"Military grade" is not an especially meaningful term. I served in the military, and generally equipment is required to stand up to water and sand and stuff, but it isn't necessarily higher quality or more durable UNLESS that was part of the specification. Lots of the times the military grade equipment was in every way inferior to what you could buy off the shelf for 1/100th of the cost. In other cases a lack of manufacturing scale and building to the spec whether it made sense or not led to things that failed routinely due to poor design or lack of adapting designs based on learning after a first generation.
A good example of being locked into a bogus design is old Humvee turn signals. I have never once had a turn signal on a car fill up with water like a little fishtank, but when PMCSing Humvees I would run into this from time to time. IIRC you had to drill a hole in the bottom to let the water out.
Another case is SINCGARS radios. I don't know if they still use them, but god help them if they do. You had to load crypto on them using arcane magic that almost nobody knew how to do, including me, and I took the 2 week class. If you didn't have the crypto set up properly you couldn't talk to people except on the emergency channel in the clear. I can't count how many times we weren't able to talk to each other because the radios were all screwed up, there was a lot of resorting to cell phones when they were available. You would think something as fundamental as radios would be figured out and fool proof, but in my experience off the shelf walkee talkees would have been far more effective, although not as secure in theory. In practice the mujahideen aren't intercepting and exploiting US communications, but they certainly benefited from the radios being dicked up half the time.
A good example of being locked into a bogus design is old Humvee turn signals. I have never once had a turn signal on a car fill up with water like a little fishtank, but when PMCSing Humvees I would run into this from time to time. IIRC you had to drill a hole in the bottom to let the water out.
Another case is SINCGARS radios. I don't know if they still use them, but god help them if they do. You had to load crypto on them using arcane magic that almost nobody knew how to do, including me, and I took the 2 week class. If you didn't have the crypto set up properly you couldn't talk to people except on the emergency channel in the clear. I can't count how many times we weren't able to talk to each other because the radios were all screwed up, there was a lot of resorting to cell phones when they were available. You would think something as fundamental as radios would be figured out and fool proof, but in my experience off the shelf walkee talkees would have been far more effective, although not as secure in theory. In practice the mujahideen aren't intercepting and exploiting US communications, but they certainly benefited from the radios being dicked up half the time.