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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.

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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.

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