Would suck to lose a war because one of the primes couldn’t fly a repair team out. Military procurement gets more insane every time I look at it. My take is that anything used by the military should not only be repairable in field, but also have a completely replaceable supply and production chain – you know, in case the original contractor can’t produce enough, goes bankrupt, or gets blown up.
It depends on what the problem is. For some things – modern fly-by-wire flight control laws come to mind – the only entity that has the know-how to fix it is the original company that did them; neither NAVAIR nor AFRL nor the Army equivalent has the personnel and the expertise. LO coatings are a similar scenario.
But many or even most mechanisms should be feasible to transfer the requisite knowledge to the customer.
The bigger issue is IP in general. If you’re a defense contractor, and the contract says that you have to supply the government all of your pre-existing IP that’s being used in a new system, and the government is free to distribute that IP to whomever it chooses with no compensation…that’s a very tough business case.
Seems like Case, Kubota, and the like could take a substantial peice of the market share by pledging not withhold such software.
Would suck to lose a war because one of the primes couldn’t fly a repair team out. Military procurement gets more insane every time I look at it. My take is that anything used by the military should not only be repairable in field, but also have a completely replaceable supply and production chain – you know, in case the original contractor can’t produce enough, goes bankrupt, or gets blown up.
It depends on what the problem is. For some things – modern fly-by-wire flight control laws come to mind – the only entity that has the know-how to fix it is the original company that did them; neither NAVAIR nor AFRL nor the Army equivalent has the personnel and the expertise. LO coatings are a similar scenario.
But many or even most mechanisms should be feasible to transfer the requisite knowledge to the customer.
The bigger issue is IP in general. If you’re a defense contractor, and the contract says that you have to supply the government all of your pre-existing IP that’s being used in a new system, and the government is free to distribute that IP to whomever it chooses with no compensation…that’s a very tough business case.