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janrinok [soylentnews.org] writes:

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story [theregister.com]:

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 [youtube.com]. 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 [defense.gov] 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 [gao.gov] [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 [bloomberg.com] 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 [theregister.com] 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 [senate.gov] [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: 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 [theregister.com], 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. ®

Original Submission