[tyingq]

>the latter puts lives at risk

Maybe. There are certainly past cases of the military creating unreasonable/unhelpful specifications.

Edit: Not justification for what she did. Just curiosity, having spent a fair amount of time in the military.

[NikolaeVarius]

It is not the job of an individual to simply just ignore a spec instead of bringing up a complaint.

[tyingq]

Yes, I'm not justifying what she did. I am, however, curious if the requirement was "stupid" or not.

[NikolaeVarius]

There is always a chance it is, however without some deep knowledge on the reasons for the spec, its impossible to say why a spec exists in the first place.

Many of these large scale engineering specs are "take the worst possible situation you can ever think of and design it so that it can survive 1.3x of that". Yes it sounds stupid to the layman, but this is how you make shit that survives everything you toss at it.

Ignoring "dumb specifications" is the reason why SpaceX lost a payload. They used non aeronautical grade metal, which did not conform to the requirements for spaceflight, causing a mission failure.