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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

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.

nradov 5y ago
If you do component level repair on a circuit board would it be more likely to fail later in combat than if you just replaced the whole board?
- toast0 5y ago
  It depends on a lot of things. If the root cause for the failure was poor factory soldering, a new board will likely fail in the same way after similar use where as a field repair may solve the issue. There are plenty of other root causes where many components were overstressed and replacing them all with a new board would result in less downtime than replacing components as they fail, too. Of course, sometimes you can do well with replace this group of components anytime any one of them fails. Also, availability of full boards and availability of individual components makea a difference.
- penagwin 5y ago
  It depends so much on what it is, a simple single component swap seems unlikely to cause issues. Sure I understand that a full diagnosis/repair of say a water damaged board I might not trust, but if it's just a port or a capacitor then it seems unlikely to cause massive issues if the person has any EE background whatsoever.
- Li7h 5y ago
  Possibly, but the component level repair could be a good triage solution while awaiting that replacement board. Not a soldier, but I imagine in warzones and combat areas a good enough solution that works now is more important than awaiting the "right" solution that takes 3 days. >When I was in Iraq (08-09), we had a juniper firewall go down, didn't have another on back up, and they had to fly a contractor out from the states to Iraq, to change it out. Took 10 minutes to diagnose the problem, and 3 days of waiting, and 15 minutes to install it. We lost feed to the predator drones in the area, phone, internet, coms, and several other mission critical things for 3 days.... a real s** show.
  - Meph504 5y ago
    This is highly unlikely, Firstly military comms equipment and drones use their own proprietary comms equipment The coms equipment is typically a combination of (AM/FM/TacSat) it wouldn't be running through a firewall that handles phone and internet (which is almost always handled by a separate contractor even in 08) I'm not going to say it didn't happen, because its the military, but that is super uncommon, and against so much info sec, it just doesn't stand to reason.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- noxer 5y ago
  Often stuff has to be repaired for training and its not equipment that would ever be used in combat. It would not be an issue if it fails again in fact it would be useful for training if it does. You dont have to simulate failure and people learn if their repair is actually lasting. I did train soldier on technical equipment (not in the US) and we would have broken or known unreliable parts given out so they learn how to find it. Also we had no authorization to repair most stuff and sometimes it was hard to keep broken parts to use the for training because these parts where scheduled for maintenance witch would mean the manufacturer of the part would replace it and turning the perfectly "good" part for training into e-waste. It's the classic problem in hierarchical structure. The top just never gets what the people at The bottom really want and need. They cant warp their head around why a broken part could be of more value than having 100% of the replacement parts functional all the time.
- mcguire 5y ago
  In a combat situation, having a thing down now may be worse than an increased likelihood to fail later. You can always order a replacement, but what are you going to do in the mean time?
- rasz 5y ago
  Oh, the sweet innocence of someone who never looked inside electronics around him. Probably 1/10 of the products you ever owned shipped with some kind of factory bodge or went thru rework at the factory. That includes silly things like alarm clocks, VCR/DVD players, but especially expensive ($xx-xxxK) scientific equipment, airplane avionics, industrial control and medical devices.
  - derefr 5y ago
    1960s mainframes were “field serviced” for processor errata by going out to every installation and hand-soldering some pre-planned bodge wires onto the boards, according to very detailed patch schematics. And their backplanes were breadboards!
    - derefr 5y ago
      For anyone who wants to see what I'm talking about, here (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mBssIIRGkOw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mBssIIRGkOw) is a good video of a 1970s minicomputer (which is not a mainframe, yes, but generally built and maintained by the same vendors with the same repair strategies) being disassembled/reassembled. You can see plenty of bodge wires! You can also see the 1970s evolution of the "breadboard blackplane" into "pseudo-ball-grid-array backplane, with arbitrary collections of bodge wires loosely mated to it via hand-crimped proto-Molex connectors." (The only difference in practice being that you could now plug/unplug a "group" of wires, rather than one at a time. There was still no screen-printed indication of where on the BGA grid to re-attach anything, since the grid wasn't customized to its purpose, but rather was still fundamentally a "generic routing board" in the same vein as a breadboard.)
- Meph504 5y ago
  Much of the communications equipment have complex counter measures built in, and sometimes just really simplistic ones that if you say open the case without unscrewing the screws in the right order, they are designed to fry themselves to prevent tampering. This isn't something you really want to try to do in 120 degree heat, hanging out the side of a vehicle in a very sandy environment.
  - CamperBob2 5y ago
    Historically, "frying themselves" was also meant in a very literal sense, with thermite or explosive charges. Every so often, something would make it into the post-WWII surplus market with anti-tampering countermeasures still intact. Hilarity seldom ensued.
AndrewKemendo 5y ago
As I said, there are exceptions. However the general principle at the Force Management level is as I describe it so the incentives for the decisionmakers are built around that, not the exceptions. I will say though that it has changed a lot since I was active duty - better and worse. It's getting better for software and worse for hardware.
Meph504 5y ago
When I was in the army I use to rail against contractors all the time, until I got transferred to a maint. center for communications equipment. The equipment you get there is usually the result of a failed attempts by trained personal to fix things, but were trying do it in the field, without the proper reference materials, equipment, or parts. There units were issued all of these, but after several deployments, books get lost or destroyed, tools walk, etc... Half the times the equipment was fried by its own protection systems being tripped because it wasn't dissembled correctly, making the issue they wanted to fix a moot point. So some PFC just destroyed a $40,000 system because a Capt. was up his ass about fixing it right now, he has no ability to push back, nothing that can be done but to follow the order to the best of his abilities. If he destroys it, well if the capt. is a dick, he gets written up, and charged for it. If not, the equipment is still fried, and has to be replaced. With a contractor, they are outside the chain of command, and can tell the capt. to pound sand, and tell them the equipment will need to be shipped and fixed properly. And reminds the capt. that there are several dummy switches that without the right tools, and training, the equipment will fry itself, and if this is discovered to be the case, the indecent will be turned over to CID (army detectives) for investigation and that he should make arrangements to source a replacement from supply ASAP. Seeing the straight don't give a fuck of these guys could exercises, in relation to what is best for the equipment and not the commands ego was amazing, and made total sense why on the high end equipment this method was used.
- worik 5y ago
  That is interesting. Surely there is a middle way? This is a classic throwing the baby out with bathwater.
  - vkou 5y ago
    The middle way is have fixed-cost civilian contractors for 'standard' maintenance, and contractors that bill by the hour for fixing fuck-ups caused by field repairs. You still have the issue of middle-managers in the armed forces asking enlisted men to do stupid things, that end up wrecking equipment, but the only way to fix that is for better accountability within the command structure. Good luck with that, since the lack of accountability shields the only people who have the power to fix it. [1] [1] See this outline of the fatal collision of the USS Fitzgerald for an example of how well accountability for stupid orders works in the US Armed Forces - https://features.propublica.org/navy-accidents/uss-fitzgerald-destroyer-crash-crystal/ https://features.propublica.org/navy-accidents/uss-fitzgeral... [2] [2] The long and short of it is that someone above you tells you what to do, and if you can't do it, you get canned. So you do it, but you cut corners. If those cut corners cause a disaster, it'll be your ass on the line.
InvaderFizz 5y ago
The Army phased out soldering for Satellite techs in late 2002. I was one of the first cohorts to go through the schoolhouse without soldering being one of the classes. We still did component level isolation, but only for the purpose of "pluck and chuck"ing bad boards. On the other side of the coin, I was one of those contractors in Afghanistan (2011-2013). I specifically co-developed an in-depth intensive five day course for all designated terminal operators. We didn't care what your background or experience was, we took everything from truck drivers to satcom techs through the same course. Taught the basics of RF theory, signal flow, troubleshooting, fault isolation, operations, and maintenance. Only the first two days were PowerPoint heavy(with very few words on the slides, mostly picture to relate concepts). After that, it was three days of hands on doing setup, tear down, and fault isolation. We would break all kinds of things, and they would repair it. All the problems we presented to them were real life issues that had been observed in the field. The high point of that work was when one of the satcom techs came up to me after the course and said that they had learned more from me in a week than in six months at the schoolhouse. As much support as we gave the folks we were there to help, it was all organic knowledge gained through experience. The satellite dish controller was a black box that we, as technicians had to reverse engineer because the company would not provide us with schematics. This was made worse by there being at least four hardware revisions (despite the company saying there were only two) with only some parts compatible across revisions. The reason for not providing schematics? They feared one of us would clone it and sell it to the Army for cheaper, since it was the only custom piece of hardware in the entire system.
- metaphor 5y ago
  > This was made worse by there being at least four hardware revisions (despite the company saying there were only two) with only some parts compatible across revisions. To be completely honest, this sounds like a classic case of conflating hardware revision and configuration as it pertains to a managed configuration item. That you didn't have access to approved internal schematics, and technical knowledge of the black box was constrained to a defined external interface boundary prior to independent reverse engineering efforts is certainly consistent with that. Class II ECPs consistent with MIL-HDBK-61/SAE EIA-649-1 and the system's documented objective maintenance plan are a thing. Surely the SMR code of this controller (more specifically, its maintenance repair and recoverability disposition indices as specified by AR 700-82 [1] that logistics activity would have assigned it) in the context of reported anecdote would be sufficient to infer an interesting story. I certainly don't doubt that you encountered 4 different harware revisions, but it strikes me as much more likely that the maintenance plan for said system never intended internal hardware abstraction layers to be serviced by activity at your level, instead structured to be independently managed by contract activity driven by performance-based logistics incentives with the objective of ensuring that, from a black box behavioral perspective, what they reindoctrinated back into the supply system is tested to be operationally indistinguishable ("form, fit, function" as it were) and thus compliant with overarching performance specifications when integrated at the next higher assembly level. [1] https://armypubs.army.mil/epubs/DR_pubs/DR_a/ARN30303-AR_700-82-000-WEB-1.pdf https://armypubs.army.mil/epubs/DR_pubs/DR_a/ARN30303-AR_700...
stephen_g 5y ago
A big part of the problem is the massive (almost exponential) increase in the complexity of the equipment over just the last few decades. And software. So much that used to be achieved with discreet parts has moved into microcontrollers, FPGAs, etc. which even if the customer had the bitfiles/firmware for, often after loading that (which might require special equipment), it then often requires configuration and calibration etc. that is very specialised (and might even need external equipment...). The amount of training required to get to that point is just massive. It would take us six months of having field techs putting units together and working with the more experienced guys to work through problems with systems in the factory before they could manage going out to the field to do basic tasks. But even then, the systems were so software-based that eight out of ten times they'd need support from the software team to diagnose and fix the problems... As a systems architect (this was in SATCOM, small specialist vendor, mostly selling to Navies), I tried to push in the direction of designing the systems to have a small number of interoperable LRUs (line-replaceable units) that the customer could keep spares of and change themselves, then ship back to us for refurbishment, as well as redundancy so the system could keep working when one of a type of unit had failed (for when it was mission-critical). I think it's a pretty good middle ground. But the problem of course is vendor lock-in where the manufacturer screws them by making replacements extremely expensive. There's not enough recourse against the big companies doing that (like banning them from other acquisition programs). Too much lobbying, back-scratching, revolving doors between military and industry goes on for that I guess...

nradov 5y ago

If you do component level repair on a circuit board would it be more likely to fail later in combat than if you just replaced the whole board?

toast0 5y ago
It depends on a lot of things. If the root cause for the failure was poor factory soldering, a new board will likely fail in the same way after similar use where as a field repair may solve the issue. There are plenty of other root causes where many components were overstressed and replacing them all with a new board would result in less downtime than replacing components as they fail, too. Of course, sometimes you can do well with replace this group of components anytime any one of them fails. Also, availability of full boards and availability of individual components makea a difference.
penagwin 5y ago
It depends so much on what it is, a simple single component swap seems unlikely to cause issues. Sure I understand that a full diagnosis/repair of say a water damaged board I might not trust, but if it's just a port or a capacitor then it seems unlikely to cause massive issues if the person has any EE background whatsoever.
Li7h 5y ago
Possibly, but the component level repair could be a good triage solution while awaiting that replacement board. Not a soldier, but I imagine in warzones and combat areas a good enough solution that works now is more important than awaiting the "right" solution that takes 3 days. >When I was in Iraq (08-09), we had a juniper firewall go down, didn't have another on back up, and they had to fly a contractor out from the states to Iraq, to change it out. Took 10 minutes to diagnose the problem, and 3 days of waiting, and 15 minutes to install it. We lost feed to the predator drones in the area, phone, internet, coms, and several other mission critical things for 3 days.... a real s** show.
- Meph504 5y ago
  This is highly unlikely, Firstly military comms equipment and drones use their own proprietary comms equipment The coms equipment is typically a combination of (AM/FM/TacSat) it wouldn't be running through a firewall that handles phone and internet (which is almost always handled by a separate contractor even in 08) I'm not going to say it didn't happen, because its the military, but that is super uncommon, and against so much info sec, it just doesn't stand to reason.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
noxer 5y ago
Often stuff has to be repaired for training and its not equipment that would ever be used in combat. It would not be an issue if it fails again in fact it would be useful for training if it does. You dont have to simulate failure and people learn if their repair is actually lasting. I did train soldier on technical equipment (not in the US) and we would have broken or known unreliable parts given out so they learn how to find it. Also we had no authorization to repair most stuff and sometimes it was hard to keep broken parts to use the for training because these parts where scheduled for maintenance witch would mean the manufacturer of the part would replace it and turning the perfectly "good" part for training into e-waste. It's the classic problem in hierarchical structure. The top just never gets what the people at The bottom really want and need. They cant warp their head around why a broken part could be of more value than having 100% of the replacement parts functional all the time.
mcguire 5y ago
In a combat situation, having a thing down now may be worse than an increased likelihood to fail later. You can always order a replacement, but what are you going to do in the mean time?
rasz 5y ago
Oh, the sweet innocence of someone who never looked inside electronics around him. Probably 1/10 of the products you ever owned shipped with some kind of factory bodge or went thru rework at the factory. That includes silly things like alarm clocks, VCR/DVD players, but especially expensive ($xx-xxxK) scientific equipment, airplane avionics, industrial control and medical devices.
- derefr 5y ago
  1960s mainframes were “field serviced” for processor errata by going out to every installation and hand-soldering some pre-planned bodge wires onto the boards, according to very detailed patch schematics. And their backplanes were breadboards!
  - derefr 5y ago
    For anyone who wants to see what I'm talking about, here (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mBssIIRGkOw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mBssIIRGkOw) is a good video of a 1970s minicomputer (which is not a mainframe, yes, but generally built and maintained by the same vendors with the same repair strategies) being disassembled/reassembled. You can see plenty of bodge wires! You can also see the 1970s evolution of the "breadboard blackplane" into "pseudo-ball-grid-array backplane, with arbitrary collections of bodge wires loosely mated to it via hand-crimped proto-Molex connectors." (The only difference in practice being that you could now plug/unplug a "group" of wires, rather than one at a time. There was still no screen-printed indication of where on the BGA grid to re-attach anything, since the grid wasn't customized to its purpose, but rather was still fundamentally a "generic routing board" in the same vein as a breadboard.)
Meph504 5y ago
Much of the communications equipment have complex counter measures built in, and sometimes just really simplistic ones that if you say open the case without unscrewing the screws in the right order, they are designed to fry themselves to prevent tampering. This isn't something you really want to try to do in 120 degree heat, hanging out the side of a vehicle in a very sandy environment.
- CamperBob2 5y ago
  Historically, "frying themselves" was also meant in a very literal sense, with thermite or explosive charges. Every so often, something would make it into the post-WWII surplus market with anti-tampering countermeasures still intact. Hilarity seldom ensued.

AndrewKemendo 5y ago

As I said, there are exceptions. However the general principle at the Force Management level is as I describe it so the incentives for the decisionmakers are built around that, not the exceptions. I will say though that it has changed a lot since I was active duty - better and worse. It's getting better for software and worse for hardware.

Meph504 5y ago

When I was in the army I use to rail against contractors all the time, until I got transferred to a maint. center for communications equipment. The equipment you get there is usually the result of a failed attempts by trained personal to fix things, but were trying do it in the field, without the proper reference materials, equipment, or parts. There units were issued all of these, but after several deployments, books get lost or destroyed, tools walk, etc... Half the times the equipment was fried by its own protection systems being tripped because it wasn't dissembled correctly, making the issue they wanted to fix a moot point. So some PFC just destroyed a $40,000 system because a Capt. was up his ass about fixing it right now, he has no ability to push back, nothing that can be done but to follow the order to the best of his abilities. If he destroys it, well if the capt. is a dick, he gets written up, and charged for it. If not, the equipment is still fried, and has to be replaced. With a contractor, they are outside the chain of command, and can tell the capt. to pound sand, and tell them the equipment will need to be shipped and fixed properly. And reminds the capt. that there are several dummy switches that without the right tools, and training, the equipment will fry itself, and if this is discovered to be the case, the indecent will be turned over to CID (army detectives) for investigation and that he should make arrangements to source a replacement from supply ASAP. Seeing the straight don't give a fuck of these guys could exercises, in relation to what is best for the equipment and not the commands ego was amazing, and made total sense why on the high end equipment this method was used.

worik 5y ago
That is interesting. Surely there is a middle way? This is a classic throwing the baby out with bathwater.
- vkou 5y ago
  The middle way is have fixed-cost civilian contractors for 'standard' maintenance, and contractors that bill by the hour for fixing fuck-ups caused by field repairs. You still have the issue of middle-managers in the armed forces asking enlisted men to do stupid things, that end up wrecking equipment, but the only way to fix that is for better accountability within the command structure. Good luck with that, since the lack of accountability shields the only people who have the power to fix it. [1] [1] See this outline of the fatal collision of the USS Fitzgerald for an example of how well accountability for stupid orders works in the US Armed Forces - https://features.propublica.org/navy-accidents/uss-fitzgerald-destroyer-crash-crystal/ https://features.propublica.org/navy-accidents/uss-fitzgeral... [2] [2] The long and short of it is that someone above you tells you what to do, and if you can't do it, you get canned. So you do it, but you cut corners. If those cut corners cause a disaster, it'll be your ass on the line.

InvaderFizz 5y ago

The Army phased out soldering for Satellite techs in late 2002. I was one of the first cohorts to go through the schoolhouse without soldering being one of the classes. We still did component level isolation, but only for the purpose of "pluck and chuck"ing bad boards. On the other side of the coin, I was one of those contractors in Afghanistan (2011-2013). I specifically co-developed an in-depth intensive five day course for all designated terminal operators. We didn't care what your background or experience was, we took everything from truck drivers to satcom techs through the same course. Taught the basics of RF theory, signal flow, troubleshooting, fault isolation, operations, and maintenance. Only the first two days were PowerPoint heavy(with very few words on the slides, mostly picture to relate concepts). After that, it was three days of hands on doing setup, tear down, and fault isolation. We would break all kinds of things, and they would repair it. All the problems we presented to them were real life issues that had been observed in the field. The high point of that work was when one of the satcom techs came up to me after the course and said that they had learned more from me in a week than in six months at the schoolhouse. As much support as we gave the folks we were there to help, it was all organic knowledge gained through experience. The satellite dish controller was a black box that we, as technicians had to reverse engineer because the company would not provide us with schematics. This was made worse by there being at least four hardware revisions (despite the company saying there were only two) with only some parts compatible across revisions. The reason for not providing schematics? They feared one of us would clone it and sell it to the Army for cheaper, since it was the only custom piece of hardware in the entire system.

metaphor 5y ago
> This was made worse by there being at least four hardware revisions (despite the company saying there were only two) with only some parts compatible across revisions. To be completely honest, this sounds like a classic case of conflating hardware revision and configuration as it pertains to a managed configuration item. That you didn't have access to approved internal schematics, and technical knowledge of the black box was constrained to a defined external interface boundary prior to independent reverse engineering efforts is certainly consistent with that. Class II ECPs consistent with MIL-HDBK-61/SAE EIA-649-1 and the system's documented objective maintenance plan are a thing. Surely the SMR code of this controller (more specifically, its maintenance repair and recoverability disposition indices as specified by AR 700-82 [1] that logistics activity would have assigned it) in the context of reported anecdote would be sufficient to infer an interesting story. I certainly don't doubt that you encountered 4 different harware revisions, but it strikes me as much more likely that the maintenance plan for said system never intended internal hardware abstraction layers to be serviced by activity at your level, instead structured to be independently managed by contract activity driven by performance-based logistics incentives with the objective of ensuring that, from a black box behavioral perspective, what they reindoctrinated back into the supply system is tested to be operationally indistinguishable ("form, fit, function" as it were) and thus compliant with overarching performance specifications when integrated at the next higher assembly level. [1] https://armypubs.army.mil/epubs/DR_pubs/DR_a/ARN30303-AR_700-82-000-WEB-1.pdf https://armypubs.army.mil/epubs/DR_pubs/DR_a/ARN30303-AR_700...

stephen_g 5y ago

A big part of the problem is the massive (almost exponential) increase in the complexity of the equipment over just the last few decades. And software. So much that used to be achieved with discreet parts has moved into microcontrollers, FPGAs, etc. which even if the customer had the bitfiles/firmware for, often after loading that (which might require special equipment), it then often requires configuration and calibration etc. that is very specialised (and might even need external equipment...). The amount of training required to get to that point is just massive. It would take us six months of having field techs putting units together and working with the more experienced guys to work through problems with systems in the factory before they could manage going out to the field to do basic tasks. But even then, the systems were so software-based that eight out of ten times they'd need support from the software team to diagnose and fix the problems... As a systems architect (this was in SATCOM, small specialist vendor, mostly selling to Navies), I tried to push in the direction of designing the systems to have a small number of interoperable LRUs (line-replaceable units) that the customer could keep spares of and change themselves, then ship back to us for refurbishment, as well as redundancy so the system could keep working when one of a type of unit had failed (for when it was mission-critical). I think it's a pretty good middle ground. But the problem of course is vendor lock-in where the manufacturer screws them by making replacements extremely expensive. There's not enough recourse against the big companies doing that (like banning them from other acquisition programs). Too much lobbying, back-scratching, revolving doors between military and industry goes on for that I guess...