*General Dynamics and Lockheed Martin considered much of the data and equipment on the LCS proprietary — a problem that the GAO has identified throughout the military. As a result, only their employees were allowed to do certain repairs, former officers said. This sometimes meant that contractors would go overseas to help, adding millions in travel costs and often delaying missions. The Navy recently purchased some of the data. A Navy spokesperson would not disclose the price “due to proprietary reasons.” *
I feel like there is a lot of outrageous stuff with these ships, but holy cow I feel like this is possibly the worst part of it all. How in gods name do you buy a piece of hardware thats meant for the military and load it up with "proprietary software" that only technicians from the manufacturer can work on. So the ship cant have their own tech or computer engineer work on it and instead they have to find a way to get some jackass from some private company to fly in at great expense.
Actually the government ordering one more 500 million dollar ship nobody wanted while so many public services go under funded and underutilized is also pretty terrible.