A few years ago I went to a military museum in Vietnam, where they have a lot of equipment used by the US military on display -- helicopters, planes, guns, etc.
What surprised me is how the equipment had labels around where to open things to rescue people, where to pour fuel, etc... It was labelled such that someone with limited (or no) exposure to the vehicle model would know what to do without referencing any sort of manual.
It may well have been done for the benefit of experts too - a hot war is true chaos. Shock, fatigue, sleep deprivation, being under fire and adrenaline dump. Militaries are very good at forgetting the lessons learned in the last war while applying the prior status quo to a novel situation.
Could this be because there were a large number of enlisted persons serving? An all volunteer force might expect all serving troops to be more familiar with equipment.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
It doesn't seem like this is really related to a "right to repair". Even if no RtR legislation was passed, it would still be in the military's interest to require user serviceability for everything they purchase. They are a large enough consumer that they could make this requirement and the market would work to accommodate them.
Military-industrial-complex: So, do you wanna buy some widgets?
Lt. Milo Minderbender: well the Army can sure always use more widgets! We’ll need to lock in a contract for spare parts too, so you have to agree to supply spares at a reasonable cost.
MIC: how about instead you take this extended service contract where you pay us to do any necessary repairs?
MM: well that doesn’t seem like a great deal - we’d be on the hook for arbitrary costs forever and you’d have no incentive to make widgets that work.
MIC: we really don’t want to agree to a fixed parts cost schedule. That would annoy our shareholders.
MM: well, we are the US Army, so you can take it or leave it. Who else are you going to sell widgets to?
MIC: ah, but Milo - we can call you Milo, right? - have you considered that you’re coming up on the end of your service?
MM: Not for a few years…
MIC: Sure, but I mean, when you get out… it’d be nice if there was a job at a military widget contractor waiting for you…
Honestly, that sounds like a more benign version of what I picture, which has the military not even giving enough of a shit to ask the questions in the first place.
This would make it a requirement, right now it's not (for all procurements, at least; tech data is expected in large systems acquisitions like a new jet fighter but that's very different than buying a generator). This also brings down the weight of the law, in contrast to a "My commander said so" which can change from one unit to another or even over time.
Or perhaps them not fighting for those clauses is a part of the culture of how the US government - or, more specifically, brass in the Pentagon - deals with defense contractors.
Since armament forms a oligopsony market [1] (i.e. there exist few buyers (countries) for big armament), why don't these buyers simply use their market leverage and refuse to buy equipment for which the producer rejects them the right to repair.
This isn't about armaments, at least not entirely. For the most part weapons and weapons systems procurement already has regulations which should be giving DOD the right to repair (or the data to perform maintenance and repairs). This is about everything else.
As the saying goes, "An army marches on its stomach". Weapons are critical, essential for a military to be a military. But everything else in logistics and support are what actually makes the military operational. A generator (the example in the article) is not an armament. And they need so many that there's no way they could lean on the entire generator industry without the support of law or other regulations to back them.
In reality, it is not the DoD that contracts out the big stuff, but Congress. And when the purchaser isn't the actual user, then a whole bunch of nefarious negative feedback loops come into being. The Congresscritter mostly only cares about sounding good and their lobbying (bribery) dollars, everything else is a problem for someone else, or sometime later.
If getting right to repair passed requires justifying it via the military, I'm ok with that. I just hope they push to make it apply to civilians as well.
I don't see any scenario where the rest of us would receive any benefits from this. I would imagine that mechanics in the military have access to everything they need to keep their Humvees running (I'm sure they're called something else now, I don't care). That doesn't mean that the software to fix a 2026 Mercedes won't cost thousands of dollars, if it's even available by a non-dealer at all.
The requirement for a voting franchise was that one joined the Federal Service, of which the military was a very small part --- the protagonists best friend was working as a science researcher on Pluto and the young lady who joined at the same time might have become part of the Skywatch if she hadn't qualified as a pilot.
It's not great, but worth recognizing that it's a notion as old as democracy itself. See ancient Athens, Greece. Among the many other requirements that made voting exclusive, only men who had completed military service were granted the right to vote.
Nor was "you have to join the military to have basic rights" the premise of the book. One of the themes of the book (I wouldn't call it the premise, just one theme among them) was that to wield authority over others one must first demonstrate that they are capable of acting for the good of the whole even if it is not in his own personal best interest. Military service was one way, not the only way, to demonstrate that ability to act selflessly.
I think Heinlein actually has a very interesting point. To wield the power of the government (which is what voting is), it is important to be able to act selflessly. If someone can't do that, even for a couple of years of their life, why should they be able to wield that power over others? The universal franchise is not a religious dogma, it's good to ask these questions and think about whether our society could be better if we organized it differently. Unfortunately, a lot of people completely missed the point and just rounded it off to "Heinlein thinks the military should run society", which isn't at all true.
Heinlein isn't even saying anything completely new in starship troopers. It is in essence an evolution of the Active vs Passive Citizen distinction. Merely living in a society doesn't necessarily give all of the responsibilities of governing, aka voting. A citizen aught to have be an active citizen within the society to gain that privilege. The US Constitution was originally for only Land Owners (ignoring the other race and sex based stipulations). Heinlein is treating that active - passive distinction as being based on service instead of property.
In the book it was said that if a blind deaf person in a wheelchair volunteered for service, the state would find something for them to do. Maybe tediously counting hairs on a caterpillar, or testing chairs in Antarctica.
Now for me the asspull from Starship Troopers that I still think about every now and then was the notion of mathematical proofs of morality at a high school level (or any academic level, for that matter). This was a society that somehow discovered provable objective morality, and I really wish that idea could have been fleshed out more by Heinlein.
It was one of his juveniles (what would now be a "young adult" novel). I don't think it was ever going to get fleshed out.
You see him put much more thought into political systems and economics in other books like The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, Stranger in a Strange Land, or For Us, the Living.
This [1] lays out pretty conclusively that even though the book plays lip service to "federal Service", the entire rest of the book makes clear that it is only military that get the right to vote, not "government workers".
I don't think that is correct at all. I read the book and it was very clear to me that it wasn't just lip service, you could do your federal service in many different ways.
> Nor was "you have to join the military to have basic rights" the premise of the book.
It was not even the premise of the film - only one right was conditioned on service, the right to vote (and possibly hold political office). I.e. actions that wield authority over others. I argue that is not "basic".
Fracturing a population is a time honored way to maintain oppression.
For example, let’s say you want to prevent wealth redistribution, but there is lots of popular support for it. Then you give it to some, for example old people, and it removes wealth redistribution as a priority for them.
Now, you can more easily withhold the benefit from the remaining population. Or give them all various tiers, such as white collar and government workers with more employer subsidies, and lower paid workers with few or no subsidies.
At the end, the opposition group will waste a ton of energy trying to make their cause a priority, and will probably never achieve the full goal. The more politically important will get theirs, and the less politically important will suffer without. That stepping stone becomes a barrier.
In the example, you can change age to skin tone, gender, religious tribe, military status, and even arbitrary geographic boundary. See the recent tax benefits Alaskans received in exchange for their Senator’s vote.
That's not what's happening here. Being in the military won't magically give you a right to repair your iPhone. This law puts a requirement on DOD procurement (beyond what's already present, as I mentioned in another comment) to acquire tech data (or whatever's required) to make purchased systems maintainable by the military itself. So you buy a Generac for your house and you're in the military you get the same manuals the rest of us get. If the DOD buys a Generac for a facility, they can get more data.
> I was overseeing generators in theater, and the one powering the mortuary facility had failed. ... I didn’t have HVAC expertise or the necessary parts.
> I had two choices: initiate a long contracting process to hire a civilian technician
It sounds like the author couldn't have repaired the generator even if they had the right to do so? Or was this the kind of thing where they could have "figured it out" or carried a few spare parts?
Yeah, and frankly a lot of it is the military's fault for outsourcing too much service and repair to contractors to begin with. If you look at the proposed law, all it is doing is requiring the military to write contracts in a manner that they should have been doing all along.
Blaming the military for the state of federal contracting reverses the cart and the horse. Congress has a heavy hand in dictating how military appropriations operate; likewise, the large prime contractors have no difficulty lining Congress’ pockets (legally, of course—campaign and PAC contributions are basically fungible for cash from a congresscritter’s perspective.)
Crazy to think we'd pay for software, ask for source to run a Fortify scan & whatnot, and get told to kick rocks. "Proprietary ... trade secrets ... &c&c". Just mark it green
They should go further & own (have full license to) the designs outright for the systems they procure.
There's so much talk about Modular Open Systems Architecture, because everyone agrees the current system is broken & doesn't allow iteration & exploration of systems. But it's so unclear technically what that means, how it happens. Maybe maybe things are a tiny bit better than they were but it's so hard to know, and it feels so likely to be lipservice, too hard to do & too little genuine desire to make it happen.
That used to be a lot more of a thing, at least with regard to small arms. Prior to the 1960s, the US government did a lot of its own work on designing and producing service rifles.
A main problem to this is that contractors get money to do repairs and they use the reputation of their equipment to get future contracts. We would need to structure the contract so there's some flat maintenance portion to incentivize the production of easily serviced equipment.
I think that there's a larger problem with defense contractors and the government just seeing these as ways certain people (usually the people in the Pentagon and Congress) can get rich or a cushy retirement gig, with no concern as to what actually happens past the contract being signed.
Otherwise a lot of this sort of thing would go without saying, and you wouldn't see problems like those surrounding the Sig Sauer P320/M17/M18.
Would you rather pay up front and get a warranty or sign a long service contract with high bills?
The answer is the latter because paying more later is a form of borrowing, but not one you have to declare as debt. So you can announce a tax cut now and voters will love it despite paying twice as much next year.
A few years ago I went to a military museum in Vietnam, where they have a lot of equipment used by the US military on display -- helicopters, planes, guns, etc.
What surprised me is how the equipment had labels around where to open things to rescue people, where to pour fuel, etc... It was labelled such that someone with limited (or no) exposure to the vehicle model would know what to do without referencing any sort of manual.
Very different today.
It may well have been done for the benefit of experts too - a hot war is true chaos. Shock, fatigue, sleep deprivation, being under fire and adrenaline dump. Militaries are very good at forgetting the lessons learned in the last war while applying the prior status quo to a novel situation.
Could this be because there were a large number of enlisted persons serving? An all volunteer force might expect all serving troops to be more familiar with equipment.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
It doesn't seem like this is really related to a "right to repair". Even if no RtR legislation was passed, it would still be in the military's interest to require user serviceability for everything they purchase. They are a large enough consumer that they could make this requirement and the market would work to accommodate them.
Hey, I agree, but if this is what it takes to get it into the regular lexicon, or to get a foot in the door in Washington, then OK.
> they could make this requirement and the market would work to accommodate them.
US millitary is truly a monopsony.
Yeah, the title is nonsense. The military is sufficiently large as a buyer to demand RtR in every contract.
Perhaps they just don't want to fight for those clauses.
Military-industrial-complex: So, do you wanna buy some widgets?
Lt. Milo Minderbender: well the Army can sure always use more widgets! We’ll need to lock in a contract for spare parts too, so you have to agree to supply spares at a reasonable cost.
MIC: how about instead you take this extended service contract where you pay us to do any necessary repairs?
MM: well that doesn’t seem like a great deal - we’d be on the hook for arbitrary costs forever and you’d have no incentive to make widgets that work.
MIC: we really don’t want to agree to a fixed parts cost schedule. That would annoy our shareholders.
MM: well, we are the US Army, so you can take it or leave it. Who else are you going to sell widgets to?
MIC: ah, but Milo - we can call you Milo, right? - have you considered that you’re coming up on the end of your service?
MM: Not for a few years…
MIC: Sure, but I mean, when you get out… it’d be nice if there was a job at a military widget contractor waiting for you…
If anyone doubts the reality of such things - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darleen_Druyun
Honestly, that sounds like a more benign version of what I picture, which has the military not even giving enough of a shit to ask the questions in the first place.
This would make it a requirement, right now it's not (for all procurements, at least; tech data is expected in large systems acquisitions like a new jet fighter but that's very different than buying a generator). This also brings down the weight of the law, in contrast to a "My commander said so" which can change from one unit to another or even over time.
Or perhaps them not fighting for those clauses is a part of the culture of how the US government - or, more specifically, brass in the Pentagon - deals with defense contractors.
Since armament forms a oligopsony market [1] (i.e. there exist few buyers (countries) for big armament), why don't these buyers simply use their market leverage and refuse to buy equipment for which the producer rejects them the right to repair.
This should solve a lot of problems.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oligopsony
This isn't about armaments, at least not entirely. For the most part weapons and weapons systems procurement already has regulations which should be giving DOD the right to repair (or the data to perform maintenance and repairs). This is about everything else.
As the saying goes, "An army marches on its stomach". Weapons are critical, essential for a military to be a military. But everything else in logistics and support are what actually makes the military operational. A generator (the example in the article) is not an armament. And they need so many that there's no way they could lean on the entire generator industry without the support of law or other regulations to back them.
In reality, it is not the DoD that contracts out the big stuff, but Congress. And when the purchaser isn't the actual user, then a whole bunch of nefarious negative feedback loops come into being. The Congresscritter mostly only cares about sounding good and their lobbying (bribery) dollars, everything else is a problem for someone else, or sometime later.
If getting right to repair passed requires justifying it via the military, I'm ok with that. I just hope they push to make it apply to civilians as well.
I don't see any scenario where the rest of us would receive any benefits from this. I would imagine that mechanics in the military have access to everything they need to keep their Humvees running (I'm sure they're called something else now, I don't care). That doesn't mean that the software to fix a 2026 Mercedes won't cost thousands of dollars, if it's even available by a non-dealer at all.
The military can demand this, we can't.
I'm not. The notion that you only earn basic rights if you join the military is literally the premise of absurd comedy Starship Troopers.
The requirement for a voting franchise was that one joined the Federal Service, of which the military was a very small part --- the protagonists best friend was working as a science researcher on Pluto and the young lady who joined at the same time might have become part of the Skywatch if she hadn't qualified as a pilot.
It's not great, but worth recognizing that it's a notion as old as democracy itself. See ancient Athens, Greece. Among the many other requirements that made voting exclusive, only men who had completed military service were granted the right to vote.
Right, but comparing the American army and strategic military positioning as a nation to those societies is more than a little comical.
These societies literally couldn't have existed without military service.
America has a very difficult time making a similar case, and, often, the case is really difficult to make that they aren't actively harmful.
For the record, the movie was comedic but the book was not.
Nor was "you have to join the military to have basic rights" the premise of the book. One of the themes of the book (I wouldn't call it the premise, just one theme among them) was that to wield authority over others one must first demonstrate that they are capable of acting for the good of the whole even if it is not in his own personal best interest. Military service was one way, not the only way, to demonstrate that ability to act selflessly.
I think Heinlein actually has a very interesting point. To wield the power of the government (which is what voting is), it is important to be able to act selflessly. If someone can't do that, even for a couple of years of their life, why should they be able to wield that power over others? The universal franchise is not a religious dogma, it's good to ask these questions and think about whether our society could be better if we organized it differently. Unfortunately, a lot of people completely missed the point and just rounded it off to "Heinlein thinks the military should run society", which isn't at all true.
Heinlein isn't even saying anything completely new in starship troopers. It is in essence an evolution of the Active vs Passive Citizen distinction. Merely living in a society doesn't necessarily give all of the responsibilities of governing, aka voting. A citizen aught to have be an active citizen within the society to gain that privilege. The US Constitution was originally for only Land Owners (ignoring the other race and sex based stipulations). Heinlein is treating that active - passive distinction as being based on service instead of property.
> Military service was one way, not the only way
In the book it was said that if a blind deaf person in a wheelchair volunteered for service, the state would find something for them to do. Maybe tediously counting hairs on a caterpillar, or testing chairs in Antarctica.
Now for me the asspull from Starship Troopers that I still think about every now and then was the notion of mathematical proofs of morality at a high school level (or any academic level, for that matter). This was a society that somehow discovered provable objective morality, and I really wish that idea could have been fleshed out more by Heinlein.
It was one of his juveniles (what would now be a "young adult" novel). I don't think it was ever going to get fleshed out.
You see him put much more thought into political systems and economics in other books like The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, Stranger in a Strange Land, or For Us, the Living.
This [1] lays out pretty conclusively that even though the book plays lip service to "federal Service", the entire rest of the book makes clear that it is only military that get the right to vote, not "government workers".
[1] https://www.nitrosyncretic.com/pdfs/nature_of_fedsvc_1996.pd...
I don't think that is correct at all. I read the book and it was very clear to me that it wasn't just lip service, you could do your federal service in many different ways.
The military could not vote either. You had to _complete_ Federal Service before you earned the franchise.
> Nor was "you have to join the military to have basic rights" the premise of the book.
It was not even the premise of the film - only one right was conditioned on service, the right to vote (and possibly hold political office). I.e. actions that wield authority over others. I argue that is not "basic".
Fair enough - I've only read the book, so I wouldn't try to speak for the movie.
The book also includes strong racist themes.
Don't let good be the enemy of perfect. If we get the right to repair, great!
Letting perfect be the enemy of good is the liberal self-own way.
I'd prefer we never get the right to repair to making precedent that rights are contingent on military service.
I think you are completely misreading this. No one is saying that it's ok if military service is a requirement.
What we're saying is that if the military gets it first, that's ok, because it's a stepping stone to all of us getting it.
Fracturing a population is a time honored way to maintain oppression.
For example, let’s say you want to prevent wealth redistribution, but there is lots of popular support for it. Then you give it to some, for example old people, and it removes wealth redistribution as a priority for them.
Now, you can more easily withhold the benefit from the remaining population. Or give them all various tiers, such as white collar and government workers with more employer subsidies, and lower paid workers with few or no subsidies.
At the end, the opposition group will waste a ton of energy trying to make their cause a priority, and will probably never achieve the full goal. The more politically important will get theirs, and the less politically important will suffer without. That stepping stone becomes a barrier.
In the example, you can change age to skin tone, gender, religious tribe, military status, and even arbitrary geographic boundary. See the recent tax benefits Alaskans received in exchange for their Senator’s vote.
That's not what's happening here. Being in the military won't magically give you a right to repair your iPhone. This law puts a requirement on DOD procurement (beyond what's already present, as I mentioned in another comment) to acquire tech data (or whatever's required) to make purchased systems maintainable by the military itself. So you buy a Generac for your house and you're in the military you get the same manuals the rest of us get. If the DOD buys a Generac for a facility, they can get more data.
Luckily none of this has anything to do with the false dichotomy that you've presented.
Yet, here we are multiple comments through because a couple of people read a poorly designed title and jumped to conclusions.
:-(
I don’t think predicating it on joining was the point. The point was if it takes the military to push for its passage, Yey…
You didn't read the article and don't understand the premise.
It's not about giving classes "rights", at all.
I'm stumbling over the example:
> I was overseeing generators in theater, and the one powering the mortuary facility had failed. ... I didn’t have HVAC expertise or the necessary parts.
> I had two choices: initiate a long contracting process to hire a civilian technician
It sounds like the author couldn't have repaired the generator even if they had the right to do so? Or was this the kind of thing where they could have "figured it out" or carried a few spare parts?
Right to repair by necessity includes access to parts and documentation.
> initiate a long contracting process to hire a civilian technician
It isn't clear that this is about what we call "right to repair" on HN. (Essentially, no DRM on physical parts.)
Maybe it really is if I read the bill, but reading the article did not clarify that for me.
Yeah, and frankly a lot of it is the military's fault for outsourcing too much service and repair to contractors to begin with. If you look at the proposed law, all it is doing is requiring the military to write contracts in a manner that they should have been doing all along.
https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/senate-bill/220...
Blaming the military for the state of federal contracting reverses the cart and the horse. Congress has a heavy hand in dictating how military appropriations operate; likewise, the large prime contractors have no difficulty lining Congress’ pockets (legally, of course—campaign and PAC contributions are basically fungible for cash from a congresscritter’s perspective.)
They ought to get source code, too !
Crazy to think we'd pay for software, ask for source to run a Fortify scan & whatnot, and get told to kick rocks. "Proprietary ... trade secrets ... &c&c". Just mark it green
They should go further & own (have full license to) the designs outright for the systems they procure.
There's so much talk about Modular Open Systems Architecture, because everyone agrees the current system is broken & doesn't allow iteration & exploration of systems. But it's so unclear technically what that means, how it happens. Maybe maybe things are a tiny bit better than they were but it's so hard to know, and it feels so likely to be lipservice, too hard to do & too little genuine desire to make it happen.
Amazing lcs report, https://www.propublica.org/article/how-navy-spent-billions-l...
That used to be a lot more of a thing, at least with regard to small arms. Prior to the 1960s, the US government did a lot of its own work on designing and producing service rifles.
A main problem to this is that contractors get money to do repairs and they use the reputation of their equipment to get future contracts. We would need to structure the contract so there's some flat maintenance portion to incentivize the production of easily serviced equipment.
I think that there's a larger problem with defense contractors and the government just seeing these as ways certain people (usually the people in the Pentagon and Congress) can get rich or a cushy retirement gig, with no concern as to what actually happens past the contract being signed.
Otherwise a lot of this sort of thing would go without saying, and you wouldn't see problems like those surrounding the Sig Sauer P320/M17/M18.
It’d be hilarious if the military industrial complex is why we get right to repair.
I think it's more likely it would be limited to the military industrial complex. Schematics would be given out under NDA.
Would you rather pay up front and get a warranty or sign a long service contract with high bills?
The answer is the latter because paying more later is a form of borrowing, but not one you have to declare as debt. So you can announce a tax cut now and voters will love it despite paying twice as much next year.