The Right to Repair
Anyone follow the recent John Deere controversy, in which Big Green/Yellow is supposed to allow folks to fix their own equipment? Buy a Deere, have a problem – and find out it is a factory-only repair, regardless of whether you could make said repair blindfolded and suspended upside down. This one seems to be going against JD, and farmers all over the country were happy about it. (In actual practice… well, the jury still seems to be out.)
Thankfully our military doesn’t labor under that kind of burden, right? There’s always “that guy” who can fix anything? Maybe a warrant officer who actually puts down his coffee? Actually…wrong.
The U.S. military often can’t fix parts of jets, ships, infantry fighting vehicles, and other equipment because they are not allowed to under the contracts the Pentagon signs with manufacturers. Instead, only the manufacturer can fix the equipment, which is a problem in a combat zone or out on a far-flung training exercise.
The Navy pays millions to fly contractors out to sea and make repairs that sailors aboard those very ships could make themselves. “Right to repair” is the catch-all term for the effort to give service members more authority to fix the equipment they rely on, but a bipartisan effort in Congress to do that fell short last year.
Troops use technical data to diagnose and fix a broken part, or to make a replacement using a 3-D printer, Computer Numerical Control (CNC) machine, or similar device. But military equipment manufacturers tend to guard that data, saying it falls under the intellectual property they invested in developing.
You would think that with billion dollar contracts, for those billions we should get all the info needed to fix ’em. You would think – but we don’t.
Up until the early 1990s, the Pentagon routinely bought complete technical data packages that let troops and military civilians repair equipment or bid the work out to other contractors at competitive prices.
That began to change during President Bill Clinton’s administration, which encouraged the defense industry to consolidate, shrinking from 51 aerospace and defense prime contractors in the early 1990s to just five today.
Anyone want to bet that some very deep-pocketed Clintonistas didn’t get very much richer and deeper pocketed? Me, neither.
The F-35 is one example of the ripple effects of these policies. Air Force, Navy, and Marine Corps maintainers said the lack of technical data prevents them from making routine repairs to many F-35 components, according to a 2023 Government Accountability Office report. Task and Purpose
We can’t fix our front-line fighter without a consultant? What the actual …?
There is a saying that “politics make strange bedfellows” (or, in the case of some deceased politicians whose spouses took over their political positions, bedfellows make strange politics.) In this case, a lot of us may be shocked at who is on our side:
Perhaps the most prominent effort to compel defense contractors to make military equipment more repairable is the Servicemember Right-to-Repair Act of 2024, introduced in Congress by Senator Elizabeth Warren and Representative Marie Gluesenkamp Perez. The Army has also been working with lawmakers to refine right-to-repair provisions in upcoming defense bills.
More recently, the 2026 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) initially included right-to-repair provisions, but they were stripped after industry pushback. Guessing Headlights
Setting aside the unlikelihood of Elizabeth Warren being on the right side of an issue for now, this is part of a trifecta of bad indicators for our warfighting abilities.
It takes us many times as long as our adversaries to field new systems which cost hugely more than theirs. We’re rich but not that rich.
Our abilities to replace complex weapons systems in a timely manner are constrained by strangled supply chains. Example? Go look up how our explosives pipeline is limited – we only get TNT, for instance, from ONE FOREIGN source.
And now we find we can’t repair a lot of our stuff because we have allowed the MIC to control the IP.
Think we know what “three strikes” adds up to.
Category: "Your Tax Dollars At Work", None, Pentagon, Science and Technology
Ummm, one of those should be easy to fix. A buddy of mine almost made TNT in college; he used too low a temperature so it was a dud batch. Or so he said; he did make nitrogen tri-iodine later. It explodes, loudly, if you stare at it too long.
I had a high school chemistry teacher that taught us to mix iodine and ammonia. Very touchy stuff, essentially it’s the same as the little “pop-it” firecrackers. Makes a pretty good boom in large amounts. Allegedly. I admit nothing, call my lawer.
I would be that a great many components on the F-35 (or even 70s era fighters) would be beyond the capabilities of a micro-electronics soldier/sailor/airman/Marine with a few years’ training to fix. We complexified ourselves out of anything but Depot level maintenance in a lot of cases. I work with the M270 and HIMARS. There are boxes in those that need to be returned to vendor for fixing circuit cards. Lower echelons can swap those cards out, but not fix them. Price of wanting “high speed, low drag”. I’m sure there are ways to run it all better, but those solutions may not be very easy.
Below, is how 14 companies become one. . . .
In the 80s and 90s as a technician we weren’t supposed to fix circuit cards and certain other major components but for some unknown reason we had all the necessary equipment to do so. So things got fixed, because well, I never even read the contracts and when your commander is screaming at you to “fix it” you just fix it.
These days I doubt they even have all the tools and parts needed to fix things past swapping out a major component. I doubt they would even know what an oscilloscope was if you dropped one on their head. This isn’t the soldier’s fault, this is failure of leadership and a failure of imagination.
Congress, the Military, the American public: We want the best of the best stuff.
Reality: Ok, that will be expensive, take a really long time to develop, be hard to produce and difficult to fix.
Congress, the Military, the American public: Oh no, we aren’t interested in any of that.
Reality: Then you don’t want the high speed gear?
Congress, the Military, the American public: Oh, no, we still want that.
The Testors glue above pic I used to use to put together balsa wood airplanes. The parts were laid down on the plans sheet and held down with pins and glued with Testors. Used to listen to NYC Allen Freeds radio show WINS 1010 radio Rock & Roll while putting together the plane.
I built a few hundred planes like that. Hard to find those kits these days. We won’t even go into the lack of Cox engines.
“Maybe a warrant officer who actually puts down his coffee?”
Now you’re just making shit up.
I worked on several pieces of John Deere equipment while I was on active duty. The big problem was Mil-Spec’s. Some rocket surgeon decided that the tractor Joe the farmer worked on wasn’t good enough for the USAF; the USAF needed something different. Something different meant more expense and longer lead-times.
Back during the Carter administration some genius came up with the contractor oriented maintenance organization. The GI would take off the broken part, give it to a contractor, the contractor would give the GI a rebuilt part, and the contractor would rebuild the broken part. Result: lower inventories and costs, shorter down-time waiting for the part to be repaired or rebuilt, and the GI’s only knew how to remove and replace. Forgotten were the abilities to actually fix something.
Ever notice how the number of GI’s has shrunk over the years while contractors have increased? Politicians and Generals can use this to say how the military is so much smaller with no dings to defense readiness.
Mechanics used to repair out of spec car parts. Now they just replace parts based on what the diagnostic computer tells them.
I took my car to a dealer to get the oil changed (easier that way since the dealer has to deal with the waste oil). The cable for the hood release was broken so the mechanic had to open the hood the same way the neer-do-wells do when they strip your vehicle without opening the doors. The dealership added $85.00 to the invoice for “services provided – diagnosed broken hood release cable”. I told the dealer I had not requested that; the dealer said he’d take the $85.00 off the bill for replacing the cable. The car still had a broken cable when I traded it in years later. If one can’t figure out how to open a hood, one shouldn’t call him/her/itself a mechanic.
I watched a “mechanic” go nuts trying to figure out how to open my Jeep’s hood. It really hasn’t changed much since 1941.
Yeah, John Deere got themselves in some “deep kimchi” with that stunt. They lost a Class Action Suit in Nebraska as well. Basically with that setup, you can’t even change a headlight in one of their tractors and then use it until someone from a dealership comes out and resets the computer and yes, they charged out the ass for it!