Navy backs right to repair after $13B carrier goes half-fed | Hacker News Reader

Navy backs right to repair after $13B carrier goes half-fed

theregister.com

125 pointsbeardyw45 comments

This is overloading the meaning of the phrase "right to repair". Usually on HN it means some kind of obligation on suppliers, to provide access to documentation or parts. Here it's something else: the client actually signed a contract agreeing not even to attempt to repair their own devices, which they bought:

> "six of its eight ovens were out of action, and sailors were barred by contract from fixing them themselves"

It's a very different flavor of "right to repair", so I wanted to highlight the language ambiguity.

(Tangentially, food service on a different US aircraft carrier was one of the targets of the "Fat Leonard" contractor bribery ring,

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fat_Leonard_scandal (C-f "Former Food Service Officer for the aircraft carrier, the USS George Washington and the Seventh Fleet Command Ship, the USS Blue Ridge")

)

This doesn't seem too different than John Deere tractors, which weigh heavily in most right to repair discussions.

I think the essential difference is that, with John Deere, you don’t have the choice between a repairable and a non-repairable tractor.

Here, the navy (very likely. Even if this provider didn’t give them the option, they could have gone with a different one) had a choice.

Did the Navy really have a choice at the time, though? Politically, I mean.

Yes, the Navy can select a higher bid as long as there is justification, and here the justification is long-term value and readiness…but a significant portion of the voting public is incapable of properly weighing long-term versus short-term effects.

All they’d understand—and they’d be helped along to this conclusion by plenty of politicians who just want to use the situation to score points—is, “The government paid twice as much for an aircraft carrier than it needed to!”

Maybe they even saw handing over to a provider all repair responsibilities as a major advantage. No need to have this capability in the crew with the associated logistics, and the accountability is also outsourced.

This comes at a cost but looking around at comparable outsourcing situations, everyone follows the same line of thinking. Sell my responsibility for (someone else’s) money.

Maybe they are an aircraft carrier that is deployed in places that no reasonable human can expect a service technician to visit, and this level of imbecility should generally be avoided.

nice way to blame "stupid public" for this internal Navy contract

The voting public never sees these costs.

They are sometimes told about it, tenth-hand, such as the fabled $10,000-hammer and the gold toilet seat.

Congress itself sees these costs, or more precisely, teams working for congressmembers see them. Congress members approve bills that are not lowest-cost when there is personal benefit for their careers: pork-barrel. It's very hard to justify not-lowest-cost without a pork-barrel angle.

Deere has a massive service network that makes it extremely rare for a farmer to get stranded during planting or harvesting. To keep this network around year after year, they lock people into using it and charge a lot of money.

The Navy should probably contract with Deere, as they’d probably think they’re getting a good deal.

And Caterpillar relies on customer loyalty, based on best-in-class service. Caterpillar has been known to rent equipment from their competitor and fly it by helicopter into remote mining locations while their equipment is inoperable. (Admittedly, mining is not a John Deere market, but this is about Caterpillar's service attitude.)

John Deere's model is successful, but ultimately monopolistic.

The Caterpillar model might work better for the Navy. Not a huge number of ships, used year-round.

I’m not condoning Deere, BTW. Just pointing out that there are tens of thousands (maybe hundreds of thousands?) of farms that get very busy twice a year and much less busy the rest of the time. Having the capacity to make sure a farmer gets service quickly during those busy times is really hard. And expensive. If anyone had a better idea on how to do it they’d be a billionaire. I mean, there probably aren’t enough helicopters available for Deere to do what Caterpillar does.

In The Merchant of Venice, a malicious contract (demanding the famous pound of flesh) is itself viewed as a criminal act worthy of punishment. If this is the kind of language vendors are sneaking into contracts, that would be a fitting solution to the problem.

“Sneaking” a service agreement into a contract that the US Navy willingly signs?

Right to repair is for the people. The Navy, however, can just adopt a policy of uhhhh reading the contracts they sign.

The Navy being sloppy does not make the contract any less malicious.

Note that it's not the contractualism, but the fact that Shylock is Jewish:

    Tarry, Jew:
    The law hath yet another hold on you.
    It is enacted in the laws of Venice,
    If it be proved against an alien
    That by direct or indirect attempts
    He seek the life of any citizen,
    The party 'gainst the which he doth contrive
    Shall seize one half his goods; the other half
    Comes to the privy coffer of the state;
    And the offender's life lies in the mercy
    Of the duke only, 'gainst all other voice.

("Alien" means any non-citizen, but it's clear that it's specifically because Shylock is Jewish.)

Because it was done in a contract, it counts as an "indirect attempt", but it's the same law as if it were a physical assault.

(Also note: nobody else in the room seems to have ever heard of this law, and nobody brought it up. Portia is not, in fact, a lawyer. Nobody bothers to check the texts. Antonio's life is already safe; there is no need to heap additional punishment on Shylock. I believe that Portia is just making it up, and everybody goes with it.)

> Antonio's life is already safe; there is no need to heap additional punishment on Shylock.

By this logic, attempted murder should carry no jail term after the assailant is disarmed.

To me it looks like the same thing as why there are so many broken ice cream machines at McD

the ice cream machines are not broken, they just say it, so they don't have to clean it

There's a lot more to it than that:

Johnny Harris "The REAL Reason McDonalds Ice Cream Machines Are Always Broken" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SrDEtSlqJC4

> This is overloading the meaning of the phrase "right to repair".

I think this is the correct usage. It is the legal right to be able to repair something. Whereas access to docs and parts is more about making repairability doable. But without the former, the latter is moot.

“Right to repair” is commonly understood to refer to a broader political movement that’s about allowing /everyone/ to repair the things they own. Not just large commercial clients with the leverage to demand custom contract terms.

Large clients negotiating their own rights is nothing new. This is just contract dispute.

The US Navy stance seems to be less "let's negotiate this" and more "this is so goddamn stupid and we're never putting up with it again."

The philosophy does seem to be "let everyone repair their stuff by default."

> "six of its eight ovens were out of action, and sailors were barred by contract from fixing them themselves"

The Government person who signed this contract should be fired. While this is somewhat forgivable on fixed bases where the company maintains a support office and can have people on site to fix problems, for a ship that might be at sea for months this is an outright travesty. This goes double when you consider that it might be wartime and the ship could be suffering battle damage. Even if the captain decides "screw the contract, we need to feed the sailors", if they have no parts and no manuals that decision may be moot.

Ships need to be self sufficient to a large degree and a part of that is being able to maintain and repair the equipment on board. Large ships have extensive machine shops for a reason.

> The Government person who signed this contract should be fired.

They've probably left the job and can now be found working for the supplier of the aircraft carrier. If by "working" we mean playing golf. (Idle speculation based on my understanding on how this kind of shit works.)

The idea that if your ovens break or even worse the lifts that carry the nukes - and you can't repair yourself, but rather have to fly a contractor out is clearly absurd.

Who signed such a contract?

Someone who wasn't paying with their own money.

My guess is that - like all competent people - the US Navy staff is fighting a constant battle against short-term managerialism. Occasionally stuff will slip through because of time and financial pressures. I can practically imagine the conversation:

"We need this contract to be signed and rolled out next month"

"But our decision process alone takes a month!"

"Decision takes a month?! How hard can it be? What do we need to do to expedite this?"

"Well, I guess we can outlay some of the review work to the interns"

The other side of this problem can be that its going to be financially impossible to support the products (which for the military would be low quantity, heavy compliance burden) if they're not also able to maintain the staff who actively work on support.

If no one in the company is regularly employed to oversee that product line directly, they might be concluding that there's no actual way to support the product at the price point being negotiated.

Fair point - but I see no reason why you'd commision unsupportable ovens or lifts - these are not unique things to aircraft carriers.

I'd suspect custom ovens or lifts are more likely to breakdown than some standard industrial ones whose manufacture and design has been optimised over many years.

Just like new software is much more likely to have bugs that battle tested ( sic ) software.

Sadly the US military (like a lot of militaries) are in love with custom requirements. And there is very little leeway for negotiating them out. So unnecessarily custom solutions are the norm.

It was muuuch cheaper that way.

Because adding in repair stuff requires the supplier to provide documentation, frequently training, a parts manifest, guaranteed 10-20 year availability of spares, and probably about 50 other requirements I don't know about.

All of which add up to a rather large contract cost increase.

Possibly this boondoggle will result in the military putting in more reasonable "right to repair" terms in the contract, rather than insisting on the gold-plated thing I mention above, but more likely it will simply result in more cost overruns.

I have a feeling that they still need to guarantee availability of spares if they fix it themselves, do they not? They still have to create documentation for their engineers, do they not?

If you repair it yourself, you have more flexibility in terms of replacing spares with newer items i.e. replacing a whole module when it a part of that module becomes hard to come by.

Internal documentation ..... hmmmm.... LOL.... Often not, word of mouth is the rule.

If there is internal documentation, it's generally pretty rough. Getting it to the point where you can hand it to external parties is a lot of work.

Or is it because nobody wants to assume responsibility?

Let's say what you really want is to be able to fix simple stuff ( replace easily replaceable parts ), and get the experts in for tricky stuff. However the contractor, who now isn't fully responsible to changes to the system, now insists that you take the full risk of your repairs ( perhaps even saying they will void any warranty if you touch the oven/lift ).

Then faced with that nobody is brave enough to say - heck fine - we will take that responsibility.

And so because the lawyers were prepared to take that risk, the people on the boat are infantilised by contract.

Not sure about this specific example, but are we sure they had the choice?

I've been in many similar situations where all the vendors in the marketplace have the same limit on their offering. You might want on-prem for example, but offerings are getting scarce because vendors are valued on recurring revenue so they are no longer interested.

If the choice is between a locked down oven or starting an oven factory yourself, it's not easy. We have built this economy for us and it is what it is, even when it clearly is a local maxima.

The difference is that the US military is literally the market-maker.

If they need left-handed solar whoopie cushion, by God and Congress they will get one made.

I bet people didn't think about this during war games...

We have enough bombs on a ship to level a city but we literally can't feed our sailors on that ship for the most boring and dystopian of reasons... they're contractually barred from fixing the ovens.

I hope there's someone in the DoD who does analysis on where we're vulnerable, and looks into these kinds of more inane vulnerabilities that cause indirect effects.

This are the failures we know. But what about what do not know? About failures which did not happen and which may happen during combat? Hopefully the Navy is allowed to fix these problems right away - as opposed to waiting for lawyers to figure who can fix what.

It also makes me wonder whether our adversarial intelligence agencies already know and track these kinds of vulnerabilities (through open source intel on procurement contracts, etc) and it's stuck in a classified document somewhere?

Well, if they did not do that already, you can bet they will start doing it now. I know I would...

What I see in this thread is industry shills making excuses for a corrupt Navy and its corrupt suppliers, make that a corrupt military.

If the Navy admirals truly believed they had real wars to fight and thus needed field serviceable equipment, would they write contracts that expected manufacturers to fly civilian service technicians into battle zones to fix equipment when the navy itself has technicians that are way more skilled than the manufacturers technicians?

Take the sheer nonsense coming from the Government and the Navy.

> The ship was struggling to feed its crew of over 4,500 because six of its eight ovens were out of action, and sailors were barred by contract from fixing them themselves.

Are we to believe that the US has placed its defense into the hands of people who will refuse to fix the equipment the nation's defense depends on when it is very necessary because doing so would breach contractual obligations?

Why doesn't the Navy then design its own equipment and subcontract the manufacturing so they don't have to deal with commercial suppliers restricive contracts? They surely have people with the knowledge and skill to do so. I hope in real war if such a situation arose their enemies would bomb the heck out of them on account of this foolery.

This nonsense sums of the title of the book - "War is a Racket"

> Of course, the devil is in the details: the military needs service documentation, detailed schematics, 3D models of parts so they can be manufactured in the field, and so on.

This phrase, embedded in a quote touting the benefits, seems to me to show a big downside. If the Navy (owner) gains the right they also gain the responsibility, and it's not like the Navy is not some huge bureaucratic system. Quite the opposite, the Navy makes most contractors look like DIY Mom and Pops. A sailor may fix an oven themselves until someone gets burned or electrically shocked, at which point the bureaucratic machine starts up and we end back up at square one: waiting to fix ovens until after-actions, reg updates, personnel coaching, part investigation, etc.

In fact the more I focus on this phrase the more the whole article seems like a sarcasm piece (and not just because of the Vulture's reporting style).

You think the prospect of injuries in among military personell are going to prevent policies and practicalities that increase operational fitness? There are about 1.5 million injuries in the US military per year that require medical treatment and documentation (so more than a first aid kit). A few burns per year vs a 13 billion dollar carrier in a dysfunctional state... even an idiotic beaurocracy (which the miltiary is not) can figure that one out.

> You think the prospect of injuries in among military personell are going to prevent policies and practicalities that increase operational fitness?

My point is that someone has to shoulder the costs. I'm not sure I would classify the Navy as an "idiotic beaurocracy" but it is not an efficient organization. They can "get it done" as you imply only with an obscene amount of money budgeted (and even so still have to shuffle money around every year). In one scenario, contracting out helps operational fitness by letting sailors focus on their MOS and taking the burden of upkeep and maintenance off the table.

Sure, contracting is often done poorly or even wickedly, but the best solution isn't always to replace contracting with an MOS.

Perhaps the oven in question may be an electric Rational AG (German multinational company) combination oven, possibly the iCombi Pro.[1] If this is correct, the manual[2] and service reference guide[3] for the iCombi Pro shows it is quite complex compared to what a ship galley would have used 20 years ago. It's a self-cleaning steam oven, has a touchscreen interface with some significant functionality for commercial kitchens (eg. scheduling/planning of oven use and functions, real time notifications, recording of temperature/humidity measurements for food safety compliance/auditing, etc) and may have WiFi/wired Ethernet connectivity depending on model.

Rational AG's maritime division state they provide:

"...training to show your on-board technicians to identify, repair, and diagnose problems at sea, maintenance programs to ensure smooth operation, and the special RATIONAL marine service app with user’s manuals, wiring diagrams, and key information for quick troubleshooting."

The "RATIONAL marine service app" referred to is probably [5] and screenshots show an ability to order spare parts, view technician manuals, view electrical schematics, etc. This app does however appear to just be a front end for a web browser session back to a vendor website.

Rational AG publish a US RRP list for spare parts.[6]

Rational AG also appear to have servicing locations in Dubai (AE), Genoa (IT), Hamburg (DE), Miami (US), Nantes (FR), Shanghai (CN), Singapore (SG) and Turku (FI).[4]

Seemingly these ovens (or ones similar to this) are used successfully on cruise ships with double the number of mouths to feed. Is this an oven manufacturer problem or an operator problem?

If it's an oven manufacturer problem, are there _any_ marine galley steam ovens on the market (and thus subsidised in price by the cruise ship industry) that are more reliable? Or are all such ovens now so complex compared to 20 years ago that there are 10 times the number of failure modes no matter which oven is chosen?

If it's an operator problem, consider that the Gerald R Ford class now only has 2 galleys (one gets used only when an air wing is present) down from 5 galleys on the Nimitz class. This change would appear to be a very large loss of galley redundancy. At least the main galley, and most likely the second galley too, on the Gerald R Ford class is going to be used 24/7 for at least the 3-8 weeks between port calls that carriers typically achieve. Disconnecting, disassembling and repairing a complex machine in a tight space of a galley operating 24/7 does not sound particularly viable. If the entire galley could be closed for a day (such as at a port call) then maybe repair of ovens is OK to complete if spare parts have been ordered ahead of time and are waiting for installation, no specialised tools are needed for installation or they've also been planned ahead of time to be present, and there is enough space in the galley to disconnect and disassemble an oven. Navy would have to train dozens of their own technicians to repair a particular type of oven on a particular class of ship. And due to the lack of real world repair experience those technicians will be exposed to, they're much more likely to make mistakes or take longer to complete repairs.

There's some further possible problems to self-repair though:

- The Gerald R Ford class galleys could have had ovens installed into a tight configuration that requires half the galley to be disconnected and relocated just to gain access and space to disconnect and disassemble an oven.

- If a replacement oven is needed, maybe half the galley needs to be removed first, and maybe lots of other equipment, conduits, doorways, etc need to be removed to get an oven off the ship, and a replacement oven installed back in the galley. It depends on how easily accessible the Gerald R Ford class galleys are to the exterior of the ship. It's not uncommon for ship repairs/upgrades for heavy equipment to have to be removed by cutting through the hull and removing interior compartments that might be in the way.

[1] https://www.usaspending.gov/award/CONT_AWD_N6279324P0006_970...

[2] https://www.rational-online.com/en_us/customercare/downloads...

[3] https://www.keelingcatering.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/05...

[4] https://www.rational-online.com/en_us/industry/marine/

[5] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.apprologic...

[6] https://www.rational-online.com/media/downloads/service-part...

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