You Can't Fix the F-35. Neither Can the Air Force.

A 1998 copyright law lets companies lock you out of your own phone, tractor, and now a $2 trillion F-35. Right to repair is in the FY27 NDAA.

The most expensive machine the United States has ever built runs about two trillion dollars, and the people who fly it are not allowed to open the hood.

That is not a figure of speech. When a Marine F-35 unit in Japan needed engine work, the engines got crated up and shipped back to the United States, because the people standing next to the jet did not have the legal right to fix it. Months of a stealth fighter sitting on the ground, because the paperwork says the contractor turns the wrench.

The Army Secretary, Dan Driscoll, recently held up a small part in a room full of people: a fin for the external fuel tank on a Black Hawk helicopter. The vendor charges fourteen thousand dollars for that fin. His own team scanned it, reverse-engineered it, and printed one for three thousand. By his number it came out seventy-eight percent cheaper and three hundred percent stronger. And under the contracts the military signed, doing that at any kind of scale is the part nobody is sure they are allowed to do.

The receipts here are not from a blog. They are from the Government Accountability Office, the federal watchdog that audits this stuff for Congress.

GAO’s latest count puts the F-35 program over two trillion dollars across its life. More than 1.58 trillion of that is sustainment, which is the polite word for repairs and upkeep. So the single biggest line item on the most expensive weapon in history is not building the thing. It is fixing it, over and over, for the next sixty years.

Back in 2014, GAO told the Pentagon the program did not even have a plan for who owns the repair data. The Pentagon did not produce that plan until July of 2025. Eleven years. In the meantime the repair backlog has at times run past ten thousand parts, and the fleet’s mission capable rate, the share of time the jet is actually ready to fly, sat around fifty-five percent. You are paying two trillion dollars for a plane that is ready about half the time, and you are not allowed to fix the half that is broken.

Here is how it happened, and why it is the same thing happening in your driveway.

About twenty years ago the Air Force bought the F-35 on what they call a total system approach. In plain English, Lockheed Martin got the rights to the whole thing. The technology, the parts, the diagnostic tools, all of it. The military signed away the right to repair its own aircraft or to hire anyone else to do it. So every breakdown has exactly one phone number. The contractor sets the price and the timeline, and makes money on the very breakdown it is being paid to fix. The worse the plane runs, the better the business.

Now look at your own stuff. There is a law from 1998, Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. It was written to stop people copying DVDs. What it does now is let a company put a software lock on a physical object you own and paid for, so that fixing it yourself becomes a crime. That is why John Deere can stop a farmer from repairing his own tractor unless he hauls it to an authorized dealer. That is why a phone can shut itself down when it sees a battery the manufacturer did not bless.

The Pentagon and the farmer are getting billed by the same machine, and the whole design of that machine is that the thing you own is the one thing you are not allowed to maintain. The lobby that fights to keep it this way knows exactly what it is protecting. Well, fuck that lobby.

This one is live right now, so here is where to point.

Last week the House Armed Services Committee put right to repair into next year’s defense bill, the FY27 NDAA, on a bipartisan amendment. Good. Except the same language passed both the House and the Senate last year and then quietly vanished in the conference committee, the closed-door room where the final bill gets written, after weapons contractors lobbied it out. The bill underneath it, the Warrior Right to Repair Act, was written by Elizabeth Warren, a Democrat from Massachusetts, and Tim Sheehy, a Republican from Montana. A D and an R wrote it. A conference run by both parties killed it.

So the move is not to cheer the markup vote. The markup is the easy part. Watch the conference. That is where it died last time, and that is where it dies again if nobody is looking. Call your House member and tell them the F-35 repair language stays in the final bill, not just the draft.

This whole thing got me thinking. I have been on the wrong end of this exact lock for years. The phone battery I could not swap. The TV I could not open the year after the warranty died, over a board I could have replaced for nine bucks if anyone would sell me one. A guy I know two counties over, staring at a tractor he owns free and clear and is not allowed to fix. None of it got a hearing. Nobody in that conference room ever lost a minute over my TV. It took a two trillion dollar fighter jet, the most expensive thing the government owns, before the lock was suddenly a problem worth a bipartisan amendment. The mechanism never changed. The customer did.

So when they fix it for the F-35, ask whether they are fixing it for you. The same month the administration talked up letting soldiers repair their own gear, Ford and GM were backing a push to make it harder for you to fix your car. Two trillion dollars says the lock is the product. The jet is just the receipt.

#TheRanterFiles