A European company that wants to sell into the Atlantic Alliance has never faced a single door. It has faced a corridor of them, each with its own lock: a command that writes the requirement, a committee that approves the money, an agency that runs the competition, a national authority that certifies the firm is fit to compete at all, and a security service that decides what the firm may even read. For most of the Alliance’s history this dispersion was simply a fact of the trade, absorbed by the capture departments of large prime contractors and largely impassable for everyone else. In July 2026 the Alliance placed a single public interface in front of that corridor, and in August one of its agencies began asking the market what a shared procurement system beneath it might look like. The two developments have been read together as the beginning of a centralised NATO market. That reading needs testing, because the interface and the infrastructure operate on different kinds of power. One changes what a supplier can see. The other would change how a supplier is recorded, qualified and compared. Neither, on the face of the disclosed record, changes who decides. The question this raises is narrow and consequential: whether an interface that alters only visibility can alter access, and if so, through what mechanism it would do so while every formal competence stayed exactly where it is.