At The Boundary Is America’s Military Too Dependent on Contractors? The Battle Over Right to Repair
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In this episode of At the Boundary, GNSI Research Fellow Dr. Guido Rossi sits down with Terry Guild, a former senior U.S. Army intelligence officer with a 30–year military career and five years of experience in the defense industry at CAE and Intrinsic Ventures. Together, they unpack one of the most controversial policy debates shaping the future of U.S. military readiness: the Warrior Right to Repair Act of 2025.
For decades, military policy has restricted what soldiers can repair in the field—even when they have the skill to do so. Broken equipment often must be shipped out or serviced by contractors, creating delays, increasing costs, and reducing operational flexibility. The proposed Right to Repair Act seeks to change that by empowering warfighters to fix more of their own gear. What does this mean for proprietary source code or intellectual property?
Dr. Rossi and Guild explore:
· Why the military has historically limited soldier-level repairs
· How contractor dependence affects readiness on modern battlefields
· The cultural, logistical, and security concerns driving debate
From wartime efficiency to industrial politics, this episode breaks down what’s really at stake for America’s fighting forces — and whether the Pentagon is ready for a fundamental shift in how the U.S. maintains its equipment.
Links From the Episode:
• GNSI Tampa Summit 6: Cracks in the Lamp: Freeing the Nuclear Genie Pre-Registration
• 2026 Intelligence and Tech Conference
• 2025 Warsaw Security Forum Recap
At the Boundary from the Global and National Security Institute at the University of South Florida, features global and national security issues we’ve found to be insightful, intriguing, fascinating, maybe controversial, but overall just worth talking about.
A "boundary" is a place, either literal or figurative, where two forces exist in close proximity to each other. Sometimes that boundary is in a state of harmony. More often than not, that boundary has a bit of chaos baked in. The Global and National Security Institute will live on the boundary of security policy and technology and that's where this podcast will focus.
The mission of GNSI is to provide actionable solutions to 21st-century security challenges for decision-makers at the local, state, national and global levels. We hope you enjoy At the Boundary.
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