Companies Lobby Against Giving the Military the Right to Repair
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As an aside one of the things I love about old school military equipment is the "battle short." It effectively disables all the safety equipment and limit switches and allows the device to run even though the device believes it should not. There's an extra measure of confidence you get just from seeing that option available to you. "No, damnit, RUN!"
On Error Resume Next
These days the imaginary recalcitrant screen isn't simply blank though, now there are ads which never fail.
I was at a local gyro shop a few weeks ago and all their menu displays were showing Amazon ads over their menus. I gave up on humanity right then.
Speaking of SciFi, I fantasized about a novel in which an alien species visiting our long dead planet in the future can't recover what's left of our culture because it had been all wrapped in DRM whose keys died with us. By extension, if the Rosetta Stone makers adopted the same practices, we would know squat about ancient Egyptian language. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosetta_Stone
More and more I see people saying "Oh I won't touch the brakes on my car because what if I mess up". I am confident most people could replace the brakes on their car.
Dragging my team to the nearest maker space for a teambuilding exercise as soon as I figure out how to convince HR to pay for it. People need to know things do not catch fire if you repair it.
Seems just a rehash of the same old excuse: "someone think of the children!" which usually comes from people not giving a damn about children but worried about their own interests.
Hopefully this will serve as a "Eureka" moment for the powers that be in DC. Just cut out the part that says "but only when the military is the customer."
And who do you think has been lining the pockets of said powers in DC, to get the military in that situation in the first place?
In this case, your 'threat actor' is servicemen and 'arms race' is like, their whole thing. These guys are bored out of their mind for 95% of their career and will take anything apart if the activity gets them 2 hrs closer to a break.
See the top story on HN front page: air conditioner customer bypasses software-locked broken tablet to run Android control panel app on generic hardware, avoiding $1600 extortionate "repair" fee. Not only did they learn an entirely new reversing toolkit just to solve this one problem, they did a 10-year upgrade of their blog so they could tell the world how they did it. Macgyver would approve. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41386319
And having a random private stand around and poke something with a screwdriver when you want something to explode is, well, pretty much how much of the military works anyway.
The opposition to the "right to repair" is coming from the "military industrial complex"
That complex is the nexus of industrial players who have become to feel entitled to anything they want
That is what they are doing with the opposition to "right to repair" and that is what, in general terms (he was predicting the future - cut him some slack) Eisenhower was warning about.
We have a business culture that unhealthily prioritize short term profit at the expenses of product excellence and stakeholders.
"To enable access to sensitive proprietary and trade secret information beyond that necessary for standard repair and maintenance, customized license agreements can be tailored on a case-by-case basis to achieve specified repair and maintenance objectives.
It seems somewhat absurd to suggest, but it's less absurd if a defense company provided binaries and then suddenly goes out of business.
One of many ways this happens is they supply the prime contractors. Another way is through programs like SBIR, which has ~7500 to 10,000 awards per year to companies max size 500 (but most much smaller). https://ssti.org/blog/useful-stats-2020-sbirsttr-awards-stat...
Any one of these companies may become a supplier. I worked ~20 yrs for a 50ish person company that was a supplier the entire time. As such, and doing SBIR pitches, I competed with many tiny firms, many of which were also suppliers.
So yes, they can go out of business, from the 2-person shop to the 10,000+ person shop, just like any one else.
Why assume that?
".... with no carve-outs or limitations to protect sensitive trade secret information"
Seems like claiming source code to the device is private would be a carve out.
The average person completely understand why a farmer should be able to fix their tractor. I don't think they're likely to extend the idea to software.
I posted quotes above from the document. I would not agree to those terms either, for exactly these reasons.
That you don't think something could go the way you think isn't enough to make a company sign on to a legally binding contract.
The military has a much much stronger bargaining position, why don't they already require that their contractors provide repairable equipment?
Slightly less simple answer: the amount of red tape around getting contacts is obscene, so the DOD has severely limited the number of places it can go to buy many bits of kit. There's a lot of incestuous relationships between the military and the companies that supply it as well.
On the one hand, that's not strictly a bad thing. A former soldier knows rather well what it's like to be in the field, and supporting veteran run businesses is a good thing to do.
On the other hand, what's more often the case is desk jockeys move into lobbying positions and / or join the large corporations after they put in some time and the network effect takes over in a rather invirtious cycle.
There are literally consulting companies that exist to help you navigate the red tape to get contacts, because doing it on your own means losing to the big names (often for whom the very contacts themselves are tailored to).
This doesn't work at all. The logistics desk jockeys also benefit financially from right to repair. The rest of your post doesn't really have anything to do with the user/buyer divide, at least not the way we usually think of it.
I also highly doubt anyone doing the buying are having either their performance or their budget impacted by the cost of repairs. Those are certainly separate budgets, and the DOD has never passed a financial audit; for the last six years, it hasn't been able to provide auditors with enough information about its $4 trillion in assets to even form a qualified opinion.
This for me is the strongest argument against single payer healthcare in America. As long as bribery is considered free speech, nothing where the government is the single payer (like the DOD is for military equipment and goods) can ever work without extensive graft. Repeat for things like roads, geneal infrastructure, the list goes on.
I think there's many underdog scifi stories of the guerilla freedom fighter vs big (inflexible) government, but most of them from the pov of the underdog.
I'd love to see a from the view of a corporate middleman seeing the house of card crumbling, not because military but because buerocratic mess, and they would've won the war decades ago if the army of lawyers wasn't there
The (CCP) Chinese were a "rugged, lower economic power" opponent and the UN/US had much better tech, including nukes.
A lot of the Chinese ruggedness came in the form of being willing to tolerate immense casualties and having strong internal media control. Sad but effective solutions to the healthcare and propaganda issues.
Military Vendors lap up Gov. money like a Camel in a desert at an oasis. Without that money, the US economy would collapse over night.
I hope the Military is allowed to repair their equipment. In a war, that ability is mandatory.
Well the camels stop after 30ish gallons. Military Vendors lap up Gov. money like a blackhole laps up pretty much everything in it's vicinity.
That right there might be just about the most accurate analogy for unchecked greed I've read in quite a long while.
Military vendors are why the government is a bad steward of money, that explains everything! /s
But that money would just get spent by other government agencies, or the taxpayers, right? And if the military vendors aren't efficiently using that money, then society would end up better off if they (the military vendors) weren't spending it.
There would be no time to recover. Phase it out over 10 years, I mean maybe then it wouldn’t be a complete collapse, but fuck would It be ugly. Oh and at year like… 8, the USA gets okie-doke’d and in 3 generations everyone is speaking !english.
Even more than the right to repair, a lot of stuff designed for use in war should be designed right from day one with easy repairability (and if necessary "Jerry-rigging" it) in the field first and foremost in mind during the design process (as often was the case at some point in the past). Anything less risks human lives.
Get all the way out of here with this. Any company that is lobbying against right to repair should have to pay a fine per item that breaks. After a certain breakage percentage, their ability to obtain future government contracts is revoked for a period of 1 year, and for repeated infractions revocation is 5 years.
The largest contributors to the debt over the last couple decades have been stimulus packages and tax cuts.
And notably, discretionary budgets are relatively small, contrasted against the overall budget. In 2024 the entire discretionary budget was "only" $1.8 trillion. So things like "just" a hundred billion might seem fairly small, but are in reality a substantial chunk of all our discretionary allocations. Then there's the military, which eats up nearly a trillion dollars of this spending. In 2024 it was $886 billion, which does not include the spending on various wars around the world.
I can guarantee you that if companies were able to include the pension fund in their operations budget there would be a massive increase in pension shortfalls as their reserves get raided for operations expenses. The whole strategy of including "entitlement" spending in the budget conversation is a part of a conservative plot to get rid of Social Security and Medicare. That's why we shouldn't include it as part of the budget.
Make a product that doesn't break, you can ignore right-to-repair.
It broke anyways? Fine, pay this fine.
I don't care much about right to repair on things that work flawlessly for decades.
That would be a physical DDOS attack with severe consequences.
I hope, one can hope, the brass, despite any consequence to their kickbacks, care a little about the grunts on the ground who would be exposed to the consequences of this nonsense and quash this unpatriotic grift.
This is mercenary attitude --which if you're dealing with mercenaries, you can expect, but your own people and companies? That's... insane.
After they're all dead, the president signs an executive order confiscating all on-site data and equipment, and authorizing military to repair. This would also be spelled out in the contract.
What ACTUALLY fixed the submarine program was SUBSAFE, a quality assurance program that mostly generates paperwork and instructs you to check things over and over.
At least then they'd be able to (somewhat) justify their insane "pay packages", "golden parachute" and "bonuses". CEO: "I risked my life for that money!"
> - ravenstine: "If I became supreme leader overnight, I would place a lot of people behind bars, and these guys would be among the first. It's pretty outrageous how much society tolerates the leadership class."
Back then Elon Musk refused to turn the Starlink on on the Black Sea and the Ukrainian drones weren't able to perform the planned attack on the Russian Navy ships there (the situation later was rectified by Pentagon itself directly contracting some of the Startlink terminals or something along these lines)
In general the modern weaponry is very complicated and Western tanks and artillery systems would be transported to Poland from Ukraine for service and repair. I think recently they tried to establish a repair base in Ukraine, yet i'm wondering whether the growing complexity of the hardware may make the "right-to-repair" issue closer to moot in larger part. I mean the right-to-repair in civilian case allows independent companies to provide repairs, while i don't see any practical way for such independent companies in the military case.
No
It is bad design
As another commenter commented the ability to repair in the field, in adverse conditions, should be a design criterion.
By the way, extremely important part, becoming even bigger and more important - the massive scale battlefield data intelligence gathering, including from all those drones, processing and targeting is done in Ukraine by Palantir in major part by their people deployed there. There is no real right-to-repair or ability to repair in the field when it comes to such software (or to communication networks like Starlink). With that background it is really small peanuts, which will take all the attention away from important things, whether soldiers can replace on their own an RFID-ed DRM-ed valve in the howitzer blowback hydraulics.
Either you give up your IP (drawings and source code) or you are non-compliant.
If it was because she's married to former president Bill, didn't you already "go back to kings and queens" when Bush Junior was elected?
It has precedent for about 10 thousand years before that, but we were moving in the right direction on it and we’ve reversed course.
I have no idea if her being a woman is anything to do with it, but if we put someone like her in high(er) office we’d get a woman and a hero as president in one stroke.
Elizabeth Warren is quite an effective advocate for the people herself as well.
One particular write up that really got me was just a brief part of the extremely long & sad ProPublica write-up on the Litoral Combat Ship (LCS). The part about the sailors not even having physical access to a computing center was off the wall madness to me, really epitomized & made real to me a certain despairing level of madness that unregulated capitalism tries to steer humanity into. https://www.propublica.org/article/how-navy-spent-billions-l...
It's not entirely clear how much remedy we're getting from this (M)OSA kumbaya, what are the bigger successes & failures or what technically it looks like (would so love to be able to see how the Arsenal of Democracy is coping with the corporate raiders within), but there's at least strong lip service to change, mutual recognition that systems need to be flexible & reconfigurable & adjustable & modular, which is something.
What part of this economy seems unregulated to you? What a ridiculous notion talking about military contracts no less.
You couldn’t be more far off from finding the source of problem then just mindlessly throwing in a dig at capitalism, the way the government awards contract is anything but competitive or capitalistic