Legal Lessons from War Dogs (Without Guns)
War Dogs is the Hollywood version of spotting arbitrage in government procurement: two guys, a lot of spreadsheets, and a willingness to go where others would not. The movie amplifies the chaos and the unethical behavior, but the core idea—information asymmetry—is very real.
In reality you do not want to touch weapons, ammo, or anything remotely close. The legal, ethical, and reputational risk is enormous. Instead, you borrow the mental model and point it at safer categories: tooling, training aids, repair kits, test fixtures, and industrial supplies.
Ask yourself: where are the "crumbs" that big primes ignore because the dollar value is low, but the technical content is just high enough to scare generic distributors? That is your zone—complex-enough-to-be-moaty, small-enough-to-be-overlooked.
Your War Dogs playbook, rewritten ethically, is: scour listings for messy problems, decode the spec stack, build a clean solution, and become the reliable, boring one who always delivers.
Mermaid Block — Business Workflow
Mermaid Block — Interaction Sequence
Action List
- Write down one concrete experiment you will run related to this chapter.
- Identify which RFQs, suppliers, or tools you need to test the idea.
- Define a small success metric: a quote submitted, a new supplier found, a script written.
- Schedule a review to capture lessons learned and update your playbook.