Companies Lobby Against Giving the Military the Right to Repair

https://www.404media.co/appliance-and-tractor-companies-lobby-against-giving-the-military-the-right-to-repair/

by worik • 2 years ago

234 114 2 years 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• 2 years ago

Lock-in on service should never be acceptable under any circumstances, war, peace, military, civilian

crest• 2 years ago

Lock-on instead of lock-in?

jmclnx• 2 years 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• 2 years 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.

blooalien6• 2 years 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.

dgfitz2• 2 years 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• 2 years 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• 2 years 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.

dgfitz2• 2 years 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.

blooalien6• 2 years ago

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

Even more than the right to repair, a lot of stuff designed for use in war should be designed right from day one with easy repairability (and if necessary "Jerry-rigging" it) in the field first and foremost in mind during the design process (as often was the case at some point in the past). Anything less risks human lives.

mc32• 2 years 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.

dismalpedigree2• 2 years 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• 2 years 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-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• 2 years 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

djaouen2• 2 years ago

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

ansmithz42• 2 years ago

Nah! I think the CEOs should be the first ones sent into the combat front line zones.

blooalien6• 2 years 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• 2 years 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.

blooalien6• 2 years 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?)

jprd• 2 years ago

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

krapp• 2 years ago

If you're referring to the military industrial complex, I don't think this is what Eisenhower was warning about.

worik2• 2 years 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.

plussed_reader3• 2 years 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• 2 years 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?

ptero• 2 years ago

That's what companies already do, charging the government a pretty penny for being in theater.

istultus• 2 years ago

Nice, you've found a pathway to hiring more veterans

bityard• 2 years ago

It's not unheard of. The contractors are generally former military.

Doches• 2 years ago

Palantir has been doing exactly this for more than a decade...

psunavy03• 2 years ago

Contractor tech reps have been doing this already since the Cold War.

firesteelrain• 2 years ago

Yes, we had them in Iraq helping us.

Rebelgecko• 2 years ago

Yes, and they'll be well paid for it

trhway2• 2 years 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.

worik2• 2 years ago

In general the modern weaponry is very complicated

It is bad design

As another commenter commented the ability to repair in the field, in adverse conditions, should be a design criterion.

trhway2• 2 years 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• 2 years 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.

WillAdams2• 2 years 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• 2 years 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.

jabroni_salad• 2 years 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.

lotsofpulp2• 2 years ago

I bet they cannot macgyver it if it’s software locked.

fragmede• 2 years ago

because they can't run Ida pro and hack it?

dismalpedigree2• 2 years ago

You drastically overestimate the vast majority of military systems.

lazide• 2 years ago

Screwdrivers and duct taped on wires can be remarkably effective at bypassing switches and relays.

And having a random private stand around and poke something with a screwdriver when you want something to explode is, well, pretty much how much of the military works anyway.

benreesman3• 2 years 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• 2 years 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• 2 years 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?

CRConrad2• 2 years 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?

benreesman3• 2 years ago

I think that of everyone notionally on the taxpayer’s payroll that Lina Khan is the most effective, tenacious, old-school pg “relentlessly resourceful” badass in practice in public life in the United States.

I have no idea if her being a woman is anything to do with it, but if we put someone like her in high(er) office we’d get a woman and a hero as president in one stroke.

Elizabeth Warren is quite an effective advocate for the people herself as well.

squarefoot3• 2 years 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• 2 years 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

pcdoodle• 2 years ago

This is why I miss Visual Basic 6:

On Error Resume Next

foobarbecue• 2 years 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• 2 years ago

As an industrial technician I fear the worst (and yet it excites me).

Brian_K_White• 2 years 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.

squarefoot3• 2 years 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.

Speaking of SciFi, I fantasized about a novel in which an alien species visiting our long dead planet in the future can't recover what's left of our culture because it had been all wrapped in DRM whose keys died with us. By extension, if the Rosetta Stone makers adopted the same practices, we would know squat about ancient Egyptian language. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosetta_Stone

avgDev• 2 years ago

What I hate the most is when companies will come out and say they don't want people touching things due to safety concerns. The awful thing is that it is working.

More and more I see people saying "Oh I won't touch the brakes on my car because what if I mess up". I am confident most people could replace the brakes on their car.

MaxPengwing• 2 years ago

It's not just repairing cars, I told a coworker I replaces the fuse in my Bosch blender and he looked at me as if I was insane. "But what if it catches fire?" was his reply.

Dragging my team to the nearest maker space for a teambuilding exercise as soon as I figure out how to convince HR to pay for it. People need to know things do not catch fire if you repair it.

squarefoot3• 2 years ago

due to safety concerns

Seems just a rehash of the same old excuse: "someone think of the children!" which usually comes from people not giving a damn about children but worried about their own interests.

ryukoposting• 2 years 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• 2 years 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?

noobermin2• 2 years 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• 2 years 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• 2 years 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• 2 years 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.

BenjiWiebe• 2 years ago

Hey, I like that concept! Maybe it could apply to everyone.

Make a product that doesn't break, you can ignore right-to-repair.

It broke anyways? Fine, pay this fine.

I don't care much about right to repair on things that work flawlessly for decades.

ungreased0675• 2 years 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.

SideQuark4• 2 years 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.

NegativeK2• 2 years 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.

M95D2• 2 years 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?

SideQuark4• 2 years 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.

rqtwteye2• 2 years 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• 2 years ago

They get to extort more money at that time for "lost revenue" as the cost of allowing field repairs.

hunter-gatherer• 2 years 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.

rqtwteye2• 2 years ago

That's not going to work in a real battle.

WatchDog• 2 years 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?

zdragnar2• 2 years 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• 2 years 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.

noobermin2• 2 years ago

Did you know medicare is unable to negotiate drug prices and usually pays through the nose to pharma companies on behalf of medicare beneficiaries? The Biden admin managed to negotiate down less than 20 drugs and this was hailed as a progressive victory which just highlights how broken it is.

This for me is the strongest argument against single payer healthcare in America. As long as bribery is considered free speech, nothing where the government is the single payer (like the DOD is for military equipment and goods) can ever work without extensive graft. Repeat for things like roads, geneal infrastructure, the list goes on.

ein0p• 2 years 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• 2 years 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• 2 years 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• 2 years 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• 2 years ago

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

Suppafly• 2 years ago

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

9659• 2 years 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• 2 years ago

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

michaelhoney• 2 years ago

the military-industrial complex is infested with parasites

silexia• 2 years ago

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

Companies Lobby Against Giving the Military the Right to Repair

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