Army Secretary Dan Driscoll is plotting a major change to the way the military buys its equipment, blasting contracts that limit soldiers’ ability to fix their own machinery as “sinful.”
He also has some allies in both parties on Capitol Hill who want to advance legislation on what proponents call the “right to repair.”
Driscoll points to the issue as a critical component of his Army Transformation Initiative, and plans to bring it up again with the Senate Armed Services Committee during a hearing on Thursday.
Military contractors work directly with the military and Congress to meet the requirements for new systems, but many bar anyone but the company’s employees to conduct diagnostics, make repairs and even order parts to fix equipment.
Even if a military mechanic or IT professional has the skill to fix a system, they aren’t allowed. Companies will also routinely hold onto the schematics and source code for major programs, allowing them to maintain the rights to their intellectual property, but making it impossible for the military to make changes without involving the contractor at every step of the process.
It’s an approach commonly employed in other industries such as aerospace and agriculture.
“We, the Army, are a terrible customer,” Driscoll said at a conference on Monday. “And then we’re also bad to ourselves. We give away our right to repair our own equipment sometimes, which is just preposterous.”
“You would see these exquisite pieces of machinery sitting on the sidelines for nine to 12 months at a time,” Driscoll added. “And we could repair it. We knew how to do it. We had a 3D printer, and the part was $2 and it would keep something out for a year. It was sinful.”
Sens. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Tim Sheehy of Montana, a bipartisan pair, are also backing the secretary’s push, and have growing support within the Senate Armed Services Committee. Over the weekend, the duo penned an op-ed titled, “Pentagon wastes billions with devastating repair rules. We’re working together to stop it.”
“There is conference-wide and bipartisan support to see a fundamental change in how we buy things,” Sheehy told NOTUS. But neither expects it to go entirely smoothly.
“The billion-dollar contractors will lobby hard and quietly against the right to repair,” Warren said. “The giant contractors hate this bill because it will save taxpayers money, and that means it will cost them money.”
While Sheehy is a relative newcomer to the Senate, he’s also expecting an uphill battle. “We’ll get a lot of pushback, but anytime you want to change something, someone’s always gonna come after you,” he said of lobbying efforts against any legislation that would legally mandate a right to repair in contracts.
This isn’t the first time Warren has pushed for right-to-repair promises from the military. During Driscoll’s confirmation hearing, Warren made it a key point of her line of questioning, gaining a commitment that Driscoll is now following through with.
Back in January, Warren even went to DOGE to try to fix the problem, writing a letter supporting changes to repair restrictions that the Government Accountability Office found “could save billions of dollars.”
It isn’t just an Army problem either. Sen. Mark Kelly, an Arizona Democrat, pointed to both the Navy and Air Force as being major beneficiaries of a possible change to the law.
“This is what makes the maintenance of things like airplanes and tanks and ships so expensive,” he said. “I always thought we owned it, until I got here. That’s after 25 years in the United States Navy. You know, I thought we owned this stuff, but we don’t.”
Kelly is fully behind the shift, knowing that it would benefit all the service components to be more efficient and agile.
But there’s plenty of blame to go around. It isn’t the major prime contractors at fault, but actually the Pentagon and Congress, according to Sheehy. “I’m not vilifying Lockheed Martin or Boeing,” he said. “They’re responding to the incentives that the Pentagon has created for them for the past 35 years.” He doesn’t see our military as being competitive enough at producing, fielding and maintaining within the defense industrial base.
A former Navy SEAL, Sheehy said it’s more than just the money; it’s also about giving “war fighters” what they need to succeed.
“We have a defense-industrial complex that has perverse incentives, really on all sides of the equation,” Sheehy told NOTUS. “And there’s really no kind of free-market economic exchange that would operate in the way that our defense-acquisition process does.”
The support for legislating the right-to-repair equipment is broad across the Senate Armed Services Committee. Sen. Mike Rounds, a South Dakota Republican, told NOTUS that it represents a “bigger issue” than just the equipment.
“It’s not just on the machinery or the ability to repair machinery, it’s also on software and hardware,” he said. “When you talk about AI or the proprietary stuff that goes into a system, who owns it? We’ve changed a lot of our contracting within DOD to where, now, [we] make it clear that the contractor does not own it. We do.”
Rounds sees the issue as fairly black and white, and a change that shouldn’t be a surprise for major contractors because the shift “started a couple of years ago.” If the military is using a particular system, software or piece of hardware, “we need to own that,” he said.
Many within the military see the “right to repair” as a national security issue at the end of the day.
Lt. Gen. Joseph Ryan, deputy chief of staff for the Army, said that in his experience, it “just boggles the mind” that the Army can’t independently maintain or repair its own equipment.
As a division commander, Ryan had to coordinate with an employee of the business contractor that built and sold the Army the unmanned Shadow aircraft anytime he wanted to use them. He even described having to coordinate travel across the Pacific theater to ensure there was a contractor with his units as they trained abroad.
“It was a constant balancing act,” Ryan said. “I should never have been reliant on just one person, one point of failure, as a division commander.”
Members of the Armed Services Committee recognize that exact risk.
“Generally speaking, yes,” Sen. Eric Schmitt, a Missouri Republican, told NOTUS. “We need to be more nimble on procurement, on the repair side, just giving more flexibility for combat commanders.”
“The way the Pentagon’s been doing things, it just doesn’t work anymore,” he said.
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John T. Seward is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow.