7 ms·

Companies Lobby Against Giving the Military the Right to Repair

234 points by worik 2y ago

On13 2y ago
[flagged]
robwwilliams 2y ago
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.
- passwordoops 2y ago
  Lock-in on service should never be acceptable under any circumstances, war, peace, military, civilian
  - crest 2y ago
    Lock-on instead of lock-in?
    - blooalien 2y ago
      Pretty sure they mean what they said. "Lock-in" in this context typically refers to "vendor lock-in" which is a common practice among unethical corporations selling products or services. They will often use underhanded tactics and "dark patterns" to psychologically or physically (through hardware means) to lock an "end user" into the forced usage of that vendor's product, while making it as painful / inconvenient as possible to switch to any possible competitor.
jmclnx 2y ago
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.
- darth_avocado 2y ago
  > like a Camel in a desert at an oasis Well the camels stop after 30ish gallons. Military Vendors lap up Gov. money like a blackhole laps up pretty much everything in it's vicinity.
  - blooalien 2y ago
    > ... "like a blackhole laps up pretty much everything in it's vicinity." That right there might be just about the most accurate analogy for unchecked greed I've read in quite a long while.
  - dgfitz 2y ago
    I can fix this for you with a sed s/Military// Military vendors are why the government is a bad steward of money, that explains everything! /s
- floxy 2y ago
  >Without that money, the US economy would collapse over night. But that money would just get spent by other government agencies, or the taxpayers, right? And if the military vendors aren't efficiently using that money, then society would end up better off if they (the military vendors) weren't spending it.
  - janalsncm 2y ago
    Depends on how the money was disseminated. Money only goes into the economy if it’s spent. If you give 1 person 2x as much money they don’t buy 2x as many cars, pairs of shoes, and iPhones. Wealthy people tend to save their money.
  - dgfitz 2y ago
    Imagine if Boeing, Northrop, Lockheed, Raytheon, general Dynamics (I could keep going) all shut down. Ignoring the what, million+ people out of jobs, the second and 3rd order effects would be astronomical. Vendors of contractors, vendors of vendors of contractors, internationally, all lose their revenue streams. There would be no time to recover. Phase it out over 10 years, I mean maybe then it wouldn’t be a complete collapse, but fuck would It be ugly. Oh and at year like… 8, the USA gets okie-doke’d and in 3 generations everyone is speaking !english.
mc32 2y ago
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.
- dismalpedigree 2y ago
  No need to imagine. It happens. There are plenty of stories from GWOT where field reps evaced to Dubai while the parent company negotiated new terms. Its a complete disgrace.
jauntywundrkind 2y ago
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-littoral-combat-ship 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.
- georgeplusplus 2y ago
  >>>> that unregulated capitalism tries to steer humanity into. What part of this economy seems unregulated to you? What a ridiculous notion talking about military contracts no less. You couldn’t be more far off from finding the source of problem then just mindlessly throwing in a dig at capitalism, the way the government awards contract is anything but competitive or capitalistic
djaouen 2y ago
The CEOs proposing such ideas should be locked up as traitors lol
- ansmithz42 2y ago
  Nah! I think the CEOs should be the first ones sent into the combat front line zones.
  - blooalien 2y ago
    > "Nah! I think the CEOs should be the first ones sent into the combat front line zones." At least then they'd be able to (somewhat) justify their insane "pay packages", "golden parachute" and "bonuses". CEO: "I risked my life for that money!"
- ravenstine 2y ago
  I didn't expect someone else to say this, but that is my first thought. If I became supreme leader overnight, I would place a lot of people behind bars, and these guys would be among the first. It's pretty outrageous how much society tolerates the leadership class.
  - blooalien 2y ago
    I vote ravenstine for "Supreme Overlord of Earth" 2024! (Be awfully hard to really do much worse than the "leaders" we've currently got in charge or on offer to choose from, yeah?)
    - shiroiushi 2y ago
      Whoever s/he is, ravenstine couldn't possibly be worse than the world's current crop of leaders. It's not a bad idea; perhaps just make it a limited 5-year (or 10-year, or whatever) term, so that if the power goes to his/her head, the damage will be limited.
      - 2y ago
jprd 2y ago
Eisenhower warned us about this kind of eventuality, and I personally never thought it could ever get this far. Outrageous.
- krapp 2y ago
  If you're referring to the military industrial complex, I don't think this is what Eisenhower was warning about.
  - worik 2y ago
    > If you're referring to the military industrial complex, I don't think this is what Eisenhower was warning about. The opposition to the "right to repair" is coming from the "military industrial complex" That complex is the nexus of industrial players who have become to feel entitled to anything they want That is what they are doing with the opposition to "right to repair" and that is what, in general terms (he was predicting the future - cut him some slack) Eisenhower was warning about.
    - taejo 2y ago
      The military-industrial complex is a complex of the interactions between the military and the industry that supplies it, not just the latter. It's the industry side of the complex that is opposing it, the military is asking for it.
    - kiba 2y ago
      It is just business in general that opposes the "right to repair" . Military contractors are not exception to the rule and there's no need to single them out specifically. We have a business culture that unhealthily prioritize short term profit at the expenses of product excellence and stakeholders.
  - plussed_reader 2y ago
    An easy litmus test if a company is part of the complex is whether they're a defense contractor or not. The companies in TFA don't pass this smell test.
blahyawnblah 2y ago
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?
- psunavy03 2y ago
  Contractor tech reps have been doing this already since the Cold War.
- istultus 2y ago
  Nice, you've found a pathway to hiring more veterans
- ptero 2y ago
  That's what companies already do, charging the government a pretty penny for being in theater.
- bityard 2y ago
  It's not unheard of. The contractors are generally former military.
- Doches 2y ago
  Palantir has been doing exactly this for more than a decade...
- firesteelrain 2y ago
  Yes, we had them in Iraq helping us.
- Rebelgecko 2y ago
  Yes, and they'll be well paid for it
trhway 2y ago
[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.
- worik 2y ago
  > In general the modern weaponry is very complicated No It is bad design As another commenter commented the ability to repair in the field, in adverse conditions, should be a design criterion.
  - trhway 2y ago
    The way things go there would be almost no people in the field, just drones of all kinds and occasional stormtrooper teams in extremely expensive stealth cloaks. Basically no human would be able to exist in the environment with several thousand drones per kilometer. And I don’t think much of these drones are going to be repaired , more like smartphones - nobody repairs them. By the way, extremely important part, becoming even bigger and more important - the massive scale battlefield data intelligence gathering, including from all those drones, processing and targeting is done in Ukraine by Palantir in major part by their people deployed there. There is no real right-to-repair or ability to repair in the field when it comes to such software (or to communication networks like Starlink). With that background it is really small peanuts, which will take all the attention away from important things, whether soldiers can replace on their own an RFID-ed DRM-ed valve in the howitzer blowback hydraulics.
a3n 2y ago
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.
- WillAdams 2y ago
  Admiral Rickover's solution for the U.S. Navy submarine program was to write into the contract having company executives on the boat for its first dive.
  - mrguyorama 2y ago
    All that means is that you buy stuff from people who cannot properly assess risk and everyone dies from stupid, predictable, known issues, like with OceanGate. What ACTUALLY fixed the submarine program was SUBSAFE, a quality assurance program that mostly generates paperwork and instructs you to check things over and over.
    - WillAdams 2y ago
      My understanding was that SUBSAFE was put in place first, but executives insisted on just pencil-whipping the requirements --- until the requirement that they went down on the first dive was put in place --- at that point things were taken a bit more seriously.
jabroni_salad 2y ago
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.
- lotsofpulp 2y ago
  I bet they cannot macgyver it if it’s software locked.
  - fragmede 2y ago
    because they can't run Ida pro and hack it?
    - aleph_minus_one 2y ago
      There exists Ghidra ... :-)
      - plussed_reader 2y ago
        And the years of prep work to be able to run the software effectively.....?
        transpute 2y ago
        Call bored reverser colleague who helped test Ghidra.
        plussed_reader 2y ago
        Where do I get one of those in a public Edu?
benreesman 2y ago
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.
- autoexec 2y ago
  It's very much in character for her. She's been supportive of consumer rights and protections for long time. She's got a long history of being anti-DRM and pro-right to repair.
- DoctorOetker 2y ago
  For those who believe in the politics circus, wouldn't this be a much better female president candidate compared to Hillary Clinton (first declare independence from Britain then go back to kings and queens?), or Kamala Harris?
  - CRConrad 2y ago
    How would electing Hillary Clinton have been "go[ing] back to kings and queens"? If it was because she's married to former president Bill, didn't you already "go back to kings and queens" when Bush Junior was elected?
    - benreesman 2y ago
      I suspect the parent is referring to a distressing trend of mean reversion: we’re really running the motor on all cylinders to elect people to high office based on what family they hail from, a phenomenon that dates at least as far back as 2000 (and there were the Kennedy family, and before that…). It has precedent for about 10 thousand years before that, but we were moving in the right direction on it and we’ve reversed course.
      - CRConrad 2y ago
        Yeah, I also suspect(ed) it's something like that. But then it's pretty weird of Dr Chemicals-as-food to single out Mrs Clinton like he did. The Bushes are a much more blatant example.
squarefoot 2y ago
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.
- akira2501 2y ago
  "We're sorry this Lithium Hydroxide canister does not appear to be genuine or has been refilled. Please contact Boeing for assistance and to order genuine parts." As an aside one of the things I love about old school military equipment is the "battle short." It effectively disables all the safety equipment and limit switches and allows the device to run even though the device believes it should not. There's an extra measure of confidence you get just from seeing that option available to you. "No, damnit, RUN!" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battleshort https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battleshort
  - pcdoodle 2y ago
    This is why I miss Visual Basic 6: On Error Resume Next
  - foobarbecue 2y ago
    Curiosity (the Mars rover) has a battleshort mode and when we use it there's a message that says "putting my battle shorts on." Never fails to crack me up.
  - tourmalinetaco 2y ago
    As an industrial technician I fear the worst (and yet it excites me).
- Brian_K_White 2y ago
  Ever since the first time I encountered HDCP I have had a little fantasy about the bridge screen on the Enterprise refusing to display anything because of an hdcp glitch. These days the imaginary recalcitrant screen isn't simply blank though, now there are ads which never fail. I was at a local gyro shop a few weeks ago and all their menu displays were showing Amazon ads over their menus. I gave up on humanity right then.
ryukoposting 2y ago
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."
- fransje26 2y ago
  > Hopefully this will serve as a "Eureka" moment for the powers that be in DC. And who do you think has been lining the pockets of said powers in DC, to get the military in that situation in the first place?
- noobermin 2y ago
  Many of the powers that be, particularly those with positions of influence in the DoD make their riches off exclusive contracts with the DoD with private companies they own or are invested in. Not to mention lawmakers themselves who invest in such contractors. The powers that be in DC are the problem, they don't want to fix it.
notinmykernel 2y ago
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.
- growthwtf 2y ago
  The Military is actually the ~5th biggest contributor to the current national deficit, behind social security, interest on the debt, and various health programs. The largest contributors to the debt over the last couple decades have been stimulus packages and tax cuts.
  - somenameforme 2y ago
    Interestingly, you're both right, but most people don't understand how government spending works. There's two main categories of spending - discretionary and mandatory. Discretionary spending is the budget submitted by Congress where they allocate money to various things. Mandatory spending is compulsory and done without a vote or manual appropriations. Things like social security, pensions, medicare, and so on are mandatory. Discretionary is military, education, housing, transportation, and so on. And, of this spending, military is, by far, the lion's share of it all. So each dollar spent on a bomb half-way around the world is one less dollar that could have been spent on e.g. education, infrastructure, or housing - which are predominantly discretionary. And notably, discretionary budgets are relatively small, contrasted against the overall budget. In 2024 the entire discretionary budget was "only" $1.8 trillion. So things like "just" a hundred billion might seem fairly small, but are in reality a substantial chunk of all our discretionary allocations. Then there's the military, which eats up nearly a trillion dollars of this spending. In 2024 it was $886 billion, which does not include the spending on various wars around the world.
    - joebob42 2y ago
      I think the naming on the split is a little disingenuous. It's "mandatory", but it's still just laws. I get that the funding is decided differently, and I'm not making any claim one way or the other regarding whether Medicare, ss, etc should be changed, but it isn't like there's some law of nature we can't adjust if we wanted.
ungreased0675 2y ago
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.
SideQuark 2y ago
"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.
- NegativeK 2y ago
  I assume that doesn't apply to source code? It seems somewhat absurd to suggest, but it's less absurd if a defense company provided binaries and then suddenly goes out of business.
  - M95D 2y ago
    Is it even possible for a defense contractor company to go out of business? Aren't they in the "too big to fail" category?
    - SideQuark 2y ago
      There's zillions of little defense contractors. I've dealt with many, many 2-man shops even (many of which failed). One of many ways this happens is they supply the prime contractors. Another way is through programs like SBIR, which has ~7500 to 10,000 awards per year to companies max size 500 (but most much smaller). https://ssti.org/blog/useful-stats-2020-sbirsttr-awards-state-and-agency https://ssti.org/blog/useful-stats-2020-sbirsttr-awards-stat... Any one of these companies may become a supplier. I worked ~20 yrs for a 50ish person company that was a supplier the entire time. As such, and doing SBIR pitches, I competed with many tiny firms, many of which were also suppliers. So yes, they can go out of business, from the 2-person shop to the 10,000+ person shop, just like any one else.
  - SideQuark 2y ago
    > I assume that doesn't apply to source code? Why assume that? ".... with no carve-outs or limitations to protect sensitive trade secret information" Seems like claiming source code to the device is private would be a carve out.
rqtwteye 2y ago
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?
- dotnet00 2y ago
  They get to extort more money at that time for "lost revenue" as the cost of allowing field repairs.
- hunter-gatherer 2y ago
  That's exactly the scheme for for defense contractors, actually. They'll happily send technicians to an austere environment to do maintenance for an extra fee. This has been going on for years, but it is just getting worse.
  - rqtwteye 2y ago
    That's not going to work in a real battle.
    - rapjr9 2y ago
      Right, so just make it a requirement that contract repairs have to be done in battle conditions and watch how quickly the contractors now want to allow right to repair. "Sorry, you've lost another repair person, please send two this time in case one gets blown up."
WatchDog 2y ago
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?
- zdragnar 2y ago
  Simple answer: the people doing the buying aren't the people that are using. Slightly less simple answer: the amount of red tape around getting contacts is obscene, so the DOD has severely limited the number of places it can go to buy many bits of kit. There's a lot of incestuous relationships between the military and the companies that supply it as well. On the one hand, that's not strictly a bad thing. A former soldier knows rather well what it's like to be in the field, and supporting veteran run businesses is a good thing to do. On the other hand, what's more often the case is desk jockeys move into lobbying positions and / or join the large corporations after they put in some time and the network effect takes over in a rather invirtious cycle. There are literally consulting companies that exist to help you navigate the red tape to get contacts, because doing it on your own means losing to the big names (often for whom the very contacts themselves are tailored to).
  - andrewflnr 2y ago
    > Simple answer: the people doing the buying aren't the people that are using. This doesn't work at all. The logistics desk jockeys also benefit financially from right to repair. The rest of your post doesn't really have anything to do with the user/buyer divide, at least not the way we usually think of it.
    - zdragnar 2y ago
      The rest of the post absolutely does, in that it explains why the people doing the buying aren't considering the needs of the people doing the using. It goes further to explain why their interests actively work against the kind of competition that might be inclined to offer right to repair as a selling point. I also highly doubt anyone doing the buying are having either their performance or their budget impacted by the cost of repairs. Those are certainly separate budgets, and the DOD has never passed a financial audit; for the last six years, it hasn't been able to provide auditors with enough information about its $4 trillion in assets to even form a qualified opinion.
ein0p 2y ago
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.
NalNezumi 2y ago
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
- spacebanana7 2y ago
  You might get something similar from reading accounts of the Chinese intervention in the Korean war. They were actively winning territory against the UN/US forces. The (CCP) Chinese were a "rugged, lower economic power" opponent and the UN/US had much better tech, including nukes. A lot of the Chinese ruggedness came in the form of being willing to tolerate immense casualties and having strong internal media control. Sad but effective solutions to the healthcare and propaganda issues.
- science4sail 2y ago
  I think that's a common scenario in historical fiction depicting conflicts between upright barbarians and decadent empires. The empire could easily crush the barbarians, but it's too preoccupied with internal politics and power struggles to do so.
evanjrowley 2y ago
The military should factor the positions of companies like this into their supply chain risk assessments.
Suppafly 2y ago
The military should just build right to repair into their RFQ processes.
- 9659 2y ago
  They do! The big platform OEM's have been saying no to extended tech data and source code access, but the smaller contracts require govt rights. Either you give up your IP (drawings and source code) or you are non-compliant.
egberts1 2y ago
B-52 is largely a right-to-repair airplane.
michaelhoney 2y ago
the military-industrial complex is infested with parasites
silexia 2y ago
Right to repair is truly a vital human right we should fight hard for. That and the right to free speech.

234 points by worik 2y ago

On13 2y ago

[flagged]

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.

passwordoops 2y ago
Lock-in on service should never be acceptable under any circumstances, war, peace, military, civilian
- crest 2y ago
  Lock-on instead of lock-in?
  - blooalien 2y ago
    Pretty sure they mean what they said. "Lock-in" in this context typically refers to "vendor lock-in" which is a common practice among unethical corporations selling products or services. They will often use underhanded tactics and "dark patterns" to psychologically or physically (through hardware means) to lock an "end user" into the forced usage of that vendor's product, while making it as painful / inconvenient as possible to switch to any possible competitor.

jmclnx 2y ago

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.

darth_avocado 2y ago
> like a Camel in a desert at an oasis Well the camels stop after 30ish gallons. Military Vendors lap up Gov. money like a blackhole laps up pretty much everything in it's vicinity.
- blooalien 2y ago
  > ... "like a blackhole laps up pretty much everything in it's vicinity." That right there might be just about the most accurate analogy for unchecked greed I've read in quite a long while.
- dgfitz 2y ago
  I can fix this for you with a sed s/Military// Military vendors are why the government is a bad steward of money, that explains everything! /s
floxy 2y ago
>Without that money, the US economy would collapse over night. But that money would just get spent by other government agencies, or the taxpayers, right? And if the military vendors aren't efficiently using that money, then society would end up better off if they (the military vendors) weren't spending it.
- janalsncm 2y ago
  Depends on how the money was disseminated. Money only goes into the economy if it’s spent. If you give 1 person 2x as much money they don’t buy 2x as many cars, pairs of shoes, and iPhones. Wealthy people tend to save their money.
- dgfitz 2y ago
  Imagine if Boeing, Northrop, Lockheed, Raytheon, general Dynamics (I could keep going) all shut down. Ignoring the what, million+ people out of jobs, the second and 3rd order effects would be astronomical. Vendors of contractors, vendors of vendors of contractors, internationally, all lose their revenue streams. There would be no time to recover. Phase it out over 10 years, I mean maybe then it wouldn’t be a complete collapse, but fuck would It be ugly. Oh and at year like… 8, the USA gets okie-doke’d and in 3 generations everyone is speaking !english.

mc32 2y ago

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.

dismalpedigree 2y ago
No need to imagine. It happens. There are plenty of stories from GWOT where field reps evaced to Dubai while the parent company negotiated new terms. Its a complete disgrace.

jauntywundrkind 2y ago

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-littoral-combat-ship 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.

georgeplusplus 2y ago
>>>> that unregulated capitalism tries to steer humanity into. What part of this economy seems unregulated to you? What a ridiculous notion talking about military contracts no less. You couldn’t be more far off from finding the source of problem then just mindlessly throwing in a dig at capitalism, the way the government awards contract is anything but competitive or capitalistic

djaouen 2y ago

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

ansmithz42 2y ago
Nah! I think the CEOs should be the first ones sent into the combat front line zones.
- blooalien 2y ago
  > "Nah! I think the CEOs should be the first ones sent into the combat front line zones." At least then they'd be able to (somewhat) justify their insane "pay packages", "golden parachute" and "bonuses". CEO: "I risked my life for that money!"
ravenstine 2y ago
I didn't expect someone else to say this, but that is my first thought. If I became supreme leader overnight, I would place a lot of people behind bars, and these guys would be among the first. It's pretty outrageous how much society tolerates the leadership class.
- blooalien 2y ago
  I vote ravenstine for "Supreme Overlord of Earth" 2024! (Be awfully hard to really do much worse than the "leaders" we've currently got in charge or on offer to choose from, yeah?)
  - shiroiushi 2y ago
    Whoever s/he is, ravenstine couldn't possibly be worse than the world's current crop of leaders. It's not a bad idea; perhaps just make it a limited 5-year (or 10-year, or whatever) term, so that if the power goes to his/her head, the damage will be limited.
    - 2y ago

jprd 2y ago

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

krapp 2y ago
If you're referring to the military industrial complex, I don't think this is what Eisenhower was warning about.
- worik 2y ago
  > If you're referring to the military industrial complex, I don't think this is what Eisenhower was warning about. The opposition to the "right to repair" is coming from the "military industrial complex" That complex is the nexus of industrial players who have become to feel entitled to anything they want That is what they are doing with the opposition to "right to repair" and that is what, in general terms (he was predicting the future - cut him some slack) Eisenhower was warning about.
  - taejo 2y ago
    The military-industrial complex is a complex of the interactions between the military and the industry that supplies it, not just the latter. It's the industry side of the complex that is opposing it, the military is asking for it.
  - kiba 2y ago
    It is just business in general that opposes the "right to repair" . Military contractors are not exception to the rule and there's no need to single them out specifically. We have a business culture that unhealthily prioritize short term profit at the expenses of product excellence and stakeholders.
- plussed_reader 2y ago
  An easy litmus test if a company is part of the complex is whether they're a defense contractor or not. The companies in TFA don't pass this smell test.

blahyawnblah 2y ago

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?

psunavy03 2y ago
Contractor tech reps have been doing this already since the Cold War.
istultus 2y ago
Nice, you've found a pathway to hiring more veterans
ptero 2y ago
That's what companies already do, charging the government a pretty penny for being in theater.
bityard 2y ago
It's not unheard of. The contractors are generally former military.
Doches 2y ago
Palantir has been doing exactly this for more than a decade...
firesteelrain 2y ago
Yes, we had them in Iraq helping us.
Rebelgecko 2y ago
Yes, and they'll be well paid for it

trhway 2y ago

[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.

worik 2y ago
> In general the modern weaponry is very complicated No It is bad design As another commenter commented the ability to repair in the field, in adverse conditions, should be a design criterion.
- trhway 2y ago
  The way things go there would be almost no people in the field, just drones of all kinds and occasional stormtrooper teams in extremely expensive stealth cloaks. Basically no human would be able to exist in the environment with several thousand drones per kilometer. And I don’t think much of these drones are going to be repaired , more like smartphones - nobody repairs them. By the way, extremely important part, becoming even bigger and more important - the massive scale battlefield data intelligence gathering, including from all those drones, processing and targeting is done in Ukraine by Palantir in major part by their people deployed there. There is no real right-to-repair or ability to repair in the field when it comes to such software (or to communication networks like Starlink). With that background it is really small peanuts, which will take all the attention away from important things, whether soldiers can replace on their own an RFID-ed DRM-ed valve in the howitzer blowback hydraulics.

a3n 2y ago

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.

WillAdams 2y ago
Admiral Rickover's solution for the U.S. Navy submarine program was to write into the contract having company executives on the boat for its first dive.
- mrguyorama 2y ago
  All that means is that you buy stuff from people who cannot properly assess risk and everyone dies from stupid, predictable, known issues, like with OceanGate. What ACTUALLY fixed the submarine program was SUBSAFE, a quality assurance program that mostly generates paperwork and instructs you to check things over and over.
  - WillAdams 2y ago
    My understanding was that SUBSAFE was put in place first, but executives insisted on just pencil-whipping the requirements --- until the requirement that they went down on the first dive was put in place --- at that point things were taken a bit more seriously.

jabroni_salad 2y ago

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.

lotsofpulp 2y ago
I bet they cannot macgyver it if it’s software locked.
- fragmede 2y ago
  because they can't run Ida pro and hack it?
  - aleph_minus_one 2y ago
    There exists Ghidra ... :-)
    - plussed_reader 2y ago
      And the years of prep work to be able to run the software effectively.....?
      - transpute 2y ago
        Call bored reverser colleague who helped test Ghidra.
        plussed_reader 2y ago
        Where do I get one of those in a public Edu?

benreesman 2y ago

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.

autoexec 2y ago
It's very much in character for her. She's been supportive of consumer rights and protections for long time. She's got a long history of being anti-DRM and pro-right to repair.
DoctorOetker 2y ago
For those who believe in the politics circus, wouldn't this be a much better female president candidate compared to Hillary Clinton (first declare independence from Britain then go back to kings and queens?), or Kamala Harris?
- CRConrad 2y ago
  How would electing Hillary Clinton have been "go[ing] back to kings and queens"? If it was because she's married to former president Bill, didn't you already "go back to kings and queens" when Bush Junior was elected?
  - benreesman 2y ago
    I suspect the parent is referring to a distressing trend of mean reversion: we’re really running the motor on all cylinders to elect people to high office based on what family they hail from, a phenomenon that dates at least as far back as 2000 (and there were the Kennedy family, and before that…). It has precedent for about 10 thousand years before that, but we were moving in the right direction on it and we’ve reversed course.
    - CRConrad 2y ago
      Yeah, I also suspect(ed) it's something like that. But then it's pretty weird of Dr Chemicals-as-food to single out Mrs Clinton like he did. The Bushes are a much more blatant example.

squarefoot 2y ago

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.

akira2501 2y ago
"We're sorry this Lithium Hydroxide canister does not appear to be genuine or has been refilled. Please contact Boeing for assistance and to order genuine parts." As an aside one of the things I love about old school military equipment is the "battle short." It effectively disables all the safety equipment and limit switches and allows the device to run even though the device believes it should not. There's an extra measure of confidence you get just from seeing that option available to you. "No, damnit, RUN!" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battleshort https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battleshort
- pcdoodle 2y ago
  This is why I miss Visual Basic 6: On Error Resume Next
- foobarbecue 2y ago
  Curiosity (the Mars rover) has a battleshort mode and when we use it there's a message that says "putting my battle shorts on." Never fails to crack me up.
- tourmalinetaco 2y ago
  As an industrial technician I fear the worst (and yet it excites me).
Brian_K_White 2y ago
Ever since the first time I encountered HDCP I have had a little fantasy about the bridge screen on the Enterprise refusing to display anything because of an hdcp glitch. These days the imaginary recalcitrant screen isn't simply blank though, now there are ads which never fail. I was at a local gyro shop a few weeks ago and all their menu displays were showing Amazon ads over their menus. I gave up on humanity right then.

ryukoposting 2y ago

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."

fransje26 2y ago
> Hopefully this will serve as a "Eureka" moment for the powers that be in DC. And who do you think has been lining the pockets of said powers in DC, to get the military in that situation in the first place?
noobermin 2y ago
Many of the powers that be, particularly those with positions of influence in the DoD make their riches off exclusive contracts with the DoD with private companies they own or are invested in. Not to mention lawmakers themselves who invest in such contractors. The powers that be in DC are the problem, they don't want to fix it.

notinmykernel 2y ago

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.

growthwtf 2y ago
The Military is actually the ~5th biggest contributor to the current national deficit, behind social security, interest on the debt, and various health programs. The largest contributors to the debt over the last couple decades have been stimulus packages and tax cuts.
- somenameforme 2y ago
  Interestingly, you're both right, but most people don't understand how government spending works. There's two main categories of spending - discretionary and mandatory. Discretionary spending is the budget submitted by Congress where they allocate money to various things. Mandatory spending is compulsory and done without a vote or manual appropriations. Things like social security, pensions, medicare, and so on are mandatory. Discretionary is military, education, housing, transportation, and so on. And, of this spending, military is, by far, the lion's share of it all. So each dollar spent on a bomb half-way around the world is one less dollar that could have been spent on e.g. education, infrastructure, or housing - which are predominantly discretionary. And notably, discretionary budgets are relatively small, contrasted against the overall budget. In 2024 the entire discretionary budget was "only" $1.8 trillion. So things like "just" a hundred billion might seem fairly small, but are in reality a substantial chunk of all our discretionary allocations. Then there's the military, which eats up nearly a trillion dollars of this spending. In 2024 it was $886 billion, which does not include the spending on various wars around the world.
  - joebob42 2y ago
    I think the naming on the split is a little disingenuous. It's "mandatory", but it's still just laws. I get that the funding is decided differently, and I'm not making any claim one way or the other regarding whether Medicare, ss, etc should be changed, but it isn't like there's some law of nature we can't adjust if we wanted.

ungreased0675 2y ago

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.

SideQuark 2y ago

"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.

NegativeK 2y ago
I assume that doesn't apply to source code? It seems somewhat absurd to suggest, but it's less absurd if a defense company provided binaries and then suddenly goes out of business.
- M95D 2y ago
  Is it even possible for a defense contractor company to go out of business? Aren't they in the "too big to fail" category?
  - SideQuark 2y ago
    There's zillions of little defense contractors. I've dealt with many, many 2-man shops even (many of which failed). One of many ways this happens is they supply the prime contractors. Another way is through programs like SBIR, which has ~7500 to 10,000 awards per year to companies max size 500 (but most much smaller). https://ssti.org/blog/useful-stats-2020-sbirsttr-awards-state-and-agency https://ssti.org/blog/useful-stats-2020-sbirsttr-awards-stat... Any one of these companies may become a supplier. I worked ~20 yrs for a 50ish person company that was a supplier the entire time. As such, and doing SBIR pitches, I competed with many tiny firms, many of which were also suppliers. So yes, they can go out of business, from the 2-person shop to the 10,000+ person shop, just like any one else.
- SideQuark 2y ago
  > I assume that doesn't apply to source code? Why assume that? ".... with no carve-outs or limitations to protect sensitive trade secret information" Seems like claiming source code to the device is private would be a carve out.

rqtwteye 2y ago

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?

dotnet00 2y ago
They get to extort more money at that time for "lost revenue" as the cost of allowing field repairs.
hunter-gatherer 2y ago
That's exactly the scheme for for defense contractors, actually. They'll happily send technicians to an austere environment to do maintenance for an extra fee. This has been going on for years, but it is just getting worse.
- rqtwteye 2y ago
  That's not going to work in a real battle.
  - rapjr9 2y ago
    Right, so just make it a requirement that contract repairs have to be done in battle conditions and watch how quickly the contractors now want to allow right to repair. "Sorry, you've lost another repair person, please send two this time in case one gets blown up."

WatchDog 2y ago

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?

zdragnar 2y ago
Simple answer: the people doing the buying aren't the people that are using. Slightly less simple answer: the amount of red tape around getting contacts is obscene, so the DOD has severely limited the number of places it can go to buy many bits of kit. There's a lot of incestuous relationships between the military and the companies that supply it as well. On the one hand, that's not strictly a bad thing. A former soldier knows rather well what it's like to be in the field, and supporting veteran run businesses is a good thing to do. On the other hand, what's more often the case is desk jockeys move into lobbying positions and / or join the large corporations after they put in some time and the network effect takes over in a rather invirtious cycle. There are literally consulting companies that exist to help you navigate the red tape to get contacts, because doing it on your own means losing to the big names (often for whom the very contacts themselves are tailored to).
- andrewflnr 2y ago
  > Simple answer: the people doing the buying aren't the people that are using. This doesn't work at all. The logistics desk jockeys also benefit financially from right to repair. The rest of your post doesn't really have anything to do with the user/buyer divide, at least not the way we usually think of it.
  - zdragnar 2y ago
    The rest of the post absolutely does, in that it explains why the people doing the buying aren't considering the needs of the people doing the using. It goes further to explain why their interests actively work against the kind of competition that might be inclined to offer right to repair as a selling point. I also highly doubt anyone doing the buying are having either their performance or their budget impacted by the cost of repairs. Those are certainly separate budgets, and the DOD has never passed a financial audit; for the last six years, it hasn't been able to provide auditors with enough information about its $4 trillion in assets to even form a qualified opinion.

ein0p 2y ago

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.

NalNezumi 2y ago

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

spacebanana7 2y ago
You might get something similar from reading accounts of the Chinese intervention in the Korean war. They were actively winning territory against the UN/US forces. The (CCP) Chinese were a "rugged, lower economic power" opponent and the UN/US had much better tech, including nukes. A lot of the Chinese ruggedness came in the form of being willing to tolerate immense casualties and having strong internal media control. Sad but effective solutions to the healthcare and propaganda issues.
science4sail 2y ago
I think that's a common scenario in historical fiction depicting conflicts between upright barbarians and decadent empires. The empire could easily crush the barbarians, but it's too preoccupied with internal politics and power struggles to do so.

evanjrowley 2y ago

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

Suppafly 2y ago

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

9659 2y ago
They do! The big platform OEM's have been saying no to extended tech data and source code access, but the smaller contracts require govt rights. Either you give up your IP (drawings and source code) or you are non-compliant.

egberts1 2y ago

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

michaelhoney 2y ago

the military-industrial complex is infested with parasites

silexia 2y ago

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