U.S. Senators Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Tim Sheehy (R-Mont.) introduced the Warrior Right to Repair Act of 2025, legislation that would require contractors to provide the Department of Defense (DoD) with access to technical data and materials the military needs to repair and maintain its own equipment.
This is important. Rossman did an interview with a few military techs, and here are few highlights
Its a complete waste of taxpayer money. Money that could be redirected into more important stuff, but alas our corrupt politicians will find other things to waste it on.
We’re allowed to fix our own cars (although manufactures are trying to stop that), why can’t the military fix their own equipment or farmers fix tractors? Get a foothold in the military sector and the rest will follow.
That “military pricing” is called “corruption”. Despite everyone knowing that it happens in most militaries (or big b2b), it still is that.
I mean, you had a truly magnificent military budget for already 30 years after the nation which was supposed to be the problem solved by it started asking for food aid and falling apart into pieces.
When the funds are provided and it’s certain they won’t have to be used, the tasks existing expand to fill the budget.
The US military budget is so over the top that even things that it achieves are not so significantly different from what Russian military budget with Russian corruption achieves, yet its size utterly dwarfs that.
If US military budget were used as efficiently as that of, say, Poland, US military would have colonized most of the Solar system already. With actual people as colonists.
That’s about that fiscal discipline the Republican party was supposedly in favor of, until it wasn’t.
OK, I live in Russia, so shouldn’t probably blabber too much about US politics.
It’s the downstream consequence of decades of outsourcing, kicked off in earnest in the Reagan Administration. “Right to Repair” is just the tip of an enormous iceberg of military privatization.
That’s the nut of it. This money is being wasted in the general sense. But it isn’t wasted in the eyes of crony legislators and bureaucrats who see themselves on the receiving end of the kickback stream.
This goes back to the BBB and its rampage through some of the most high efficiency Medicaid programs on offer, in order to shuttle somewhere between $175B and $541B (depending on who is counting) to a national security system that’s just legions of badged up bullies harassing locals for the entertainment of a few hooting chuds.
Because
and SaaS is how corporate industry has decided it will continue to grow its profits indefinitely.
Which is also why people active against this will be killed many times before the stream made dry out.
So finally they’ve figured out that “privatization” is a shitty idea. Not only does it introduce another point of failure in logistics and operations, but the private sector doesn’t mind trying to make every contract on they can retire off of using taxpayer money.
This has nothing to do with privatization, at least not in the sense you seem to mean. It has everything to do with ownership, and the military wants to actually own the products it buys.
This isn’t going against the private sector as a supplier of goods, it merely says if you sell to the military, the military actually owns that product instead of rents it.
Just informing you that good old USSR had a similar problem, except not just with the military.
It, of course, had planning inefficiency problems, but the reason some stuff costed and was funded orders of magnitude more than the Western alternatives (sometimes being clones of those alternatives) was just that industries producing this stuff were closer to important interests in internal politics. Soviet production lines were not that much less efficient.
Thanks for the type up! I really do appreciate the info, I’m just bitching about the current state of things and how this seems like a distraction compared to the laundry list of other stuff going on.
It’s not though. The current administration can suck and also do good things. Both can be true simultaneously.
The entire military budget is a massive waste of taxpayers money.