: Army joins in push to break vendor grip on military maintenance
US Navy Secretary John Phelan has told the Senate the service needs the right to repair its own gear, and will rethink how it writes contracts to keep control of intellectual property and ensure sailors can fix hardware, especially in a fight.
Speaking to the Senate Armed Services Committee on Tuesday, Phelan cited the case of the USS Gerald R. Ford, America's largest and most expensive nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, which carried a price tag of $13 billion. The ship was struggling to feed its crew of over 4,500 because six of its eight ovens were out of action, and sailors were barred by contract from fixing them themselves.
"I am a huge supporter of right to repair," Phelan told the politicians. "I went on the carrier; they had eight ovens — this is a ship that serves 15,300 meals a day. Only two were working. Six were out."
He pointed out the Navy personnel are capable of fixing their own gear but are blocked by contracts that reserve repairs for vendors, often due to IP restrictions. That drives up costs and slows down basic fixes. According to the Government Accountability Office, about 70 percent [PDF] of a weapon system's life-cycle cost goes to operations and support.
A similar issue plagued the USS Gerald Ford's weapons elevators, which move bombs from deep storage to the flight deck. They reportedly took more than four years after delivery to become fully operational, delaying the carrier's first proper deployment.
"They have to come out and diagnose the problem, and then they'll fix it," Phelan said. "It is crazy. We should be able to fix this."
The Navy is not alone in its concerns, as the US Army is peeved about the right to repair equipment it paid for too. In a rare display of bipartisanship, both Democrats and Republicans agreed that the Army shouldn't be waiting on contractors to fix its kit and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth issued a memo directing the service to add right-to-repair provisions to its contracts.
"On a go-forward basis, we have been directed to not sign any contracts that don't give us a right to repair," Army Secretary Daniel Driscoll told the House Armed Services Committee on June 4. "On a go-back basis, we have been directed to go and do what we can to go get that right to repair."
Last year Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) introduced the Servicemember Right-to-Repair Act [PDF] that would allow military personnel to repair the equipment they use. It's currently under consideration by Congress, but it seems the government is anxious to move fast.
Our soldiers are immensely smart and capable and should not need to rely on a third party contractor to maintain their equipment. Oven repair is not rocket science
"Our soldiers are immensely smart and capable and should not need to rely on a third party contractor to maintain their equipment. Oven repair is not rocket science: of course sailors should be able to repair their ovens," Kyle Wiens, CEO of repair specialists iFixit told The Register.
"It's gratifying to see Secretary Phelan echoing our work. The Navy bought it, the Navy should be able to fix it. Ownership is universal, and the same principles apply to an iPhone or a radar. Of course, the devil is in the details: the military needs service documentation, detailed schematics, 3D models of parts so they can be manufactured in the field, and so on. We're excited that the military is joining us on this journey to reclaim ownership."
Wiens has also been vocal in letting ordinary citizens have the same rights, despite frantic lobbying by the tech industry, which would generally prefer you just buy a new thing when the old one wears out. Several states, including California, New York, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Oregon, and Colorado, have already passed consumer right-to-repair laws, and now it seems like the military is leading the way to get it done on the federal level.
"We hope that anyone listening to us who hopes to pitch us a contract going forward will look back at their previous agreements they've signed with us, and if they're unwilling to give us that right to repair, I think we're going to have a hard time negotiating with them," Driscoll said.
We'll have to see if this trickles down to the rest of us. ®
Read the original article
Comments
By perihelions 2025-06-129:275 reply This is overloading the meaning of the phrase "right to repair". Usually on HN it means some kind of obligation on suppliers, to provide access to documentation or parts. Here it's something else: the client actually signed a contract agreeing not even to attempt to repair their own devices, which they bought:
> "six of its eight ovens were out of action, and sailors were barred by contract from fixing them themselves"
It's a very different flavor of "right to repair", so I wanted to highlight the language ambiguity.
(Tangentially, food service on a different US aircraft carrier was one of the targets of the "Fat Leonard" contractor bribery ring,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fat_Leonard_scandal (C-f "Former Food Service Officer for the aircraft carrier, the USS George Washington and the Seventh Fleet Command Ship, the USS Blue Ridge")
)
By Eddy_Viscosity2 2025-06-1215:241 reply > This is overloading the meaning of the phrase "right to repair".
I think this is the correct usage. It is the legal right to be able to repair something. Whereas access to docs and parts is more about making repairability doable. But without the former, the latter is moot.
“Right to repair” is commonly understood to refer to a broader political movement that’s about allowing /everyone/ to repair the things they own. Not just large commercial clients with the leverage to demand custom contract terms.
Large clients negotiating their own rights is nothing new. This is just contract dispute.
By SR2Z 2025-06-1315:52 The US Navy stance seems to be less "let's negotiate this" and more "this is so goddamn stupid and we're never putting up with it again."
The philosophy does seem to be "let everyone repair their stuff by default."
> "six of its eight ovens were out of action, and sailors were barred by contract from fixing them themselves"
The Government person who signed this contract should be fired. While this is somewhat forgivable on fixed bases where the company maintains a support office and can have people on site to fix problems, for a ship that might be at sea for months this is an outright travesty. This goes double when you consider that it might be wartime and the ship could be suffering battle damage. Even if the captain decides "screw the contract, we need to feed the sailors", if they have no parts and no manuals that decision may be moot.
Ships need to be self sufficient to a large degree and a part of that is being able to maintain and repair the equipment on board. Large ships have extensive machine shops for a reason.
By netsharc 2025-06-1223:27 > The Government person who signed this contract should be fired.
They've probably left the job and can now be found working for the supplier of the aircraft carrier. If by "working" we mean playing golf. (Idle speculation based on my understanding on how this kind of shit works.)
This doesn't seem too different than John Deere tractors, which weigh heavily in most right to repair discussions.
I think the essential difference is that, with John Deere, you don’t have the choice between a repairable and a non-repairable tractor.
Here, the navy (very likely. Even if this provider didn’t give them the option, they could have gone with a different one) had a choice.
Did the Navy really have a choice at the time, though? Politically, I mean.
Yes, the Navy can select a higher bid as long as there is justification, and here the justification is long-term value and readiness…but a significant portion of the voting public is incapable of properly weighing long-term versus short-term effects.
All they’d understand—and they’d be helped along to this conclusion by plenty of politicians who just want to use the situation to score points—is, “The government paid twice as much for an aircraft carrier than it needed to!”
By IAmBroom 2025-06-1217:37 The voting public never sees these costs.
They are sometimes told about it, tenth-hand, such as the fabled $10,000-hammer and the gold toilet seat.
Congress itself sees these costs, or more precisely, teams working for congressmembers see them. Congress members approve bills that are not lowest-cost when there is personal benefit for their careers: pork-barrel. It's very hard to justify not-lowest-cost without a pork-barrel angle.
Maybe they even saw handing over to a provider all repair responsibilities as a major advantage. No need to have this capability in the crew with the associated logistics, and the accountability is also outsourced.
This comes at a cost but looking around at comparable outsourcing situations, everyone follows the same line of thinking. Sell my responsibility for (someone else’s) money.
By omniglottal 2025-06-1214:45 Maybe they are an aircraft carrier that is deployed in places that no reasonable human can expect a service technician to visit, and this level of imbecility should generally be avoided.
By mistrial9 2025-06-1216:03 nice way to blame "stupid public" for this internal Navy contract
Deere has a massive service network that makes it extremely rare for a farmer to get stranded during planting or harvesting. To keep this network around year after year, they lock people into using it and charge a lot of money.
The Navy should probably contract with Deere, as they’d probably think they’re getting a good deal.
And Caterpillar relies on customer loyalty, based on best-in-class service. Caterpillar has been known to rent equipment from their competitor and fly it by helicopter into remote mining locations while their equipment is inoperable. (Admittedly, mining is not a John Deere market, but this is about Caterpillar's service attitude.)
John Deere's model is successful, but ultimately monopolistic.
By Kon-Peki 2025-06-1219:57 The Caterpillar model might work better for the Navy. Not a huge number of ships, used year-round.
I’m not condoning Deere, BTW. Just pointing out that there are tens of thousands (maybe hundreds of thousands?) of farms that get very busy twice a year and much less busy the rest of the time. Having the capacity to make sure a farmer gets service quickly during those busy times is really hard. And expensive. If anyone had a better idea on how to do it they’d be a billionaire. I mean, there probably aren’t enough helicopters available for Deere to do what Caterpillar does.
By like_any_other 2025-06-1211:112 reply In The Merchant of Venice, a malicious contract (demanding the famous pound of flesh) is itself viewed as a criminal act worthy of punishment. If this is the kind of language vendors are sneaking into contracts, that would be a fitting solution to the problem.
“Sneaking” a service agreement into a contract that the US Navy willingly signs?
Right to repair is for the people. The Navy, however, can just adopt a policy of uhhhh reading the contracts they sign.
By like_any_other 2025-06-1322:29 The Navy being sloppy does not make the contract any less malicious.
Note that it's not the contractualism, but the fact that Shylock is Jewish:
("Alien" means any non-citizen, but it's clear that it's specifically because Shylock is Jewish.)Tarry, Jew: The law hath yet another hold on you. It is enacted in the laws of Venice, If it be proved against an alien That by direct or indirect attempts He seek the life of any citizen, The party 'gainst the which he doth contrive Shall seize one half his goods; the other half Comes to the privy coffer of the state; And the offender's life lies in the mercy Of the duke only, 'gainst all other voice.Because it was done in a contract, it counts as an "indirect attempt", but it's the same law as if it were a physical assault.
(Also note: nobody else in the room seems to have ever heard of this law, and nobody brought it up. Portia is not, in fact, a lawyer. Nobody bothers to check the texts. Antonio's life is already safe; there is no need to heap additional punishment on Shylock. I believe that Portia is just making it up, and everybody goes with it.)
By like_any_other 2025-06-1311:35 > Antonio's life is already safe; there is no need to heap additional punishment on Shylock.
By this logic, attempted murder should carry no jail term after the assailant is disarmed.
To me it looks like the same thing as why there are so many broken ice cream machines at McD
By superuligi 2025-06-1214:081 reply the ice cream machines are not broken, they just say it, so they don't have to clean it
By Pet_Ant 2025-06-1216:10 There's a lot more to it than that:
Johnny Harris "The REAL Reason McDonalds Ice Cream Machines Are Always Broken" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SrDEtSlqJC4
By DrScientist 2025-06-129:225 reply The idea that if your ovens break or even worse the lifts that carry the nukes - and you can't repair yourself, but rather have to fly a contractor out is clearly absurd.
Who signed such a contract?
By n4r9 2025-06-1210:32 My guess is that - like all competent people - the US Navy staff is fighting a constant battle against short-term managerialism. Occasionally stuff will slip through because of time and financial pressures. I can practically imagine the conversation:
"We need this contract to be signed and rolled out next month"
"But our decision process alone takes a month!"
"Decision takes a month?! How hard can it be? What do we need to do to expedite this?"
"Well, I guess we can outlay some of the review work to the interns"
Not sure about this specific example, but are we sure they had the choice?
I've been in many similar situations where all the vendors in the marketplace have the same limit on their offering. You might want on-prem for example, but offerings are getting scarce because vendors are valued on recurring revenue so they are no longer interested.
If the choice is between a locked down oven or starting an oven factory yourself, it's not easy. We have built this economy for us and it is what it is, even when it clearly is a local maxima.
By IAmBroom 2025-06-1217:43 The difference is that the US military is literally the market-maker.
If they need left-handed solar whoopie cushion, by God and Congress they will get one made.
It was muuuch cheaper that way.
Because adding in repair stuff requires the supplier to provide documentation, frequently training, a parts manifest, guaranteed 10-20 year availability of spares, and probably about 50 other requirements I don't know about.
All of which add up to a rather large contract cost increase.
Possibly this boondoggle will result in the military putting in more reasonable "right to repair" terms in the contract, rather than insisting on the gold-plated thing I mention above, but more likely it will simply result in more cost overruns.
I have a feeling that they still need to guarantee availability of spares if they fix it themselves, do they not? They still have to create documentation for their engineers, do they not?
By grandinj 2025-06-1214:18 If you repair it yourself, you have more flexibility in terms of replacing spares with newer items i.e. replacing a whole module when it a part of that module becomes hard to come by.
Internal documentation ..... hmmmm.... LOL.... Often not, word of mouth is the rule.
If there is internal documentation, it's generally pretty rough. Getting it to the point where you can hand it to external parties is a lot of work.
By DrScientist 2025-06-1216:07 Or is it because nobody wants to assume responsibility?
Let's say what you really want is to be able to fix simple stuff ( replace easily replaceable parts ), and get the experts in for tricky stuff. However the contractor, who now isn't fully responsible to changes to the system, now insists that you take the full risk of your repairs ( perhaps even saying they will void any warranty if you touch the oven/lift ).
Then faced with that nobody is brave enough to say - heck fine - we will take that responsibility.
And so because the lawyers were prepared to take that risk, the people on the boat are infantilised by contract.
The other side of this problem can be that its going to be financially impossible to support the products (which for the military would be low quantity, heavy compliance burden) if they're not also able to maintain the staff who actively work on support.
If no one in the company is regularly employed to oversee that product line directly, they might be concluding that there's no actual way to support the product at the price point being negotiated.
By DrScientist 2025-06-1212:341 reply Fair point - but I see no reason why you'd commision unsupportable ovens or lifts - these are not unique things to aircraft carriers.
I'd suspect custom ovens or lifts are more likely to breakdown than some standard industrial ones whose manufacture and design has been optimised over many years.
Just like new software is much more likely to have bugs that battle tested ( sic ) software.
By grandinj 2025-06-1214:12 Sadly the US military (like a lot of militaries) are in love with custom requirements. And there is very little leeway for negotiating them out. So unnecessarily custom solutions are the norm.
By theshrike79 2025-06-129:27 Someone who wasn't paying with their own money.
I bet people didn't think about this during war games...
We have enough bombs on a ship to level a city but we literally can't feed our sailors on that ship for the most boring and dystopian of reasons... they're contractually barred from fixing the ovens.
I hope there's someone in the DoD who does analysis on where we're vulnerable, and looks into these kinds of more inane vulnerabilities that cause indirect effects.
This are the failures we know. But what about what do not know? About failures which did not happen and which may happen during combat? Hopefully the Navy is allowed to fix these problems right away - as opposed to waiting for lawyers to figure who can fix what.
It also makes me wonder whether our adversarial intelligence agencies already know and track these kinds of vulnerabilities (through open source intel on procurement contracts, etc) and it's stuck in a classified document somewhere?
By dh2022 2025-06-1219:00 Well, if they did not do that already, you can bet they will start doing it now. I know I would...
