The idea that if your ovens break or even worse the lifts that carry the nukes - and you can't repair yourself, but rather have to fly a contractor out is clearly absurd.
Who signed such a contract?
I bet people didn't think about this during war games...
We have enough bombs on a ship to level a city but we literally can't feed our sailors on that ship for the most boring and dystopian of reasons... they're contractually barred from fixing the ovens.
I hope there's someone in the DoD who does analysis on where we're vulnerable, and looks into these kinds of more inane vulnerabilities that cause indirect effects.
What I see in this thread is industry shills making excuses for a corrupt Navy and its corrupt suppliers, make that a corrupt military.
If the Navy admirals truly believed they had real wars to fight and thus needed field serviceable equipment, would they write contracts that expected manufacturers to fly civilian service technicians into battle zones to fix equipment when the navy itself has technicians that are way more skilled than the manufacturers technicians?
Take the sheer nonsense coming from the Government and the Navy.
> The ship was struggling to feed its crew of over 4,500 because six of its eight ovens were out of action, and sailors were barred by contract from fixing them themselves.
Are we to believe that the US has placed its defense into the hands of people who will refuse to fix the equipment the nation's defense depends on when it is very necessary because doing so would breach contractual obligations?
Why doesn't the Navy then design its own equipment and subcontract the manufacturing so they don't have to deal with commercial suppliers restricive contracts? They surely have people with the knowledge and skill to do so. I hope in real war if such a situation arose their enemies would bomb the heck out of them on account of this foolery.
This nonsense sums of the title of the book - "War is a Racket"
> Of course, the devil is in the details: the military needs service documentation, detailed schematics, 3D models of parts so they can be manufactured in the field, and so on.
This phrase, embedded in a quote touting the benefits, seems to me to show a big downside. If the Navy (owner) gains the right they also gain the responsibility, and it's not like the Navy is not some huge bureaucratic system. Quite the opposite, the Navy makes most contractors look like DIY Mom and Pops. A sailor may fix an oven themselves until someone gets burned or electrically shocked, at which point the bureaucratic machine starts up and we end back up at square one: waiting to fix ovens until after-actions, reg updates, personnel coaching, part investigation, etc.
In fact the more I focus on this phrase the more the whole article seems like a sarcasm piece (and not just because of the Vulture's reporting style).
Perhaps the oven in question may be an electric Rational AG (German multinational company) combination oven, possibly the iCombi Pro.[1] If this is correct, the manual[2] and service reference guide[3] for the iCombi Pro shows it is quite complex compared to what a ship galley would have used 20 years ago. It's a self-cleaning steam oven, has a touchscreen interface with some significant functionality for commercial kitchens (eg. scheduling/planning of oven use and functions, real time notifications, recording of temperature/humidity measurements for food safety compliance/auditing, etc) and may have WiFi/wired Ethernet connectivity depending on model.
Rational AG's maritime division state they provide:
"...training to show your on-board technicians to identify, repair, and diagnose problems at sea, maintenance programs to ensure smooth operation, and the special RATIONAL marine service app with user’s manuals, wiring diagrams, and key information for quick troubleshooting."
The "RATIONAL marine service app" referred to is probably [5] and screenshots show an ability to order spare parts, view technician manuals, view electrical schematics, etc. This app does however appear to just be a front end for a web browser session back to a vendor website.
Rational AG publish a US RRP list for spare parts.[6]
Rational AG also appear to have servicing locations in Dubai (AE), Genoa (IT), Hamburg (DE), Miami (US), Nantes (FR), Shanghai (CN), Singapore (SG) and Turku (FI).[4]
Seemingly these ovens (or ones similar to this) are used successfully on cruise ships with double the number of mouths to feed. Is this an oven manufacturer problem or an operator problem?
If it's an oven manufacturer problem, are there _any_ marine galley steam ovens on the market (and thus subsidised in price by the cruise ship industry) that are more reliable? Or are all such ovens now so complex compared to 20 years ago that there are 10 times the number of failure modes no matter which oven is chosen?
If it's an operator problem, consider that the Gerald R Ford class now only has 2 galleys (one gets used only when an air wing is present) down from 5 galleys on the Nimitz class. This change would appear to be a very large loss of galley redundancy. At least the main galley, and most likely the second galley too, on the Gerald R Ford class is going to be used 24/7 for at least the 3-8 weeks between port calls that carriers typically achieve. Disconnecting, disassembling and repairing a complex machine in a tight space of a galley operating 24/7 does not sound particularly viable. If the entire galley could be closed for a day (such as at a port call) then maybe repair of ovens is OK to complete if spare parts have been ordered ahead of time and are waiting for installation, no specialised tools are needed for installation or they've also been planned ahead of time to be present, and there is enough space in the galley to disconnect and disassemble an oven. Navy would have to train dozens of their own technicians to repair a particular type of oven on a particular class of ship. And due to the lack of real world repair experience those technicians will be exposed to, they're much more likely to make mistakes or take longer to complete repairs.
There's some further possible problems to self-repair though:
- The Gerald R Ford class galleys could have had ovens installed into a tight configuration that requires half the galley to be disconnected and relocated just to gain access and space to disconnect and disassemble an oven.
- If a replacement oven is needed, maybe half the galley needs to be removed first, and maybe lots of other equipment, conduits, doorways, etc need to be removed to get an oven off the ship, and a replacement oven installed back in the galley. It depends on how easily accessible the Gerald R Ford class galleys are to the exterior of the ship. It's not uncommon for ship repairs/upgrades for heavy equipment to have to be removed by cutting through the hull and removing interior compartments that might be in the way.
[1] https://www.usaspending.gov/award/CONT_AWD_N6279324P0006_970...
[2] https://www.rational-online.com/en_us/customercare/downloads...
[3] https://www.keelingcatering.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/05...
[4] https://www.rational-online.com/en_us/industry/marine/
[5] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.apprologic...
[6] https://www.rational-online.com/media/downloads/service-part...
This is overloading the meaning of the phrase "right to repair". Usually on HN it means some kind of obligation on suppliers, to provide access to documentation or parts. Here it's something else: the client actually signed a contract agreeing not even to attempt to repair their own devices, which they bought:
> "six of its eight ovens were out of action, and sailors were barred by contract from fixing them themselves"
It's a very different flavor of "right to repair", so I wanted to highlight the language ambiguity.
(Tangentially, food service on a different US aircraft carrier was one of the targets of the "Fat Leonard" contractor bribery ring,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fat_Leonard_scandal (C-f "Former Food Service Officer for the aircraft carrier, the USS George Washington and the Seventh Fleet Command Ship, the USS Blue Ridge")
)