Something I ran across in a video by @Fat_Electrician made sense of something I and most military personnel have never understood: Why military equipment sucks compared to most civilian.
@Fat_Electrician was talking about super cars and why they don’t generally work as well as, say, a regular car. Super cars break down a lot. Some are worse than others. His point, apparently from Jay Leno, is that a Ferrari has much less actual engineering in it than, say, a Dodge minivan. Why?
Because there are thousand more engineers working on the minivan and tens of thousands more background hours of engineering. The minivan comes from a long history of similar vehicles with much more engineering in the actual design.
So, think about a military vehicle. Say the Humvee. It’s not that it’s designed to fail, it’s that there is much much less engineering in it. Ditto any military equipment. Thus, it’s much more likely to break down, just like a Ferrari.
I was thinking about this in light of the current series I’m working on not to mention any milSF. The current series the main character is leading a group that works with a mix of civilian small freighter starships and military warships. The civilian ships, even the old ones, are relatively maintenance free vs the military ships. Why?
1. There’s way more engineering in the civilian ships because the companies sell more of them and can spend more on engineering.
2. There’s a lineage of what works and what doesn’t.
3. Civilian companies cannot spend enormous sums on maintenance.But it’s mostly the first one.
I’m not even sure I’m going to insert a discussion of it in the book. It’s the sort of thing I occasionally insert just because my readers sometimes find stuff like that interesting. But mostly I thought you might.
MilSpec sucks because there’s not as much of it as civilian.
John Ringo, The social media site formerly known as Twitter, 2026-05-07.
August 17, 2026
QotD: The real reason that MilSpec stuff sucks
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