The right-to-repair fight could make or break US troops’ robot-war plans

Pentagon policies that forbid troops from repairing and modifying their weapons and gear are hindering efforts to accelerate U.S. operations with ground and air robots, special operators and defense experts warn.

The problem stems from defense contracts that enable manufacturers to retain lucrative repair and data rights, Dara Massicot, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said at a Carnegie event on Wednesday. 

Massicot noted that Ukrainian forces can’t repair much of the U.S. gear they have been given.

“For some of the Western equipment, if it's damaged to a certain point, they can't necessarily maintain it, and they actually have to ship it back out and back in, which is terrible. So there is a drag there if you try to isolate this core function, especially if you're in a high-intensity conflict,” she said.

But the Ukrainians can modify domestically produced drones, and that has helped them adapt at the lightning-fast pace of modern warfare. Their efforts are of intense interest to the instructors who train U.S. special operators at the Kennedy Special Warfare Center and School at Fort Bragg, North Carolina.

The robotic-warfare concepts being taught at the Kennedy school depend on being able to repair and rapidly modify weapons in the field, said Army Col. Simon Powelson, who leads First Special Warfare Training Group at Bragg. 

“We're all about open architecture,” Powelson said in a recent interview. “You have to have the ability to change them rapidly on the fly, and that's also important.” 

Powelson believes that outpacing future adversaries will depend on being able to swiftly integrate air and ground robots with older weapons such as artillery and missiles using AI, in new ways, often during conflict.

“When I think of robotics, I don't think of just a drone doing one particular thing. I think drones are a system of systems, systems of systems that are also tied to legacy systems,” he said. ”There's a lot of talk about: ‘Is tube artillery or cannon artillery dead? No, I could have an…operational objective where I have my reconnaissance drone, my [electronic warfare] drone… strike drone, my bombers, my mine-laying drones are all operating to impart that plan in conjunction with tube artillery.”

In the past year, the Pentagon has urged its acquisition corps to favor open architecture systems that can be easily repaired and modified. But vast amounts of its weapons and gear were designed to proprietary standards.

In 2025, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., and other senators attempted to insert a “Warrior Right to Repair provision in the National Defense Authorization Act. The provision would have required weapons makers to provide “fair and reasonable access to all the repair materials, including parts, tools, and information, used by the manufacturer or provider or their authorized repair providers to diagnose, maintain, or repair the goods.” 

After the provision failed to make it into the bill’s final version, Warren issued a Dec. 8 statement: “We support the Pentagon using the full extent of its existing authorities to insist on right to repair protections when it purchases equipment from contractors, and we will keep fighting for a common-sense, bipartisan law to address this unnecessary problem.”

As the Pentagon advances efforts to bring more types of companies into the defense industrial base, it will have to contend with more problems related to intellectual property, William C. Greenwalt, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, warned at the Carnegie event. 

“This is not a cut-and-dried issue,” said Greenwalt,  a former staffer for the Senate Armed Services Committee. “There are many, many things in the law that emanate from political sources that end up having to be massaged, and I think that's where we are on this issue.”

Massicot said that Russia has found a way to speed battlefront repairs and mods. 

“On the Russian side, they actually do repairs within their units. But they have to supplement with forward-deployed defense industry specialists to the front. So we would have to think about what that means for us moving forward. That's one way to do it. You push it forward, and they're doing it together.”

U.S. defense contractors have taken varied approaches to moving technicians closer to the battlefield. Some, like Palantir, Anduril, and Shield AI, are open about the work they do alongside Ukrainian operators. Larger and more established contractors have been less eager to take similar steps, resulting, for instance, in snafus that affected the use of Javelin missiles and other weapons.

In late 2024, the Biden administration eased restrictions that had limited the ability of defense contractors to provide consulting and support to Ukrainian forces. Massicot said more armsmakers and other contractors should take advantage of the opportunity to observe and work with their products in the war zone.

“Why do we still have policy restrictions on ourselves? It's four years later, I think we can be pretty confident that the Russians are not going to escalate because we are starting to slip in observers, but that's just my point of view,” she said. “There's a closing window to get this done. There are some American companies that are testing in Ukraine. I just don't think it's as robust as it needs to be, given that it's a laboratory for experimentation right now.”