The following letter, signed by veterans of the U.S. armed services, will be delivered to Members of Congress considering whether to support the Warrior Right-to-Repair Act, legislation to ensure the military has necessary access to repair materials.

Dear Member of Congress: 

As United States veterans, we are writing to support procurement rules for the Department of Defense that ensure military service personnel have the Right to Repair the equipment they rely on. The Warrior Right-to-Repair Act is a common-sense bill to ensure that repair restrictions do not interfere with the daily operations of our men and women in uniform. 

The repair restrictions imposed by contractors literally put lives at risk. When mission critical equipment breaks on a battlefront – or on any mission where logistics are constrained or contested – our service members are the ones who have to fix it. Any barriers to repairing equipment in these life-or-death situations is unacceptable. 

Relatedly, contractors’ repair restrictions are degrading our military readiness. In order to repair equipment, our military needs to train on fixing it both as part of routine maintenance and during combat exercises. As Captain Ekman details, when Marines cannot repair a generator during a joint training exercise or maintenance workers have to ship engines back to contractors in the United States for repair, they lose “the opportunity to practice the skills they might need one day on the battlefield, where contractor support is inordinately expensive, unreliable or nonexistent.”

Finally, repair restrictions are causing skyrocketing sustainment costs. Contractors’ monopolization of costly maintenance and repair contracts can be as much as seventy percent of programs’ expenditures and are wasting billions of dollars of taxpayers’ money that would be better invested in modernizing our military and manufacturing the equipment it needs.

The best way to ensure that equipment is fixable in the field is to ensure that it is purchased with a plan for repair in place. Manufacturers have sold products in this way for nearly all of our history, and moving away from this tradition has been a mistake. It’s time we corrected it. 

Sincerely,