Google "MKUltra"

still depends. food ranges from tastes ok to this meal will outlast you(against your wishes) weapons range from sometimes to yes

Wrap it in silicon, plastic and duct tape and charge 10x the price.

In fairness, it's still robust and quantum secure by design

Military grade means contract went to the lowest bidder

Military grade means made by the lowest bidder.

Former military member here. There are a couple things at play here.

1.) The military will outline a specific requirement for specific equipment that contractors need to meet. Requirements depend on the mission, usage, tools required, etc. so "military grade" just means "we needed a specific product to perform a specific way." This does not mean it's good for any use. Just that it's what we needed in the moment for a specific job.

2.) We are required to buy from the lowest bidder. We ask contractors to build products for us that meet the specific requirements we outlined, then compare/contrast prices. Every contractor that built our product are in the running to become our supplier for that product... if they can beat every other contractor in price.

So how does a contractor win a government contract while still making money on the product they're selling? By cutting corners, using cheaper materials, and ensuring the product will last just long enough to meet our requirements before breaking. The cheaper they can build it, the more money they make while also selling cheaper than all their competitors.

So "military grade" just means it's a cheap piece of crap that met some arbitrary request the military made for a specific tool at one time. If you want quality products, avoid military grade.

I used to volunteer for a German rescue organisation (think firefighters but for other use cases) and a common joke was “when you finish your deployment and you can only retrieve either personnel or equipment, what do you choose? Equipment, because personnel grows back after 18 years, equipment after 30”.

So yeah, we can relate to getting shitty equipment…

Military grade is moniker placed on different types of gear and equipment to denote it was 'militarized' for use in service, or so the idea.

For most equipment, this means it was ruggedized, or in more laymen terms extra layers of plastic, rubber or some inexpensive material to make the item more resistant to shocks, drops or other potential trauma one might expect when used by soldiers in potentially hostile environments. The catch is the companies that produce these militarized equipment sell them for 5-10x more than what they should cost.

In the civilian world, people think military grade means top spec, latest and greatest. In the military world, military grade usually means it's tough but it's also a decade or more behind in tech and performance with very few exceptions. So if someone is trying to sell you military grade goods or worse, surplus, it's guaranteed to be overpriced crap that at best is going to survive a few more bumps than what a normal, civilian version could.

A budget as possible to meet the bare requirements for military use on bulk. You can consider "military grade" the baseline while most civvy items have higher quality, more feature, more comfort, etc.

No. Mil-spec is an actual certified standard

Military grade is basically just “we made this shit to look like it’d be good as a prop in a movie” no actual standards, just good enough to sorta kinda sometimes work and is made as cheap as possible.

Edit; interesting comment by the other fella in the same reply chain, maybe “military grade” also encompasses stuff that’s made for specific purposes but doesn’t need to withstand rigorous standards, just be good enough for this one thing this one time and not much else

Granted, YMMV depending on country and region.

Yup.

EDIT: I see someone else commented that they're not the same. The truth is... it depends.

When I was serving in the military, we used the two terms interchangeably. They were basically the same thing to us. Although "military grade" is a more common term in the civilian sector, we would still use it when working with contractors on custom military equipment.

So if you want to be pendantic, mil-spec may be the more official term in the military. But in practice, we don't really differentiate between the two terms.