Comment by sumtechguy

Louis would be first to tell you that it is all related. Many manufactures have moved to this model. In his space he is specifically seeing 'just toss the thing and buy a new one', when the real fix is 30 cents worth of resistor and a couple of hours of someone's time. The military is no exception. But they may have the bargaining power to fix it for themselves at least. Think of it more along the lines of what mcdonalds did to themselves. Their milkshake machines are broken (10%-20% of the time) because they outsourced fixing it to a third party. The third party has no reason to really fix the issue when a good chunk of their income is repeatedly fixing the broken thing. When the reality is poor diagnostic and poor info to some teenager who was told by his boss to 'fill that thing' and he did it slightly wrong. Mcdonalds could fix it real quick if they just stood up to their third party and said 'fix this, like last week'. But the companies have 'political' issues where people in mcdonalds are incentivized to keep it the same. Also parts of the costs are take on by others and mcdonalds proper does not really have to deal with it. The military has similar issues.