My guess is that - like all competent people - the US Navy staff is fighting a constant battle against short-term managerialism. Occasionally stuff will slip through because of time and financial pressures. I can practically imagine the conversation:

"We need this contract to be signed and rolled out next month"

"But our decision process alone takes a month!"

"Decision takes a month?! How hard can it be? What do we need to do to expedite this?"

"Well, I guess we can outlay some of the review work to the interns"

Not sure about this specific example, but are we sure they had the choice?

I've been in many similar situations where all the vendors in the marketplace have the same limit on their offering. You might want on-prem for example, but offerings are getting scarce because vendors are valued on recurring revenue so they are no longer interested.

If the choice is between a locked down oven or starting an oven factory yourself, it's not easy. We have built this economy for us and it is what it is, even when it clearly is a local maxima.

The difference is that the US military is literally the market-maker.

If they need left-handed solar whoopie cushion, by God and Congress they will get one made.

It was muuuch cheaper that way.

Because adding in repair stuff requires the supplier to provide documentation, frequently training, a parts manifest, guaranteed 10-20 year availability of spares, and probably about 50 other requirements I don't know about.

All of which add up to a rather large contract cost increase.

Possibly this boondoggle will result in the military putting in more reasonable "right to repair" terms in the contract, rather than insisting on the gold-plated thing I mention above, but more likely it will simply result in more cost overruns.

I have a feeling that they still need to guarantee availability of spares if they fix it themselves, do they not? They still have to create documentation for their engineers, do they not?

If you repair it yourself, you have more flexibility in terms of replacing spares with newer items i.e. replacing a whole module when it a part of that module becomes hard to come by.

Internal documentation ..... hmmmm.... LOL.... Often not, word of mouth is the rule.

If there is internal documentation, it's generally pretty rough. Getting it to the point where you can hand it to external parties is a lot of work.

Or is it because nobody wants to assume responsibility?

Let's say what you really want is to be able to fix simple stuff ( replace easily replaceable parts ), and get the experts in for tricky stuff. However the contractor, who now isn't fully responsible to changes to the system, now insists that you take the full risk of your repairs ( perhaps even saying they will void any warranty if you touch the oven/lift ).

Then faced with that nobody is brave enough to say - heck fine - we will take that responsibility.

And so because the lawyers were prepared to take that risk, the people on the boat are infantilised by contract.

The other side of this problem can be that its going to be financially impossible to support the products (which for the military would be low quantity, heavy compliance burden) if they're not also able to maintain the staff who actively work on support.

If no one in the company is regularly employed to oversee that product line directly, they might be concluding that there's no actual way to support the product at the price point being negotiated.

Fair point - but I see no reason why you'd commision unsupportable ovens or lifts - these are not unique things to aircraft carriers.

I'd suspect custom ovens or lifts are more likely to breakdown than some standard industrial ones whose manufacture and design has been optimised over many years.

Just like new software is much more likely to have bugs that battle tested ( sic ) software.

Sadly the US military (like a lot of militaries) are in love with custom requirements. And there is very little leeway for negotiating them out. So unnecessarily custom solutions are the norm.

Someone who wasn't paying with their own money.