The Government Accountability Office claimed that the Pentagon has known about problems from overreliance on single suppliers for years, but has failed to develop solutions.
Resource-strapped militaries around the world have long flirted with “robbing Peter to pay Paul,” whereby components and spare parts are taken from one vehicle or system in order to keep another in operation. A report released last month by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) warned that the United States Department of Defense (DoD) was facing critical issues stemming from a lack of spare parts, necessitating this practice—but also that it had much improvement to make in terms of data rights to intellectual property (IP) created by contractors.
Why the “Right to Repair” Matters
The situation the Pentagon now faces is roughly analogous to what McDonald’s franchises have encountered with their notoriously malfunctioning milkshake machines, and what farmers using John Deere equipment have dealt with for years. Under existing defense contracts, the original equipment manufacturer (OEM) usually maintains the intellectual property (IP) of the product it sells, restricting who is allowed to service that equipment. Part of the issue is that today’s modern systems rely on specific, proprietary software and/or require specialized tools and particular training to perform repairs.
This problem is well-known in the private sector. The McDonald’s “broken ice cream machine” has achieved internet meme status, but a far more troubling example is John Deere’s monopoly on repair services for its vehicles—leading to disaster for farmers who cannot plow their fields or carry out a fall harvest because the equipment is broken.
For the US military, this is part of the new reality, the GAO and others have warned. Lawmakers have sought to address the issue, and there has already been bipartisan legislation introduced, the “Warrior Right to Repair Act of 2025,” which would prohibit the Pentagon from entering into contracts for goods unless the contractor agreed to provide access to the necessary parts, tools, software, and technical information to diagnose, maintain and most importantly repair the particular piece of equipment.
Military Vendors Often Control the Market for Spare Parts
This goes beyond just the right to repair, the GAO further stated. It found that several high-profile Pentagon programs faced “vendor lock, which is due to a lack of procured technical data and rights to that data; programs must rely on OEMs or the prime contractor to meet their sustainment needs through sole source contracts.”
Even where the US military can undertake the repairs, it is a matter of obtaining the parts from the OEM. As today’s systems become increasingly complex, their components become increasingly specialized. There is no “one-size-fits-all” when it comes to the components within the very modern military platforms.
According to the GAO, maintainers of the F/A-18 Hornet aircraft warned that for more than a decade, the Pentagon has been unable to procure the data rights for a radio frequency cable.
“This means only that the vendor can make the part, and generally, repairs to that part are made on the OEM’s schedule. Officials considered reverse engineering the part or contracting to stock spare parts, but determined both options would be too costly. Maintainers, therefore, have resorted to cannibalizing grounded aircraft for the part,” the GAO explained.
A similar story was told about the F-35 Lightning II, where maintainers often face hurdles due to ongoing corrosion issues that can’t be resolved without contractor support. The problem then is that the prime contractor, Lockheed Martin, and the aircraft’s subcontractors lack personnel capable of addressing the corrosion issue. That may explain why the F-35 has failed to reach the desired mission-capable rates, which lag well behind some older and more established platforms.
The Littoral Combat Ship Is Impacted—Because of Course It Is
Not surprisingly, the United States Navy’s shipyards are reliant on OEMs for its fleet of Littoral Combat Ships—just one of a plethora of issues that the warships have faced, leading to them becoming something of a running joke in the defense community. Much like the F-35, the reliability may be traced back to the OEMs, which addressed maintenance on a “first-come, first-served basis,” according to the GAO.
“Maintainers cannot redirect contract work from one ship to another to prioritize which sustainment activities get delayed. As a result, LCS had to wait for the OEM to complete the repairs and absorb the delay,” the watchdog explained—noting that in one case, a private company wouldn’t even work on an LCS without the OEM present. That delayed repairs by nearly three weeks, which was still considered a “quick turnaround”!
Maintenance of the Navy’s Virginia-class fast attack submarines also required that OEMs or the prime contractor be present, due to technical data rights.
In this case, maintainers have been forced to cannibalize parts to keep the submarines in service.
The Pentagon Has Known About This Problem for Years
The warnings over IP and the right to repair come as another GAO report, “Weapon System Sustainment: Various Challenges Affect Ground Vehicles’ Availability for Missions” warned that none of the United States Army’s vehicles reviewed met the service’s goal of “availability 90 percent of the time” during fiscal year 2024 (FY24), which ended on September 30, 2024.
The GAO report noted that two key challenges were present across the 18 vehicles reviewed. Those include a lack of spare parts and materiel needed to keep the vehicles properly maintained, and a lack of updated (current) technical data, including manuals and drawings, of the specific equipment. In some cases, the Army was able to mitigate the issue by “harvesting parts from vehicles being phased out of service” to keep the current fleet running.
That was coupled by a shortage of trained/skilled maintainers.
The worst part is that all branches of the US military are facing these issues, but no lessons are being learned from them. The GAO found that there has been “no comprehensive process by which lessons learned on IP and data rights are collected from programs in sustainment and shared either at the military department-level, or across DOD.”
The report noted that the Department of Defense had begun to study the vendor lock problem in 2021, collect lessons learned, and evaluate potential solutions, but had ended the study without reaching any conclusions. Instead, DOD’s current solution is to deal with the OEMs’ poor response times and high-priced services, cannibalize other vehicles when they are unavailable, and hope for the best.
For farmers, this strategy could result in their business being put up for foreclosure. For a McDonald’s franchise, it leads to angry customers and likely lost revenue. For the US military, the consequences could be far worse. This is a problem now, when the US military isn’t involved in any significant conflict; in wartime, it would be a disaster.
About the Author: Peter Suciu
Peter Suciu has contributed over 3,200 published pieces to more than four dozen magazines and websites over a 30-year career in journalism. He regularly writes about military hardware, firearms history, cybersecurity, politics, and international affairs. Peter is also a contributing writer for Forbes and Clearance Jobs. He is based in Michigan. You can follow him on Twitter: @PeterSuciu. You can email the author: [email protected].
Image: Wikimedia Commons.
