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Comment by aleph_minus_one | Hacker News Reader

Since armament forms a oligopsony market [1] (i.e. there exist few buyers (countries) for big armament), why don't these buyers simply use their market leverage and refuse to buy equipment for which the producer rejects them the right to repair.

This should solve a lot of problems.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oligopsony

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This isn't about armaments, at least not entirely. For the most part weapons and weapons systems procurement already has regulations which should be giving DOD the right to repair (or the data to perform maintenance and repairs). This is about everything else.

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.

Also that Commercial off the shelf availability for things is a key way to drive down prices. If consumers buy it and a slightly modified version is suitable for the military then the thing will be a lot cheaper to acquire and operate.

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.

They don't need to lean on the entire industry, just on the chosen supplier.

In reality, it is not the DoD that contracts out the big stuff, but Congress. And when the purchaser isn't the actual user, then a whole bunch of nefarious negative feedback loops come into being. The Congresscritter mostly only cares about sounding good and their lobbying (bribery) dollars, everything else is a problem for someone else, or sometime later.

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