Beware the Pentagon's 'Right to Repair' Crusade

Right to repair conjures up images of fixing farm tractors or repairing motorcycles at independent shops.  According to the American Farm Bureau, 75% of the agricultural machinery sold in the U.S. is covered under right-to-repair memoranda signed by Kubota, Deere, CNH Industrial, and other industry leaders.

At first glance, right to repair might seem like a straightforward national security priority.  In fact, the issues surrounding military repair, data rights and intellectual property (IP) are quite a bit more complicated.  Applying a legislative fix that goes too far in allowing the government to distribute IP could impact the defense production supply chain, and drive away new firms and their products, including drones and AI. 

Both House Armed Services Committee Chairman Mike Rogers (R-AL) and Ranking Member Adam Smith (D-WA) have urged caution.  Here’s why Congress has a delicate balance to maintain. 

Nor are data rights the sole driver of readiness.  A recent GAO study of Army ground combat vehicles found that parts were the number one culprit, not IP.  Overall readiness rates rest on a complex interaction between field maintenance and depot-level repair. Many other variables, including shortages of skilled personnel, parts and materiel, maintenance scheduling, unexpected repairs and extensive work, unplanned maintenance, and delays swapping out vehicles also affected readiness.[i]  For the Bradley Fighting Vehicle, lack of parts accounted for 70% of the readiness shortfalls. 

IP as a Stumbling Block.  Yet frustration has built to the point where certain right-to-repair advocates want to scoop up all tech data connected to defense contracts and give it to the government.  The House Armed Services Committee’s current push for military right to repair would establish government-purpose rights as the default setting for any technical data, software and software documentation associated with future Department of War contracts.  Terabytes of tech data would automatically be transferred to the government. 

Data rights – the essence of the right to repair quest – are indeed a tricky issue.  There are cases where the government wants full data rights in order to set up military repair at the depot level or to give the IP of the original equipment manufacturer to several other firms who can compete on repair work.  Individual cases may have their merits, but the “tendency to claim IP rights as broadly as possible” hurts both contractors and the government, observed Elizabeth A. Rowe and Harrison E. Kearby of the University of Virginia School of Law.[ii]  In other words, trying to fix the problem with legislation covering all data rights could open up a can of worms.

In the commercial economy, right to repair works for fixing tractors because specific data sets go to franchisees, independent repair shops, and even skilled owner-operators.  Companies can protect their intellectual property while distributing it to others performing aftermarket upgrades, modifications and repairs.  Naturally, dealing with the Pentagon is different.  Data rights come in three types.  Two are easy.  A commercial product developed by a company and then sold to the government usually transfers very limited data rights.  When the government has paid 100% of the development cost, data rights are unlimited.  Category three is for systems that have been co-developed with both government and industry funding.  The government picks and chooses down to the part level to obtain government-purpose data rights.  Placing intellectual property rights is hard work, requiring both industry and government to pitch in on behalf of the warfighter.  The Pentagon’s own IP Handbook recognized this as “Swiss cheese” data rights.[iii]  

Purely from a practical standpoint, sending the Pentagon an avalanche of data won’t fix the problem.  For one thing, the Pentagon does not have a centralized electronic repository for the data it would suddenly acquire.  This, according to CSIS, is a well-known problem that “has led to multiple services buying the same IP because they are unaware that it has already been purchased.”  In addition, the GAO found in September 2025 that the Pentagon “has not comprehensively collected lessons learned to address IP challenges during sustainment.”

Above all, any legislation that overrides the current process and distributes blanket rights to IP to a bunch of other companies is unthinkable, for industry primes and new tech companies alike.  Industry primes already invest billions in factory space and research and development, investments their aftermarket competitors don’t have to make at the same scale.  As for the new entrants, they operate at the leading edge of strict sandboxing and other forms of data and IP containerization.  “You have hundreds of founders out there now who are building in the national interest,” Palantir’s CTO Shyam Sankar said in a recent interview.  These data-savvy firms are constantly guarding the IP of their inventions from Chinese cyber theft.  Introducing an unwieldy tech data law in the name of right to repair will make these firms, which thrive on their commercial customer bases, wary of doing business with the Pentagon.

Moving On with MOSA.  The good news is that another government initiative, called Modular Open Systems Architecture, or MOSA, is finally bearing fruit.  MOSA is a technical solution that can also provide relief on IP, since it allows more companies to compete and prevent vendor lock.  “The war in Ukraine showed the world that speed matters and an open architecture construct is highly effective in high-intensity warfare,” said Driscoll.  The Army-Industry “right to integrate” focuses on jailbreaking: a deliberate, rapid process where Soldiers work with industry to open up systems’ application programming interfaces.     

New programs like the Bell Textron MV-75 and the Air Force’s Collaborative Combat Aircraft are utilizing MOSA requirements as a springboard to a radically different approach.  In June, the Air Force broke the mold by awarding two contracts for the CCA air vehicles to General Atomics and Anduril–and six separate contracts for the mission autonomy system.  The software can be split from the drone because air vehicle designers built a standardized mission interface with connection points that accept mission-control software from other vendors – all without imperiling software subroutines that control safety of flight, etc.  Put it all together, and it means the Air Force has a healthy baseline pool of competitors: Anduril, General Atomics, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, RTX Collins Aerospace, and Shield AI, allowing for “continuous competition and rapid software development.”  CCA is “an experiment in how to get as much technological capability as possible out of hardware and software by using novel acquisition strategies,” noted Pat Host of GovConWire.  No worries about vendor lock here.         

The Air Force awards demonstrate yet again that the Pentagon has the authorities it needs to manage data rights up front in contract negotiations.  Last year, right-to-repair provisions did not make it into the final defense authorization bill.  Perhaps there is wisdom in avoiding another trend stampede.  Legislation on “right to repair” data won’t cure problems caused by parts and other factors. But it may, as an unintended consequence, diminish the appetite of new companies for doing business with the Pentagon.

Dr. Rebecca Grant is a national security analyst based in Washington, DC specializing in defense and aerospace research and national security consulting.

This article appeared originally at Lexington Institute.

[i] https://www.gao.gov/assets/gao-25-108679.pdf, p. 14.

[ii] Elizabeth A. Rowe* and Harrison E. Kearby, Trade Secrecy and the Government’s Right to Repair. https://download.ssrn.com/2026/2/5/6184278.pdf?response-content-disposition=inline&X-Amz-Security-, p. 15

[iii] https://www.acq.osd.mil/asda/dpc/api/docs/intellectual%20property%20guidebook%20for%20dod%20acquisition%20signed.pdf pp. 23-24.