentary scrutiny. This article traces the emergence of a logic of interoperability through which alliance-mediated procurement routines come to normalise and entrench commercial platform dependency for small states. The empirical case explored here is New Zealand’s roughly fourteen-year integration with Palantir Technologies, with that investigation being further assisted by consideration of documentary evidence from the United Kingdom and a contrastive vignette from Switzerland. The paper argues that the logic of interoperability at play operates through a two-stage mechanism: anticipatory alignment narrows procurement options toward partner-compatible platforms before vendor selection, while infrastructural lock-in consolidates dependency through architecture, accreditation, training and exercise integration. Platform choices become progressively harder to revisit regardless of why they were initially made, raising questions about sovereignty and oversight that go beyond previous concerns about capability dependency and which demand closer scrutiny.