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Comment by StephenHerlihyy | Hacker News Reader

I would argue they need to go even further - warranty. I’ve seen vehicles 100% maintained by contractors need full engine or power train replacements after 5000 miles of light driving. Never been off road, never been deployed, just shuttling people around the base completely inoperatable after less than 2 years. When you buy a car the manufacturer has some stake in the game still - even the limited warranty ensures that a major failure will cost them and not you. Government contracting doesn’t work like this. They sell a product, sell you service and then sell you parts. If that part is bad you, the American taxpayer, then has to buy another one. There is no such thing as returns or lemon laws when it comes to government purchases. You get what you get and hope for the best.

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I am in the military product industry, the military absolutely demands we provide them warranty for the purchase, typically 3 years on our particular products. We sell the same products outside the military with only a 1 year warranty.

And we absolutely accept US government RMAs and replace product under warranty as we get it.

Jeez, we even replace product that they've clearly played shotput with and thrown off cliffs.

My buddy in the Marines was complaining the other day that you guys wouldn't replace his crayons.

Eating the crayons voids the warranty AFAIK.

He maintains that the warranty continues to apply if said crayons were, in fact, vomited back up.

What sort of vehicles are those? I thought that the military purchased regular civilian vehicles for light duty road transport outside of combat zones. Do those not come with the regular powertrain warranty?

Not GP, but I suspect the "100% maintained by contractors" part of the sentence has something to do with the explanation to an otherwise absurd situation.

When you consider the sheer size of the US defense budget, and the nature of government contracts in the first place, it would be more surprising if this sort of thing didn't happen at all.

One thing that happens a lot in DOD is that you'll purchase something that, to an outsider, you'd think you just went to a store and bought. But no, the DOD goes through a contractor to procure it and often pushes the warranty/maintenance onto those same contractors instead of the original producer. It results in some odd, and often bad, situations.

You buy a bunch of HPE servers from HP? Nope. You buy them from Fly-by Night Contractor who won some contract and didn't document the HP support contracts they are wrapping their own support contract around so when it gets handed off at the end of their contract, you're SOL and can't get support from FbNC or HP without going through a lot of red tape. And by the time you succeed in identifying who is responsible for what, you're out of support anyways.

It's dumb, and happens way too often. DOD should be purchasing straight from those major vendors instead of purchasing through a contractor.

In the case of light duty vehicles if the contract includes maintenance services then those are rolled into the contract price, which is presumably the lowest bid. What's the problem?

> which is presumably the lowest bid

Exactly, what's the problem. I know more things on the IT side, and there the lowest bidder is always the best at failing, but also the one selected most often because they check enough of the right boxes.

Not only the DoD by a long shot. I remember idly mentioning in a meeting that the same $50 USB thumb drives that we were buying from our vendor could be purchased at Office Depot for < $10 and without the paperwork and signoffs of generating a Purchase Order.

No one, including the Buyer cared. That was when I learned that buying from an Approved Vendor had nothing to do with what they charged.

Even the civilian vehicles tend to go through a different fleet vehicle process, sometimes even with different features. Many times fleet vehicles do not get the same consumer grade warranties, even for civilian companies.

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