Short-term, that's not the worst thing on earth when you've got a combat mission to execute, and you need working tanks.

Long-term, you're absolutely right. Somebody needs to solve the problem.

Good way of thinking of something like that is that it's a "spare tire". It's not meant to completely replace the busted part, but just last long enough until you can get a proper replacement installed. In the military, that could be the difference between life and death.

A guy who had been in the air force told me about their electrical generators. They used them to set up temporary air traffic control installations to guide fighters to targets and stuff. The generators would kick off after X hours of continuous operation, to protect them from destroying themselves (due to heat, I presume). That's standard on civilian versions of the generators. But the air force wouldn't buy them unless there was an override. If you need that generator so that you can control the 10 more minutes of an air battle, even if it destroys the generator, you can get it.

Generally known as BattleShort

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battleshort

Or, Id rather damage the bilge pump, than not have it when we're flooding...

Older military aircraft used to have a 'War emergency power' setting (WEP), it produced more than 100% of the engine's normal rated power but it decreased the operating life of the engine substantially and could only be run for a few minutes.

When it's acceptable and when it's not is an important question. And the fundamental problem of command/management is that you want that decision made by the lowest level of command/management who is fully competent to make it.

Well it's being used to clean the air filter so presumably any failure will be caught by said filter.

I would think that a fan that has the purpose of cleaning the filter would have to blow in the reverse direction to blow the trapped dirt out. It would probably be on the clean side of the filter in that case, and any shrapnel it spewed off would go right into the turbine inlet.

It's likely drawing bypass air.

Here's a prefilter for a tractor or something:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_P3u7wgiy-c

It's using air flow to blow the particles out before they hit the filter. If I understand correctly, the part in question does similar, pulling debris out of the intake stream without being in series with it.