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Soldiers speak out about being blocked from repairing equipment by contractors

• 1MachineElf 5y ago
  Does the pentagon consider it a feature that repair knowledge is compartmentalized outside of the combat zone such that it cannot be as easily leaked?
  • austincheney 5y ago
    No. Maintenance and repair of a contracted item are governed by the active contract. That means if a soldier steps in to repair the item the military is breaking the contract and the assigned contractors won’t touch that item moving forward. This is problematic because the soldiers in place likely don’t have the dedicated resources to assume full ownership.
  • ruined 5y ago
    it sure would be an unmitigated disaster if the enemy knew how to fix an ac
  • shadilay 5y ago
    No, contracting as many military functions out as possible was spun as making things 'more efficient' by the Bush administration. Forcing the pentagon to go with the absolute lowest bid has been an enormous source of waste when every contractor goes over budget because they had to lie about how cheap they could do it to get the contract.
• shadilay 5y ago
  As always, government contracts are some of the most lucrative out there. Especially when 'unauthorized' repair can be spun as 'dangerous'.
  • literallyaduck 5y ago
    "Sorry Lockheed didn't change that bolt, you forfeited future repairs. We can get you back into compliance for 2 million"
• dogman144 5y ago
  Hit or miss here. Hit: can get a field rep who by contract has to be available, in the motor pool, for 1-2 weeks stretches when called. That field rep may have just designed the very weapon system you’re trying to maintain and they improves your readiness in 2 weeks more than 2 years worth of soldier maintenance would, and all for free to the unit. Miss: you find out about that field rep and their cellphone through word of mouth, and the on post field reps are garbage.
  • ethbr0 5y ago
    And minor addition as to why contractors are valuable -- you only pay them when they're there, and can terminate them when they're not needed. Granted, this can be mismanaged (omnipresent contractors on infinitely extended contracts), but the general principle is that it's sometimes cheaper to pay $600/hr and $60/part, than have to pay for (1) recruiting, (2) training, (3) sustainment, (4) pension, & (5) inventory warehousing and management.
    • worik 5y ago
      Thereby incentivise your contractors to let things fail. Contractors only get paid if things fail, if they are on salary and on staff they are incentivised for things not to fail.
    • mcguire 5y ago
      Speaking as a current government contractor, this is not how government contracts work. On the individual level, someone would have to work very hard, or be seriously disliked, to be terminated. In particular, when an old prime contractor loses a contract, the new prime contractor attempts to hire all of the individual workers from the old contractor, and generally succeeds. (It kind of makes sense; the work will likely remain the same, and the workers are the only ones who know what that is.) Second, the government is often paying the $600/hr not because it's cheaper or more flexible, but instead to insure that there is a national market for, say, aerospace engineers. (Without defense contracts, the number of aerospace engineering positions in the country would likely be in the three digits, not the five digits.) The government is paying for recruiting, training, sustainment, pensions, and inventory management anyway.
• deleted 5y ago
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• rightbyte 5y ago
  This is no way similar to Louis Rossmann's case. If the military would want to repair its fancy stuff it would.
  • exporectomy 5y ago
    Yes. I think they agreed to these repair conditions as part of the contracts to make the things. Right to repair would protect consumers who don't have any special contract and didn't really think about negotiating that.
  • soneil 5y ago
    It is related to the politics of getting anything changed though. Does America venerate "the good old days"? Farmers aren't allowed to repair their tractors. Does America venerate her military? Soldiers aren't allowed to repair their equipment. (Alternatively, you can frame those as food security and national security.) If you can't get the people who matter to sympathise with your problem, put it in a context they can sympathise with.
  • Tabular-Iceberg 5y ago
    You don’t think there could be perverse incentives if not outright bribery with the people who negotiate with the contractors?
    • rightbyte 5y ago
      Surely. I just mean that the US military is in a position to choose how their stuff is repaired, while I can't force Apple to sell me spare parts or whatever.
      • Tabular-Iceberg 5y ago
        Not even that is a given. It would be easy for defence contractors to form a cartel forbidding any of its members to let the customer do the repairs.
        • 5y ago
• speeder 5y ago
  I am not from US, but reading this makes me feel US is very, VERY vulnerable. They made it so they are more dependant on logistics than any army already is, meaning if they ever got in a war against peers (China, Russia, etc...), USA could lose the war because the front line got cut-off or sieged. Seriously, for example if you send a special force group to sabotage a carrier for example, then all you need to keep the carrier non-funcional is siege it, place boats with anti-air equipment in certain positions and shoot any airplane trying to reach the carrier. Land battles against bases seemly can be won by just sieging them and waiting all their gear to break, specailly if it is in harsh environment (like desert or snow), don't need to wait them to run out of food or ammo, just have to wait until their gear stopped working properly and then you can assault. How the leadership doesn't see that?
  • snowwrestler 5y ago
    I would consider the possibility that reading a bunch of YouTube comments that Matt Stoller copy pasted to his Substack probably did not give you a full picture of the U.S. global military posture.
  • ta988 5y ago
    Because you are rewarded to cuddle metrics not make things that work properly.
  • throwaway20875 5y ago
    The leadership does, but their interests are political so that they may end up in the ranks of the private contractors selling materials and services to the military. It's beyond dysfunctional and isn't well recognized. The military industrial complex has converged into a self-defeating feast of taxpayer's money.
  • DantesKite 5y ago
    The US would definitely lose against China if a war was fought today.
    • SEJeff 5y ago
• silexia 5y ago
  This used to be called war profiteering and was a crime and a great shame to those who did it. We need to get rid of the patent system and dramatically overhaul intellectual property to increase competition and reduce barriers to entry.
  • primitivesuave 5y ago
    Totally agree that this should be called war profiteering, although I don't think the people who engaged in it were shamed in the slightest. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust
• jonnycomputer 5y ago
  This sounds like a threat to US military readiness and operational capabilities in a serious conflict.
• AndrewKemendo 5y ago
  This was a deliberate decision back in the 1980s and 1990s related to how to structure personnel. You'll likely recognize it as how software teams are siloed and the concept of "full stack" is kind of a misnomer. The theory was basically that complex systems needed specialization for building and maintenance and that the US military could not afford or recruit the kind of people that could simultaneously run operations, do management AND troubleshoot. In other words, military personnel are not seen as technical experts that focus on one thing for a decade, moreso that they are like project managers who have depth in one area from their first 5-6 years and then "broaden" out to fill in the management layer of the force beyond that. There are exceptions to this of course, warrant officers and the like. However it's a tiny slice and given how massive the system is and how many sub-systems are involved - the management layer grows in the form of uniformed ranks while the technician layer grows in the contractor ranks because of how the force is structured. The incentive for that contract force however is to keep the contract (and follow on) and the knowledge related to it, so they end up building in these kind of "nobody can touch this but us" requirements. Functionally you can see how this is a self fulfilling prophecy - we aren't recruting or structuting our force to have the capability to maintain systems because we have a contract force that does it. To fix this a deliberate decision has to be made to change the force structure to build more technicians and unfortunately people like that don't want to take the pay and lifestyle cut so we just can't fill out the ranks. I could go on all day, including how the defense industrial base as well as citizens balking at growing the size of the uniformed forces reinforce this system, but it's a pervasive problem across multiple vectors.
  • extrapickles 5y ago
    The problem is that the military does (or at least did in the 200X's) train people how to repair and troubleshoot. They basically take the people more adapt to do that sort of work and train them how to do it. I know several people who were trained to do board level component replacement, but for most of the equipment they had, they were not authorized to do the repair, even though they were trained and equipped to troubleshoot and repair most circuit boards (including surface mount). For design and creation of new things (eg: software) they used to train for that, but I don't think they do that anymore.
• exporectomy 5y ago
  Seems like an old issue. I used to know a WWII British navy officer who complained how the Americans were so wasteful because they would get equipment replaced instead of repairing it themselves. I had assumed it was because their manufacturing capability was greater/cheaper but maybe it was this kind of war profiteering (is that the correct term?).
  • tehjoker 5y ago
    Well, we don't fight wars for any reason other than war profiteering so it might as well be as blatant on the ground as the geopolitical calculations are.
    • Robotbeat 5y ago
      Did the US fight in World War II only for war profiteering?
      • tehjoker 5y ago
        Mainly yes. WW2 is the only US war where I can identify some objectives that decent people can support. However, US war aims in WW2 were based on expanding US influence around the world. I think if you look in retrospect, the results of post-war planning are obvious. The US is the world hegemon after we turned on our Soviet ally, whom collapsed decades later leaving us a monopole. US business interests were very friendly to the Nazis, providing manufacturing knowledge, financing, and equipment for chemicals, tanks, and advanced computing equipment. Without IBM computing equipment, the holocaust would have been logistically impossible. They have never been brought to justice and are name brands today including what is now Monsanto, IBM, Ford, General Motors, and Chemours. After the war, the United States helped the former Nazis escape on the "rat line", seeding them inside US industries, around Europe (including NATO command), and South America. Nazis and their ideological descendents were used for US covert operations around the world to counter the communists and latin american governments that were a bit too independent. We live in this world now.
        • 5y ago
• squarefoot 5y ago
  Yikes! This is crazy. I could understand if an AC breaks in some general's tent in the backlines, but preventing soldiers to repair things in combat zone can have serious consequences. Ok, it may not be like the old days when some wire and duct tape could keep a plane flying; today if you need a chip you need a chip; but for fsck sake, let them bring spares and documentation, rather than forcing them to wait for service. I'm not even from the US, this is against the education everyone in the military should have been taught everywhere. Just imagine this being replaced by business cards with the service phone numbers on them (bookmark it, quality is excellent). https://maritime.org/doc/ https://maritime.org/doc/
• daniel-thompson 5y ago
  While I have no doubt that the linked article is legit, this was not my experience (I used to fly Blackhawks in the army). Maintenance schedules are periodic, where after every flight day there will be minor maintenance, every x0 hours there will be moderate maintenance and repair, every x00 hours there will be major maintenance and repair, etc. Typically post-flight and x0-level maintenance and repair is conducted by the unit that owns the aircraft, by soldiers, not contractors.
  • Jtsummers 5y ago
    It varies from system to system. The HH-60 Pave Hawk, for example, (USAF variant of the UH-60 Black Hawk) is well understood and on a regular maintenance schedule like you talk about. However, the USAF contract didn't require Sikorsky to hand over tech data and, instead of purchasing it, the USAF program office essentially reverse engineered a large portion of it. Go to the JSTARS, the maintenance is almost entirely done by NG (which also bit them, they fucked up the work on one and caused it to be grounded overseas after the issue caused a fuel tank rupture during midair refueling). There's also been a rush during Iraq & Afghanistan to push out small-run proprietary systems into the field for specific purposes, which also creates complications. Even if permitted, many of these systems end up being unmaintainable in the field due to the lack of maintenance tech data since it isn't required by the contract and lack of experience with the systems due to their relative novelty.
    • daniel-thompson 5y ago
      Makes sense.
  • metaphor 5y ago
    With respect to aviation, the O-level maintenance activity you would have encountered is largely unapplicable here. You'd have to step into the depot bowels of e.g. Corpus Christi, Tobyhanna, etc. to get a feel for the real behind-the-scenes clusterfuck.
  • mcguire 5y ago
    How much of that work is repair of existing components versus wholesale replacement of larger assemblies?
• lostlogin 5y ago
  > If people understood how much money we actually waste on defense contracts they'd be in awe. Yes, but would they be surprised? Does anyone argue that the money is spent efficiently or effectively?
• tomohawk 5y ago
  The military is specifying this behavior in the contract. If they want spares, training, field replaceable units, or support techs stationed in the field, they need to put that in the contract.
  • 123pie123 5y ago
    That's what I first thought of when I read it, someone has not writen a good contract. The contract could even be constructed to penalise the suplier, eg if the army doesn't have the capacity to fix the issue, the supplier has to pay for the technician to go out immediatly and with in a time frame - this isn't very hard to do
• hughrr 5y ago
  The reason they don’t allow repair as such is twofold: competence and liability. Both increase the risk of the equipment malfunctioning in the field. This leads to dead people fairly quickly. Repair is one of those things where the Dunning–Kruger effect is very real. Source: the guy who used to work at the contractor doing the repair or disposal evaluation of things which had been attempted to be repaired.
  • metaphor 5y ago
    The underlying issues are far more nuanced than that. In fact, it has little (if any) to do with manual labor competence and/or liability risk; if you can be trained then you can be summarily replaced, and the risk is hardly a support contractor's prerogative to assume. The root cause of these issues (as I see it) is almost entirely traceable to tech data availability/quality, commercial influence on DFARS data rights language, and the acquisition games being played (of which the general public only every catches superficial wind surrounding ACAT I programs).
• worik 5y ago
  A lot of comments here essentially about how it is all too complex, specialist contractors are needed, soldiers cannot do it. Perhaps design criteria should include failure modes that can be corrected (faults can be fixed) in the field. The defence contractors are piling complexity on complexity. Still the Taliban won, the USA Army lost.
• vfclists 5y ago
  Sorry to break this to you soldiers. To the military industrial complex you are not soldiers. You are simply logistics and weapons sales accessories. I know it is tough to hear this, but most of you already know this.
• JoeAltmaier 5y ago
  It seems like this could be really risky, what with sophisticated equipment in the field being unready at time of crisis. I doubt it though. I recall from "Best damn ship in the Navy", a chapter about how the navy had satellite communications on every modern ship. But still used the old communications system anyway because until everybody was trained on the new one, nobody wanted to use it. And nobody wanted to go first. (So in the Mediterranean this guy's ship sent their communications officer to each other ship in the area and trained them, but that's another story). My son was in Iraq and relates that all the night vision and fancy portable display devices and whatnot got left in the barracks. For whatever reason, they just used radios and guns like they always had. It's one thing for the military to fund and buy all the latest technology. But somebody on the ground has to give a flip, and get it trained and deployed effectively. Until then, it's irrelevant.
• s1artibartfast 5y ago
  This isn't a right to repair issue, it is a purchasing specification and policy issue. The DOD can and does specify what has to be field repairable by soldiers by design, documentation, and spare parts. The fact is that they made a policy choice that they don't want this.
  • IX-103 5y ago
    Exactly. Purchasing is a mess, and it is impossible to get improvements that don't increase numbers on a PowerPoint slide somewhere funded.
• science4sail 5y ago
  This feels like something out of Warhammer 40k. The troops aren't allowed to repair their equipment, they need to call in a techpriest^H contractor. 40k started off as a satire of 1980s British culture, but somehow reality ended up matching fiction.
• mtnGoat 5y ago
  i know a guy who works as a contractor to do helo repairs in afghan, iraq, etc for the USGov, he makes BACON! ya'll thought tech salaries were good.
• thrwaway753951 5y ago
  Used to work in a intelligence agency, and we regularly had the usual suspects of defense contractors working for us. I can't really say anything specific, but I can tell you this - the projects were itemized down to almost every line of code. We once had a contractor tech/engineer fix some extremely trivial bug on the spot, which was not part of his support tickers - it was a one-liner. Guy got chewed out back home, flown out again, reverse the fix, and flown back again. 6 months later he came back, applied the same fix, and everything was peachy. His previous sin was doing something for free.
• mlindner 5y ago
  Why is hacker news doing more advertising for a Youtube personality?
• Aeolun 5y ago
  I have literally never heard a success story of a company/organization outsourcing their core capabilities to presumably save money. Never. I don’t understand why all of management still thinks it’s a great idea? Maybe it’s actually working well for them personally and making them boatloads of money?
  • AnimalMuppet 5y ago
    It's working for managers because in the beginning, it makes the quarterly numbers look good. They've got some MBOs or something, and they delivered, and they get a nice bonus or a raise or both. And the stock goes up, and they probably have some options. So, yeah, they make money. The bill comes later, and it comes to other people.
  • _carbyau_ 5y ago
    I spent 10 years in a public service. In that time, management centralised all IT support into one office to save money. The next set of management - to fix claims of insufficient customer service - split IT out and embedded them into the various departments again. When I left, management was looking to centralise again... So. Much. Bullshit.
    • baud147258 5y ago
      I heard similar stories for private companies too...
• Johnny555 5y ago
  I used to work for a defense contractor in the late 80's, and my job was to build "spares kits" for our products -- every component in the system had one or more spares that were packaged up and sent along with the equipment so it could be repaired in the field. I assumed all military procurements still worked this way, with enough spares and/or documentation to do field repairs. Though this product was relatively easy to repair, it was mostly discrete circuit boards plugged into a backplane. Most of the components were socketed and could be easily replaced if needed.
• riazrizvi 5y ago
  I wonder if institutionalized corruption in the Chinese military is the same, worse or better. If they are not paying $600 to replace 20 cent bolts, we are heading towards a massive shift in military power, because their military spending has surged since 2016 and they are now spending almost as much on defense as the US.
• Proven 5y ago
  They aren't blocked, they are merely told that DIY repairs would void their warranty and/or support agreement. Which makes sense. If that's what they agreed to in the contact, what is there to complain about?
• aeoleonn 5y ago
  These defense companies have captured the US Government's congress, congressional budget, & military branches. It's as simple as that. Military Industrial Complex, Banking, Energy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lobbying https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lobbying https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture