Without right to repair, the military can't fix its own battlefield equipment

Disregard these rules and just fix it. I don’t have time for these companies.

Why isn’t US military gear modular? That just plug in the box stuff saves lives. I wonder how long before loading your own magazine is banned?

This weapon only works with ACME™ brand cartridges. Using your own load voids your warranty.

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“Peacekeeping”

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Gotta admit, I can’t not laugh

Looks like the military-industrial-political complex is alive and well.

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Well, that was flat out weird. No wonder I don’t remember seeing this as a kid. Which is weird as that’s obviously Mel Blanc doing the voices.

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Since Snafu and the like were made for Government use, they rarely got shown on TV. They weren’t included in the usual syndication packages like general-audience Warner Brothers 'toons were.

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Lots of this kind of shortsightedness.

A few years back, the UK decided to privatise Air-Sea rescue. Up to this point quite a lot of rescues, especially those done out of the immediate coastal area had been done by the Royal Navy. now it’s done by private contractors.It didn’t seem to have occurred to anyone that the reason the RN do the job is because if there’s an actual war, and pilots need picking out of the water after keeping the French on their side of the channel, then a private company’s not going to even consider taking off.

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Or, as practiced by the USA, Israel, Russia, etc., “Piecekeeping” as “we’ll keep a piece of your oil fields, your land, etc.”

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Without the skill to negotiate contracts that specify training for service personnel, sufficient near-field spares or near-field repair technicians from supplier. Typical outsourcing fuck-up.

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I’m starting my own arms manufacturer, just so I can call it ZWB (Zoom, Whoosh, Bang) Inc.

ETA and the company logo would have Zoom, Whoosh, Bang in 1960s Batman TV series comic-style graphics! :wink:

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Plus, the RN pilots benefitted from the regular real-life practice. Now they don’t.

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There was a period between late 2001 and roughly late 2009 (gee, what happened there) where the military was doing a lot of commercial-off-the–shelf (COTS) contracts, or Rapid-Fielding-Initiatives (RFIs). These were by nature rapid, and contracts were not as thorough as say a purchase of a major system such as an Abrams tank. This made some sense, after all why would you need a huge contract to buy 100 small widgets. This probably did affect the skill based of contracts writers on both sides. I dont see much of that part though so I couldnt say for sure.

At the same time, contractors often had just a basic clue of what the military intended to use these COTS or RFI products would be used for, or where, or for how long. This negatively affected supportability and sparing of products introduced during that period.

As stated previously there are multiple levels of maintenance, and O-level and I-level components need to be spared properly and appropriately. But it needs to be a two way conversation to make that happen.

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But it’s funny how sometimes the supplier fails (inadvertently or otherwise) to fully engage in their side of that conversation and say “you’ll need to cover [this] or [that]” when the buyer does not know that, and then when it crops up after the contract is signed, the supplier says “well, you didn’t include that”. I’ve seen the buyer fail to ask the right questions and therefore not get told stuff they needed to know, so many times in civil outsourcing supply contracts, and so no reason to think it can’t happen with military deals, too.

Usually it’s incompetence by the supplier rather than intent (though intent cannot be ruled out if they can make more money from out-of-contract billing terms than in-contract billing terms). A sensible, competent supplier mentions every damn thing because each damn thing added increases the contract value. In larger contracts these things tend to get picked up; in smaller ones less so because (1) the specifying teams on both sides are smaller so less expertise applied overall, and (2) sales people are more often in charge on the supplier side in smaller deals.

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