Service members deserve the right to repair
61 comments
·August 28, 2025cl42
kev009
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.
sdeer
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.
StephenHerlihyy
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.
nradov
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?
giantg2
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.
ghurtado
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.
Jtsummers
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.
nradov
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?
alphazard
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.
s_dev
> they could make this requirement and the market would work to accommodate them.
US millitary is truly a monopsony.
dfxm12
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.
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prasadjoglekar
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.
jameshart
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…
bell-cot
If anyone doubts the reality of such things - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darleen_Druyun
Jtsummers
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.
lenerdenator
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.
aleph_minus_one
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.
Jtsummers
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.
jgeada
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.
jedberg
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.
catigula
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.
WillAdams
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.
evanjrowley
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.
catigula
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.
mwcremer
For the record, the movie was comedic but the book was not.
bigstrat2003
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.
jedberg
Don't let good be the enemy of perfect. If we get the right to repair, great!
2OEH8eoCRo0
Letting perfect be the enemy of good is the liberal self-own way.
catigula
I'd prefer we never get the right to repair to making precedent that rights are contingent on military service.
reactordev
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…
esseph
You didn't read the article and don't understand the premise.
It's not about giving classes "rights", at all.
arh68
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
fn-mote
> 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.
pavon
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...
TimorousBestie
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.)
giantg2
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.
jauntywundrkind
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...
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lenerdenator
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.
lenerdenator
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.
bluSCALE4
It’d be hilarious if the military industrial complex is why we get right to repair.
platevoltage
I think it's more likely it would be limited to the military industrial complex. Schematics would be given out under NDA.
LatteLazy
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.