Companies Lobby Against Giving the Military the Right to Repair

What a bunch of greedy bastards. Not being able to repair an appliance/device/tool/whatever in some contexts could make the difference between life and death. And not just in combat. Imagine if the air filter on the Apollo 13 couldn't be hacked with what the astronauts had at hand up there because it was driven by closed electronics whose brain was sandwiched in multiple layers of DRM, NDAs, stupidity and lawyers: the guys would have been doomed.

It makes sense that the military would be the first organization to get widespread federal R2R protections. The US Gov't basically uses the DoD as a funding firehose for private sector R&D, so it's only natural that there would be some ground rules for companies that want to "take a drink from the hose," so to speak.

Hopefully this will serve as a "Eureka" moment for the powers that be in DC. Just cut out the part that says "but only when the military is the customer."

If my exmil co-workers have taught me anything its that anything and everything can be macgyver'd in a pinch. If jerry rigging was a sport these guys would be ranked competitive players.

In this case, your 'threat actor' is servicemen and 'arms race' is like, their whole thing. These guys are bored out of their mind for 95% of their career and will take anything apart if the activity gets them 2 hrs closer to a break.

Eisenhower warned us about this kind of eventuality, and I personally never thought it could ever get this far. Outrageous.

What are they going to do when they are in a real war with a capable enemy? In the midst of battle call the manufacturer and request a service tech to fly in while bombs are flying? Or maybe spend a few hours calling customer service?

"The Section would require Department of Defense procurement contracts to be contingent on a contractor's agreement to continually provide access to all repair materials and information, with no carve-outs or limitations to protect sensitive trade secret information."

"To enable access to sensitive proprietary and trade secret information beyond that necessary for standard repair and maintenance, customized license agreements can be tailored on a case-by-case basis to achieve specified repair and maintenance objectives.

Right to repair legislation makes more sense to me for consumer products, where the individual bargaining power is quite low.

The military has a much much stronger bargaining position, why don't they already require that their contractors provide repairable equipment?

With Warren on this proposed legislation whatever the pain for vendors. Lock-in on service might be acceptable during peace but not at all in combat. Slightly ironic that this should apply with equal force to code.

For some time, a contract winning strategy has been to underbid on the hardware and make most of the profit on the long-tail service contract. Eliminating that business model will raise prices a little bit on hardware, but net savings would likely be significant.

Slightly tangential, but I would love to see a scifi scenario of (fictional) USA vs something like Russia, where the premise is that the "rugged, lower economic power" enemy beats the US because complacency that lead to buerocratic mess, such as army of lawyer the size of the military, no right to repair, privatized medical care for military and heavy lobbying & private media propaganda creating a political gridlock.

I think there's many underdog scifi stories of the guerilla freedom fighter vs big (inflexible) government, but most of them from the pov of the underdog.

I'd love to see a from the view of a corporate middleman seeing the house of card crumbling, not because military but because buerocratic mess, and they would've won the war decades ago if the army of lawyers wasn't there

Of course they are :)

Military Vendors lap up Gov. money like a Camel in a desert at an oasis. Without that money, the US economy would collapse over night.

I hope the Military is allowed to repair their equipment. In a war, that ability is mandatory.

How is this legal in the USA today? With a debt of $34 trillion, and military being the primary financial burden?

Get all the way out of here with this. Any company that is lobbying against right to repair should have to pay a fine per item that breaks. After a certain breakage percentage, their ability to obtain future government contracts is revoked for a period of 1 year, and for repeated infractions revocation is 5 years.

So the companies are going to send repair people all over the world, have people that have clearance, and potentially go into actively hostile areas?

This is ridiculous. Imagine you're in the middle of a battle and you need to get an okay to fix something outside of an approved/certified repair outfit?

That would be a physical DDOS attack with severe consequences.

I hope, one can hope, the brass, despite any consequence to their kickbacks, care a little about the grunts on the ground who would be exposed to the consequences of this nonsense and quash this unpatriotic grift.

This is mercenary attitude --which if you're dealing with mercenaries, you can expect, but your own people and companies? That's... insane.

Simple solution: Only let contracts where verifiably senior company technical employees are to accompany equipment in war and peace, and to have all technical data in their possession, verified unencrypted.

After they're all dead, the president signs an executive order confiscating all on-site data and equipment, and authorizing military to repair. This would also be spelled out in the contract.

I’m not sure why anyone would want to handle field repairs where a rocket can blow up your entire operation at any time. Or maybe have some other type of repair in mind. In for a penny, in for a pound, bros.

The CEOs proposing such ideas should be locked up as traitors lol

[saying without prejudice, just using real example to illustrate the power of tech company, or even a single person like in this case, behind locked-in tech]

Back then Elon Musk refused to turn the Starlink on on the Black Sea and the Ukrainian drones weren't able to perform the planned attack on the Russian Navy ships there (the situation later was rectified by Pentagon itself directly contracting some of the Startlink terminals or something along these lines)

In general the modern weaponry is very complicated and Western tanks and artillery systems would be transported to Poland from Ukraine for service and repair. I think recently they tried to establish a repair base in Ukraine, yet i'm wondering whether the growing complexity of the hardware may make the "right-to-repair" issue closer to moot in larger part. I mean the right-to-repair in civilian case allows independent companies to provide repairs, while i don't see any practical way for such independent companies in the military case.

Right to repair is truly a vital human right we should fight hard for. That and the right to free speech.

The military should factor the positions of companies like this into their supply chain risk assessments.

The military should just build right to repair into their RFQ processes.

B-52 is largely a right-to-repair airplane.

Elizabeth Warren being in the DoD’s corner on basic serviceability of equipment critical to the sustained warfighting capability of our military against an industry flexing DRM was not on my late capitalism bingo card.

It feels like the military is well into pushing back in a lot of ways. "Modular Open Systems Architectures" ((M)OSA) is a buzzword you can't go ten pages through a proposal or strategy doc without running into, after years of the military enduring the same locked down IP shit the rest of the world has been mixed in for decades now. And the military seems to be one of the few places opening up expectations that this unevolvable hell isn't good enough.

One particular write up that really got me was just a brief part of the extremely long & sad ProPublica write-up on the Litoral Combat Ship (LCS). The part about the sailors not even having physical access to a computing center was off the wall madness to me, really epitomized & made real to me a certain despairing level of madness that unregulated capitalism tries to steer humanity into. https://www.propublica.org/article/how-navy-spent-billions-l...

It's not entirely clear how much remedy we're getting from this (M)OSA kumbaya, what are the bigger successes & failures or what technically it looks like (would so love to be able to see how the Arsenal of Democracy is coping with the corporate raiders within), but there's at least strong lip service to change, mutual recognition that systems need to be flexible & reconfigurable & adjustable & modular, which is something.

the military-industrial complex is infested with parasites