Make Sustainment Competitive Again

At a recent dinner at Army Chief of Staff General Randy George’s home, seven U.S. senators were exchanging their favorite Pentagon procurement horror stories, until Secretary of the Army Daniel Driscoll interjected.

“Senators, respectfully, I don’t think you realize these aren’t like one-off, cute stories of government incompetence,” the Army secretary told them. “These are trailing indicators of a fatally flawed, broken system. Like the whole thing is hollowed out. Like you should be terrified that these stories are existing at such scale.”

Driscoll recounted this conversation on a recent podcast while discussing one systemic procurement failure in particular: Time and again, the Department of Defense (DOD) has purchased a new platform, weapons system, or other equipment without also buying the rights and materials needed to maintain and repair it. The Pentagon makes this unforced error early on in the acquisition and procurement process, but it often haunts the military and the troops for decades.

The military should be in control of equipment sustainment, including when, how, and by whom its equipment is maintained and repaired. When the Pentagon fails to acquire the necessary repair rights and materials, such as technical data, manuals, and diagnostic tools, it relinquishes that control to whomever does have those rights and materials — often exclusively the original equipment manufacturer. The military is then forced to rely on a sole source, or on a small pool of suppliers that the original equipment manufacturer chooses to authorize, for maintenance and repair instead of using in-house capabilities or competitive contracting.

The resulting repair restrictions bleed defense budgets, risk leaving service members in the lurch when equipment breaks down in contested or austere environments, and lead to maintenance and repair delays, hampering mission-capable rates of platforms across the forces.

In 2023, after assessing 100 fielded systems, DOD disclosed its finding that about half of them “showed insufficient technical data or IP data rights that negatively affected the military’s capability to maintain and repair its equipment.”

That military repair restrictions hinder U.S. readiness today has rightly been the subject of growing interest in the problem. But the consequences go beyond that. These restrictions also come with steep costs for competition and defense supply chain resilience down the line.

Congress could stop the Pentagon from shooting itself in the foot by requiring it to purchase all necessary repair rights and materials upfront when acquiring new systems. This “right-to-repair” reform would make the ability of the military and its contractors to perform maintenance and repair non-negotiable.

Unsurprisingly, trade associations representing original equipment manufacturers mounted opposition to this reform, which had been proposed last year as an amendment in the Senate version of the fiscal year 2025 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). In a letter urging Congress to reject it, the groups suggested that the amendment, Section 828, “would encourage even more companies to exit the defense industrial base.”

Congress should certainly carefully consider the impacts that today’s procurement policies will have on tomorrow’s defense industrial base, but repair monopolies don’t strengthen the base — they weaken it. When DOD gets locked in with a sole source, capable firms get locked out of contracting opportunities.

Precisely for this reason, the Aeronautical Repair Station Association, which represents the aviation maintenance industry, supports the proposed military right-to-repair reform. Some of the aviation maintainers represented by the association have been blocked from competing for DOD service contracts despite being technically capable of performing the work — simply because DOD often does not have sufficient access or rights to the maintenance data for its own aircraft. 

One maintenance, repair, and overhaul firm, First Aviation Services, began sounding the alarm about competition over a decade ago, with its subsidiary Piedmont Propulsion Systems unsuccessfully protesting sole-source contracts it was capable of performing. Neither Piedmont nor DOD had the requisite technical data and data rights, so despite its protests, Piedmont remained unable to compete, and the work went to the original equipment manufacturers.

And it’s not just maintenance and repair services that are impacted: DOD’s failure to retain sufficient technical data or usage rights has at times precluded competitive spare parts procurement. Rotair Aerospace Corporation, a veteran-owned small business, had manufactured hundreds of arm assemblies used on the Army’s AH-64 Apache attack helicopter. When Boeing, the Apache’s manufacturer, updated the arm assembly’s specifications, it marked them “proprietary.” As a result, Rotair and other sources lost their approval to supply the part, and Boeing became the Army’s only source for it.

Though original equipment manufacturers, who understandably want to be the only game in town, may warn that the military right-to-repair reform would lead firms to exit the defense industrial base, all signs suggest the reform would actually broaden the base by cutting the red tape that keeps capable new entrants out.

Cutting this red tape would make sustainment competitive again. For decades, the Project On Government Oversight has extolled the many benefits of full and open competition in federal contracting and highlighted what can often go wrong in its absence.

Competitive pressure has benefits in addition to lowering prices and enhancing performance: It also incentivizes innovation in repair and maintenance processes and tooling. That same type of innovation tends to stagnate in a “vendor-lock” environment, where a sole incumbent wins by default. The right-to-repair would unlock the power of market competition across a wider range of sustainment activities.

Echoing this point are the findings of a 2017 study from the Institute for Defense Analyses. Enlisted by DOD to examine its access to intellectual property (IP) in sustainment, the institute concluded that, “lack of access to IP data with appropriate rights inhibits DOD’s ability to use competitive contracting for repair parts, maintenance and follow-on production, and likely translates into higher long-term sustainment costs.”

Moreover, delays for critical parts and services already degrade mission-capable rates of platforms across the forces. A 2018 DOD assessment of U.S. defense supply chain resiliency identified “the rise of single and sole source suppliers” as two of 10 discrete risk archetypes because they “create individual points of failure within the industrial base.” 

The surge in demand any future war will bring will quickly reveal the importance of supply chain redundancy. Having the most advanced weapons in the world won’t matter in wartime if they are not mission capable. Giving the military the right-to-repair could help avert having to learn these lessons the hard way.

Promisingly, reform is gaining ground on the Hill and within the Pentagon. A 2023 memo from the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition and Sustainment stated that, “the Department strongly supports the concept of a ‘right to repair.’”

During Driscoll’s confirmation hearing, he agreed with Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), who introduced both the Section 828 amendment and a similar standalone bill in the Senate, about the importance of the military’s right-to-repair, and has championed it since.

In April this year, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth directed the Army to “seek to include right to repair provisions in all existing contracts and also ensure these provisions are included in all new contracts.”

At a House Armed Services Committee hearing on readiness for fiscal year 2026, when asked for tangible ways Congress could help the Air Force recover readiness more rapidly, Deputy Chief of Staff for Operations of the Air Force Lieutenant General Adrian Spain noted that “certainly a right-to-repair” would be helpful.

Air Force Secretary Troy Meink expressed support for the reform while testifying at the Senate Armed Services Committee’s Air Force posture hearing in May.

Most recently, Senators Warren and Tim Sheehy (R-MT) announced that they would be teaming up to tackle repair restrictions. The bipartisan duo will soon introduce a military right-to-repair bill in the Senate.

Codifying a department-wide right-to-repair requirement would boost U.S. readiness now. It would enable capable firms to compete with entrenched incumbents, broadening the defense industrial base and strengthening fragile supply chains over time. And it would bring full and open competition back to sustainment, ensuring taxpayers get more bang for their buck. Congress should include the military right-to-repair in the forthcoming fiscal year 2026 NDAA.