Service Members Deserve the Right to Repair
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The debate rages on over whether the military's push for Right to Repair legislation is a valid strategy, with some commenters, like jedberg, arguing that "if getting right to repair passed requires justifying it via the military, I'm ok with that" as long as it ultimately benefits civilians too. However, others, such as catigula, strongly disagree, likening the idea that military service is required for basic rights to the absurd comedy premise of Starship Troopers. As the discussion unfolds, it becomes clear that some commenters are more focused on the end goal of achieving Right to Repair, while others are adamant that the means by which it's achieved matters, with some even diving into a tangent about the themes of Starship Troopers, clarifying that the book's premise wasn't quite as catigula suggested.
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Aug 28, 2025 at 12:21 PM EDT
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What we're saying is that if the military gets it first, that's ok, because it's a stepping stone to all of us getting it.
For example, let’s say you want to prevent wealth redistribution, but there is lots of popular support for it. Then you give it to some, for example old people, and it removes wealth redistribution as a priority for them.
Now, you can more easily withhold the benefit from the remaining population. Or give them all various tiers, such as white collar and government workers with more employer subsidies, and lower paid workers with few or no subsidies.
At the end, the opposition group will waste a ton of energy trying to make their cause a priority, and will probably never achieve the full goal. The more politically important will get theirs, and the less politically important will suffer without. That stepping stone becomes a barrier.
In the example, you can change age to skin tone, gender, religious tribe, military status, and even arbitrary geographic boundary. See the recent tax benefits Alaskans received in exchange for their Senator’s vote.
:-(
I think Heinlein actually has a very interesting point. To wield the power of the government (which is what voting is), it is important to be able to act selflessly. If someone can't do that, even for a couple of years of their life, why should they be able to wield that power over others? The universal franchise is not a religious dogma, it's good to ask these questions and think about whether our society could be better if we organized it differently. Unfortunately, a lot of people completely missed the point and just rounded it off to "Heinlein thinks the military should run society", which isn't at all true.
In the book it was said that if a blind deaf person in a wheelchair volunteered for service, the state would find something for them to do. Maybe tediously counting hairs on a caterpillar, or testing chairs in Antarctica.
Now for me the asspull from Starship Troopers that I still think about every now and then was the notion of mathematical proofs of morality at a high school level (or any academic level, for that matter). This was a society that somehow discovered provable objective morality, and I really wish that idea could have been fleshed out more by Heinlein.
You see him put much more thought into political systems and economics in other books like The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, Stranger in a Strange Land, or For Us, the Living.
[1] https://www.nitrosyncretic.com/pdfs/nature_of_fedsvc_1996.pd...
It was not even the premise of the film - only one right was conditioned on service, the right to vote (and possibly hold political office). I.e. actions that wield authority over others. I argue that is not "basic".
These societies literally couldn't have existed without military service.
America has a very difficult time making a similar case, and, often, the case is really difficult to make that they aren't actively harmful.
It's not about giving classes "rights", at all.
The military can demand this, we can't.
Perhaps they just don't want to fight for those clauses.
Lt. Milo Minderbender: well the Army can sure always use more widgets! We’ll need to lock in a contract for spare parts too, so you have to agree to supply spares at a reasonable cost.
MIC: how about instead you take this extended service contract where you pay us to do any necessary repairs?
MM: well that doesn’t seem like a great deal - we’d be on the hook for arbitrary costs forever and you’d have no incentive to make widgets that work.
MIC: we really don’t want to agree to a fixed parts cost schedule. That would annoy our shareholders.
MM: well, we are the US Army, so you can take it or leave it. Who else are you going to sell widgets to?
MIC: ah, but Milo - we can call you Milo, right? - have you considered that you’re coming up on the end of your service?
MM: Not for a few years…
MIC: Sure, but I mean, when you get out… it’d be nice if there was a job at a military widget contractor waiting for you…
US millitary is truly a monopsony.
It isn't clear that this is about what we call "right to repair" on HN. (Essentially, no DRM on physical parts.)
Maybe it really is if I read the bill, but reading the article did not clarify that for me.
https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/senate-bill/220...
You buy a bunch of HPE servers from HP? Nope. You buy them from Fly-by Night Contractor who won some contract and didn't document the HP support contracts they are wrapping their own support contract around so when it gets handed off at the end of their contract, you're SOL and can't get support from FbNC or HP without going through a lot of red tape. And by the time you succeed in identifying who is responsible for what, you're out of support anyways.
It's dumb, and happens way too often. DOD should be purchasing straight from those major vendors instead of purchasing through a contractor.
Exactly, what's the problem. I know more things on the IT side, and there the lowest bidder is always the best at failing, but also the one selected most often because they check enough of the right boxes.
No one, including the Buyer cared. That was when I learned that buying from an Approved Vendor had nothing to do with what they charged.
When you consider the sheer size of the US defense budget, and the nature of government contracts in the first place, it would be more surprising if this sort of thing didn't happen at all.
And we absolutely accept US government RMAs and replace product under warranty as we get it.
Jeez, we even replace product that they've clearly played shotput with and thrown off cliffs.
There's so much talk about Modular Open Systems Architecture, because everyone agrees the current system is broken & doesn't allow iteration & exploration of systems. But it's so unclear technically what that means, how it happens. Maybe maybe things are a tiny bit better than they were but it's so hard to know, and it feels so likely to be lipservice, too hard to do & too little genuine desire to make it happen.
Amazing lcs report, https://www.propublica.org/article/how-navy-spent-billions-l...
What surprised me is how the equipment had labels around where to open things to rescue people, where to pour fuel, etc... It was labelled such that someone with limited (or no) exposure to the vehicle model would know what to do without referencing any sort of manual.
Very different today.
Also imo USA & the UN let Rwanda genocide happen because they were gunshy after Black Hawk Down in Mogadishu thus everyone was so reluctant to commit forces even though even limited intervention early on could have stopped hundreds of thousands of atrocities. The overreaction to Somalia paralyzed effective action anywhere else.
My position might be revisionist on that matter, but I think the Maginot line worked as planned: the goal was to force the German to go around (mostly through the Low Countries), reducing the frontage where they'd have to fight. The German did exactly that, but also pushed through the Ardennes, which the Allied planners hadn't though possible.
I have no experience in the matter but I suspect that's not it. A conscript and a recently recruited professional soldier should in theory have the same level of training. Many professional soldiers only enlist for a few years.
I reckon it's more that equipment is a lot more complicated now than in the past. And maybe something to do with literacy levels in the 1960s meaning you couldn't trust a soldier to have read and understood a manual.
This should solve a lot of problems.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oligopsony
As the saying goes, "An army marches on its stomach". Weapons are critical, essential for a military to be a military. But everything else in logistics and support are what actually makes the military operational. A generator (the example in the article) is not an armament. And they need so many that there's no way they could lean on the entire generator industry without the support of law or other regulations to back them.
Same goes for RtR: it's worthless without a robust spare parts market, and having that exist in the civilian sector is what you need to realize savings.
This is related to one of the key reasons F-16 was worth getting to Ukraine: compared to any other system, there's just a lot of F-16s in the world and a lot of spare parts for them.
> I was overseeing generators in theater, and the one powering the mortuary facility had failed. ... I didn’t have HVAC expertise or the necessary parts.
> I had two choices: initiate a long contracting process to hire a civilian technician
It sounds like the author couldn't have repaired the generator even if they had the right to do so? Or was this the kind of thing where they could have "figured it out" or carried a few spare parts?
Otherwise a lot of this sort of thing would go without saying, and you wouldn't see problems like those surrounding the Sig Sauer P320/M17/M18.
Crazy to think we'd pay for software, ask for source to run a Fortify scan & whatnot, and get told to kick rocks. "Proprietary ... trade secrets ... &c&c". Just mark it green
The answer is the latter because paying more later is a form of borrowing, but not one you have to declare as debt. So you can announce a tax cut now and voters will love it despite paying twice as much next year.
This should be the role of governments. To tend to the garden of economy. Sadly US government abdicates from that responsibility even more than governments of other countries. And even dumps a bunch of fertilizer on the weeds overgrowing the garden because they tickle it nicely.