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?
Who signed such a contract?
"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"
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.
If they need left-handed solar whoopie cushion, by God and Congress they will get one made.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.