It's even better than that. They brought in a media darling to draw attention as the pilot, carefully staged every part of the public demo to maximize the theoretical kill count against SDLF equipment, publicized the HELL out of it, and then declared the Mackie proprietary SDLF tech so the house lords would all geek and waste their military R&D and Procurement budgets into copying Big J's new hotness.
Either that or The Main Man wanted big stompy robots like in his cartoons, sank his political pull into justifying it, and then told everyone he wasn't sharing and to get their own damn toys like a responsible and mature adult. For a man who subsisted solely on Tennessee whiskey and Grizzly bear liver it could honestly go either way.