For millennia, it was the greatest show in town. The distant rhythmic clanging of metal on metal was an invitation to draw near. Up close, you saw magic. Hard metal was made soft and then hard again in a useful new shape through controlled violence—intense heat, hammer blows, sparks flying, and explosive quenching in water. It was like a reverse volcano that turned chaos into order and utility.

All of it was in the charge of one man moving calmly from forge to anvil with white-hot metal, pounding it red, creating horseshoes, knives, hoes, nails, pots, hinges, and locks—and repairing them when they became worn or broken. Crafting metal was so essential that every town had to have at least one blacksmith, and many saw him as the very embodiment of virility. No wonder the commonest family name in some societies is Smith.

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Most of our talk about civilization is about how it will end, and how soon, and why, and who’s to blame. These days, everything the public frets about gets elevated to where it has to be seen as an “existential threat” to civilization. 

I think I know where that started, because I was seven in 1945 when the Japanese city of Hiroshima was destroyed by a single bomb. Hiroshima and then the Cold War introduced a new idea to humanity—that we had the power to destroy the world. My youth was poisoned at times by that dread. [...] 

Mostly, we still think of Earth in global terms—nations on continents—and the power relations between those various patches. But the planetary reality keeps leaking through, especially in light of climate change, which is not a global issue. It is a planetary one. 

That image is wholesome and helpful, and yet the old dread keeps poisoning everything that we think about in a big way. And the dread is harmful. It fosters helplessness. It makes us fear the future and fear everything deeply new. And it is grossly exaggerated. 

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An inquisitive anthropologist discovered that what the technicians did all day with those machines was grotesquely different from what Xerox corporation thought they did, and the divergence was hampering the company unnecessarily.  The saga that followed his revelation is worth recounting in detail because of what it shows about the ingenuity of professional maintainers at work in a high-ambiguity environment, the harm caused by an institutionalized wrong theory of their work, and the invincible power of an institutionalized wrong theory to resist change.

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BY 2011, THE WORLD’S AUTOMOBILE INDUSTRY was enormous, intensely competitive, and asleep.  Car manufacturing, inspired by Toyota’s “lean production system,” had become highly efficient and perfectionist but also conservative.  Innovations came piecemeal from all over the map—stability control from one company, GPS navigation from another, bluetooth integration from somewhere else.  That’s the norm in a mature industry with many players in prolonged close competition.  Progress comes in distributed increments rather than concentrated leaps.  

But then in 2012, a brash new company introduced a glamorous version of an ancient kind of car, and everything changed.  Motor Trend magazine gave the new vehicle their “Car of the Year” award with an unprecedented unanimous vote.  Consumer Reports magazine declared it was probably the best car ever built and assigned it their highest rating—99 out of 100.¹

The car could accelerate from zero to 60 mph in a whiplash 4.2 seconds.  It was rated the safest car in history.  It seated seven, with luxurious features controlled from a huge touch-screen next to the driver.  Its engine was twice as efficient as anything else on the road.  And most importantly, its exhaust was free of greenhouse gases because there was no exhaust at all. 

The new company was Tesla. 

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We will see you in a few months for Ch. 3.

THE UKRAINE WAR that started in 2022 turned dramatically on sustainment issues, amid surprising echoes of the 1973 October War.

When Russian forces invaded Ukraine on February 24, 2022, they were confident that conquering the capital city of Kyiv and overthrowing the government could be done quickly with a massive show of force. Just eight years earlier in 2014 they had crushed the Ukrainian Army in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine. Senior officers in the invading force were told to pack their parade dress uniforms for the victory celebration in Kyiv.

Some outspoken American intelligence officers told the media they had the same expectation. The day after the invasion, America’s news was full of grim predictions such as: “Three U.S. officials have told Newsweek they expect Ukraine's capital Kyiv to fall to incoming Russian forces within days, and the country's resistance to be effectively neutralized soon thereafter.”1

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WHO STUDIES, TESTS, AND INSTITUTIONALIZES MAINTENANCE-MIND BEST? I find that the most active frontiers of maintenance theory and practice are in four domains: manufacturing, aerospace, software—and the military.

The US Army, lately, has introduced a new term—“sustainment”— signaling a seismic shift in its doctrine. It was formally introduced in 2009 with a new edition of Field Manual 4-0, previously titled Combat Service Support. The new FM 4-0 was titled Sustainment Operations. The edition of 2019 states: “Sustainment is the provision of logistics, financial management, personnel services, and health service support necessary to maintain operations until successful mission completion.”

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IS THERE SUCH A THING as “maintenance mind?” If so, what are its features, and what is its underlying character? What hinders it? Can it be cultivated? Can it be institutionalized? This digression about the role of maintenance in two wars may have some clues.

War one, 1973. On October 6th in that year, Israel was attacked by Egypt and Syria simultaneously. It was variously named the Yom Kippur War, the Ramadan War, and—the non-sectarian option—the October War.

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DEFEATING RUST is an endless drudgery of oiling, greasing, brushing, scraping, cleansing, swabbing, painting, repainting, re-repainting, and finally discarding.  All that hassle and expense is a strong incentive to devote a great deal of science and engineering to improve the situation.  Thus maintenance issues are the force behind the anti-corrosion part of technological progress.  We want to make rust just go away, and it just won’t.  So we negotiate.

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IN THE OLDEN DAYS before the Internet, when some device of yours had a problem, you had to seek out its manual (probably long misplaced) or some expert repair person.

Now you just go online and enter a few search words. Instantly, there’s the manual for the make, model, and year of your device—even if the manufacturer no longer exists. It’s probably worth having a look at the troubleshooting section. More likely, though, you’ll be drawn to a swarm of relevant YouTube videos begging for your attention. When you tell the search engine what kind of problem your device has, the videos offered become even more relevant. As soon as you pick one to sample, YouTube’s recommendation engine shows you an array of related videos. After a bit of shopping among them, you’ll probably find exactly the lore you need to figure out your device’s problem and several demonstrations of how to fix it. All for free.

YouTube is a damn miracle.

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SOME OF THE MOST VALUED MANUALS focus on known weaknesses of the device in question.  John Hall’s musket manual did that.  So did John Muir’s VW manual.  This digression-within-a-digression examines what was behind the most famous of all manuals dedicated solely to maintaining a flawed tool.  It emerged from the Vietnam War and one of the harshest maintenance dramas in history.

In the earliest years of the war—the mid-1960s—the North Vietnamese outgunned US forces on the ground. China had provided them with AK-47s—a cheap, highly effective firearm referred to as an "assault rifle"—which means a gun that can shift from semi-automatic (bang bang bang) to fully automatic (braaaaaaaapp). The US responded by fielding its own assault rifle— a brand new, highly sophisticated weapon called the M16.

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Once a device has a large enough user base, two manuals are often considered essential.  One is the shop manual that comes from the manufacturer.  The second is an emergent third-party manual that goes deeper and wider, often with an artfulness and outsider attitude that the manufacturer would never dare to display.  Robert Persig carried two manuals on his motorcycle along with his tools—the Shop Manual from Honda for the specifics of his Super Hawk and Chilton’s Motorcycle Troubleshooting Guide for the then-current state of the art of motorcycle maintenance.

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THE THREE MOST POPULAR CARS ever made have this in common: they were cheap, they retained their basic design for decades, and they invited repair by the owner.  The Ford Model T sold 16.5 million between 1908 and 1927.  The Volkswagen Beetle sold 21.5 million between 1938 and 2003.  The Lada Classic from Russia sold 18 million between 1970 and 2012.¹

In essence, they were easy to maintain. Read the piece here. Comment on the piece here.

SOME SUBJECTS helpful for thinking about maintenance don’t really work as chapters, but they can be rooted in a chapter. Call them “digressions.” This one looks at how something called “armory practice” eventually made it possible for Ford to fabricate the truly interchangeable parts that made 16.5 million Model T’s so cheap to produce and easy to repair. Achieving that level of uniformity took over a century of relentless obsession with precision in manufacturing.

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A FUNDAMENTAL QUESTION that will keep coming up is this: What are the best ways to design for maintenance?  At the very beginning of the auto industry, no less than three radically different design-for-maintenance philosophies fought it out.  One lost, but not because of maintenance issues.  The other two won big by rejecting each other’s approach to maintenance.

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