Every minister of defense should be the ambassador of the right to repair
In 2024, NASA kept the Voyager spacecraft operational not by replacing hardware, but by rewriting software to work around failing components on a system launched in 1977. The system survived precisely because engineers were allowed to adapt it beyond its original design constraints.
The Right to Repair is all about resilience. We should value it far beyond its circular economy principles as a safeguard for adverse conditions.
Amazon might not deliver after disasters, but there should be plenty of iPhones around from which you can harvest parts. Repair means continuity. Under stress, systems remain functional through reusing parts, substitution and software adaptation, not through replacement or optimisation.
Resilience is the capacity of a society to absorb shocks and continue delivering essential functions such as food production, mobility and communication. This capacity depends less on technological sophistication than on the ability to maintain, adapt and extend the life of existing assets when replacement, supply chains or external support are unavailable.
This logic of repair is well understood in domains where failure is unacceptable. Armies design vehicles and weapons systems around interchangeable parts, field repair and local cannibalisation. A tank that can only be serviced by the original manufacturer, with central authorisation, would be considered operationally useless. Military systems are built on the assumption that logistics break, vendors disappear and improvisation becomes necessary.
Civilian systems are moving in the opposite direction by Part pairing and software locks. They increasingly prevent the exchange of otherwise functional components. They bind parts to devices by cryptographic keys using manufacturer-controlled systems. This means that failure shifts from a physical to an administrative problem.
This is already visible in critical infrastructure. Modern John Deere tractors may be mechanically repairable in the field, yet refuse to operate unless components are authorised by licensed technicians using proprietary software. This means that food production becomes contingent on remote, corporate permission. Similarly, iPhones pair batteries, screens and biometric components to the device. Replacing them without manufacturer tools can disable functionality or degrade performance, making local repair impractical or uneconomic.
Software licensing further erodes ownership. Assets increasingly function only as long as licences remain valid, servers remain reachable and vendors continue to cooperate. Circumventing these controls, even for repair, is often illegal. Physical ownership remains, but operational control does not.
This creates systemic risks. Systems that require remote authorisation to perform basic functions are inherently fragile under crisis conditions, when networks fail, vendors are unreachable or geopolitical alignment cannot be assumed. Food security, mobility and communication become dependent on factors external to society’s control.
Resilience requires offline agency. Critical systems must be repairable, modifiable and maintainable without cloud access, proprietary authorisation or legal ambiguity. They should degrade gracefully under damage, not cease functioning because a policy condition is unmet.
The conclusion is straightforward. Societies that take resilience seriously should demand repairability and reject serialised, licensed and locked-down assets in critical domains. Not only for ideological reasons, but because they fail under stress.
Repairability must be treated as a design and procurement constraint: interchangeable parts, documented procedures, offline functionality and legal protection for repair and modification. This is how resilience is engineered when it actually matters.