I recently bought my children an Oculus Quest because ... nagging. And I was utterly blown away.
I understand why every billionaire is betting on this in some way.
I would however put these goggles firmly in the camp of weapons like the tank that fires hundreds of missiles that fly off independently and destroy a hundred passing tanks. There is such a distance from "kinda works in demo" to "killing active enemy" that it is barely worth thinking about for five years or more.
I would have to put other projects up top like
- when all the civilian engine development turns to batteries and electric, how the hell do we keep our planes trains and automobiles running. Just how expensive will getting the gas get?
- Do ship defences really work? I would want to be pretty sure we test fire every kind of drone and missile at real ships and see if they shoot them down.
- In defiance of everything i wrote above, Apparently there is a cool targeting sight that puts a red dot on where the bullet will land based on distance, weather etc etc. It "apparently" makes every squaddie a sniper and is going to roll out to US army real soon. My question is once soldiers get out of a vehicle, how lethal is the battlefield now? What's the survival time measured in minutes under sniper and artillery fire? The last time the battlefield was insanely lethal people just dig trenches to even survive the day.
>The last time the battlefield was insanely lethal people just dig trenches to even survive the day.
This occurred during a time when trenches actually protected those soldiers. Modern artillery with GPS-guided rounds can not only target a specific building (so far away that you need to account for the rotation of the earth as it spins underneath the round) but you can pick the window of the building you want the round to go through.
For a fraction of the cost there's also the ol' hand-grenade-duct-taped-to-a-quadcopter.
Hiding in a trench isn't really going to save anyone.
People have been bragging about the accuracy of weapons for the last half century or so, and they haven't been wrong. The weapons do hit what you aim them at.
You may notice though, that war hasn't ended up being people lobbing a bunch of smart weapons at each other, and militaries still seem to be digging holes and building walls.
So I came back to this after a while. I agree with you but was wondering why. And I think it is target selection. We can now and have had the ability for decades to drop a bomb in through a chosen window. The problem is always which window and what if the window is mobile?
For this you need up to the minute intelligence and that is either insiders, or boots on the ground. If you have penetrated their networks well enough to have up to the minute intel, it's a totally different game anyway. And if you have active frontline soldiers there then it's close air support.
I suspect this is the issue of asymmetric warfare (where one side massively out-tech and out-weapons the other but the terrain (mountains / cities) nullifies the effect or symmetric warfare (where frankly we seem to be preparing for now ) - and effectively we make close air support into artillery (or vice versa) lobbing smart bombs directed by frontline soldiers.
The problem is of course the other side will too - so we just have the artillery of WWI - only even more accurate and responsive to front line needs.
So the solution: have tanks next to your trenches. If your opponent loads air-burst rounds into their weapon, charge at them with your tank.
If your opponent loads armor-piercing rounds into their weapon, run into the trench. Armor-piercing (neither HEAT nor Sabot) can do much vs a trench. (I'm ignoring the AC-130, just assuming land-based combat for now cause AC-130 is beaten by a totally different strategy: air superiority)
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"Combined arms". Your opponent has to load his weapon with the right bullet for the right circumstance. Mix up your strategies (both defensive and offensive strategies).
* HEAT-armor piercing loses to reactive armor on a tank.
* Reactive-armor loses to sabot-rounds.
* Sabot rounds lose to long-distance battle (air-resistance slows down the round). HEAT is better at long-distance (HEAT always was kinda slow: most of the "power" comes from the explosion that occurs after-the-collision... which is beaten by reactive armor).
You can't guard against everything. Instead, you rely upon mixing up the strategies enough so that enemies are kept "guessing" as to which weapon to load / unload.
HEAT rounds and Sabot rounds just aren't useful against civilians or soft targets. They're a weapon for dislodging highly armored enemies: like bunkers, tanks and the like.
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The weapons that are useful against soft targets are pistols, machine guns, rifles, and the like. And they're already being used in crimes and other such situations.
There's no point shooting 120mm tank sabot rounds at people, because a 9mm pistol will effectively kill at much cheaper prices. There's pretty much nothing to fear from the more sophisticated weapons. A singular 120mm tank round weighs nearly 40 lbs.
In contrast, you can carry something like 1000+ rounds of 9mm ammunition in the same 40lbs weight. The weapons used on the battlefield (ex: missiles, HEAT rounds, rockets, etc. etc.) simply aren't useful in soft / civilian settings.
But that still has all the problems associated with why M1 Abrams are suboptimal for infantry.
1. Very slow rate of fire -- It takes time to load the weapon.
2. Low number of shells -- an M1 Abrams only can carry 40ish shots.
3. Extreme heavy weight / armor is redundant -- 70-tons means really big engines, really big engines uses a lot of fuel.
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I'd say the "heavy vehicle" that is actually designed for infantry are the M2 Bradley IFV. Less than 30 tons, a smaller 25mm chain gun with 900-rounds, armor still too thick for small-arms fire (but not redundantly / absurdly thick like the M1 Abrams).
The 25mm cannon is still capable of firing those "anti-trench burst rounds" that started this thread, and a faster rate of fire would be more useful than a bigger, slower 120mm boom.
Things like the M1 Abrams exist to kill things like the M2 Bradley. Sure, the M1 Abrams has some tricks (mainly the 50-cal secondary gun) to deal with infantry, but a lot of its features are straight up redundant if there's no enemy armor around.
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A lot of military weapons, maybe most of them, exist to beat the strategies that beat lower level tactics. Ex: F22 is designed to kill airplanes, but cannot serve as a close-air support fighter very well.
A civilian might have to worry about a Predator Drone (seemingly the main weapon we use to kill targets from the sky). But civilians don't have to worry about F22.
My point: Two tanks can't deal with a trench. 10 tanks can't deal with a trench. They just don't have the right weapons for the job.
What the US Military does, is combine a force of an M1 Abrams + M2 Bradley IFV, maybe with a M109A6 Paladin self-propelled armored Howitzer and a cell-phone that can call an AC-130 if things get really bad.
Each machine is designed for a different situation. For the trench, the M2 Bradley IFV has the ability for anti-trench air burst rounds... and the M109A6 Paladin classic "artillery" can lob explosives at a very high angle and probably hit any trench from miles away.
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M2 Bradley IFV can take a trench: it has grenades, air-burst weapons, machine gun, missiles and more. M2 Bradley IFV has thinner armor however. So the M2 Bradley fighting by itself is still not the best option: if the opponent has a 100mm anti-armor gun in their trench, they may kill the M2.
M1 Abrams can't take the trench, but it can lend its armor to the M2 by driving in front of it: blocking those anti-armor shots and making things safer for the M2. The air-burst attack can likely be done from behind an M1's cover.
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If you know the enemy will only send M2 Bradleys, you simply set up bunkers (covered above-grade concrete structures) with anti-armor cannons. Bradleys only have a 30mm gun, so you can build concrete + steel walls that can stop that attack.
If you know the enemy will only send M1 Abrams, you simply set up trenches (below-grade dug structures). Tanks are direct-fire, and the ground is a surprisingly good shield. The M1 can probably penetrate any reasonably built bunker with ease: thanks to heavy 100mm+ sabot rounds (I forget how big tank guns are but... much bigger than M2 guns)
If you build a trench + bunker, now the opponent has to send the M1 Abrams (for the bunker) + the M2 Bradley (for the trench). Now you have an opportunity for the bunker to shoot the Bradley with a 100mm weapon, killing it. And for the trench to similarly attack the tank, largely with impunity (if the supporting M2 is dealt with).
Or maybe the US Army decides to call in the AC-130 and just pew-pew-pew you from the sky at that point.
Almost all combat is N+1. The holy grail is asymmetric weaponry/tactics. Unfortunately all asymmetric weaponry/tactics is eventually countered through R&D. The critical question is whether one combatant can gain a strategic edge over another during the novelty period of the asymmetric weapon/tactic.
Ah, the joy of the Military Industrial Complex's feature treadmill.
Airburst rounds existed in WW1 too. The point is, you hide in a bunker until the shelling is over, then you come up and man positions before the enemy can reach your trenches, or failing that, counterattack while they are cut off from supplies and reinforcements.
Airburst rounds with timers set by calculation, not airburst rounds that can blow up when they reach a specific point determined by proximity, distance, GPS, etc. It's a completely different kind of airburst.
But WWI trenches weren't those kind of six foot deep trenches that are dug out by a squaddie and a spade.
Trenches (at least on the less mobile German side) were underground bunkers, concrete and steel reinforced that could survive literally hundreds of tons of high explosives. The shit fired here would be laughed at by WWI defences. Honestly the dummies in the trenches were getting hit yes, but they were still standing. 1916 those dummies would be five hundred feet in the air along with a ton of earth. And the machine gunners would be underground safe (if not actually sound).
Yes, the air burst attack there would kill anyone standing in an open trench.
But a minute after opening up (and remember this is going to be divisional level artillery you are airbursting here - hundreds of tanks across miles of front, someone will notice) once the attack starts everyone is under the ground in bunkers.
The minute you stop they come back out and start firing back.
(And they will have mined the ground, have anti-tank weapons etc.)
Honestly the more I think about how lethal a battlefield is nowadays the more I think any "front" less than 500 miles wide is just going to bog down
Can’t do much about missiles but against quadcopters with grenades just add a storm fence dome over your trench. And unless the quadcopters get equipped with high strength wire cutters they’re not going to do much.
I don’t think grenades can successfully punch large holes into a storm fence. It’s flexible and very little surface to hit. They’re affective against people because we perforate easily.
> For a fraction of the cost there's also the ol' hand-grenade-duct-taped-to-a-quadcopter.
Its like people don't know we have CIWS or something.
Rockets flying at 500mph are shot down regularly by aimbot defensive weapons. But suddenly a drone flying at 20mph is too tough to handle? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0d_h5uqnYOI
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"Duct-taped grenade on drone" is just a crappy TOW missile. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BGM-71_TOW), which were around in the 70s. That's not a new strategy. We have CIWS today that provide mild-protection against weapons like this.
Wire-guided missiles are older than the TOW system. But I assume most military buffs would know about the TOW.
EDIT: Wow, I knew that there were wire-guided missiles before TOW. I didn't know that wire-guided missiles were in play in Nazi Germany during WW2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruhrstahl_X-4
In any case: the problem with pure wire-guided missiles is that when people are shooting guns at you, and you're hiding in a trench... fiddling around with a joystick trying to move your "drone" (or wire-guided missile) to hit them is a lot harder than it looks. Even if the enemy is the size of a tank (remember: the tank is moving surprisingly fast)
TOW were optical-guided + wire-guided, meaning a computer calculates the positioning, and you "only" need to point the optical scanner towards your target, no joystick involved. 1940s style joysticks being used in modern combat would be a significant disadvantage compared to modern systems.
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EDIT2: CIWS is the big version we put onto the Iron Dome or Cruisers / Supercarriers. Apparently the smaller version is called APS (active protection system), when its put onto a tank or IVF: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-JI0cYo6rag
That's two explosions: once "over" the target, the TOW 2B Missile (one of the many, many variants of TOW) explodes, sending an armor-piercing round over the top of a tank where the armor is weaker.
The 2nd explosion is the actual explosion designed to kill the tank.
TOW missiles fly at 300m/s (or ~650+ miles per hour).
There are plenty of videos on YouTube and other services showing isis &co destroying tanks with mortar rounds strapped to commercially available drones, all you need is a dumb remote release system
Mortar teams are already indirect fire, and have a variety of methodologies at adjusting aim to pummel the enemy with attacks.
Mortars are devastating weapons, partially because of how quickly you can load and shoot mortars and bombard an area.
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If you want accuracy, you use the missiles I described earlier. Mortars are (relatively) rapid-fire weapons in contrast, with a blast occurring every 3 or so seconds.
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I'm sure ISIS is trying to come up with new uses for weapons. But... frankly I'm not seeing how strapping a mortar round to a drone is more effective than shooting 20 mortars in the same amount of time.
Or, if precision is needed (urban environment / guerilla situation), TOW missiles. Going to 1940's style joystick controls in a combat situation when the enemy has point-and-shoot TOWs is definitely a disadvantage.
And you can do this like, 15-times per minute with today's mortar systems. How quickly does your drone fly back-and-forth to pick up more mortar rounds?
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Alternatively, you can see the drone as maybe a CAS (Close Air Support)? But generally speaking: CAS airplanes use gatling guns (AC-130 being an exception: it uses a tank-gun from the sky).
Releasing bombs from flying objects isn't very accurate. It seems like the "meta" has increasingly moved towards guns: 105mm tank guns on an AC-130 to accurately shoot tank-shells / high explosives onto a target. Gatling guns from a A10 Warthog, etc. etc. And maybe a guided missile-launch platform here and there.
CAS needs to fly around and fire more than 1 shot to be effective. Dropping one bomb is like, WW2 dive-bomber style combat (fly to target, drop bomb, fly back). If you actually want to sit around and help out the troops for more than one attack, you need multiple payloads, and guns are really good at that.
Trenches weren't even all that great at protecting people in their days. What the multi-layer trench systems were good at was more or less "making it hard for the enemy to hold this territory for more than a few hours or days after taking it."
During the more conventional phase of the 1st Chechen War, the Chechens made good use of hastily dug zig-zag trenches to limit the effects of Russian artillery and air support. The real revolution now is the proliferation of precision weapons and the use of drones to enable targeting for supporting fires. The trench still matters, but now camouflage and deception is equally important to prevent accurate targeting of a position. The marines did some testing in a drone-saturated environment and had to reshuffle their tactical doctrine to put a much higher emphasis on immediately camouflaging their position.
I mean, shotguns also made trenches a really not great option.
Bad enough that Germany literally tried to get them banned, and considered them a violation of the Hague conventions...
Video games make a joke of shotguns, but they're disgustingly effective in real life.
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"On September 15, 1918, the German government officially protested the use of the shotgun in a note verbale—an unsigned diplomatic note—transmitted to the Spanish Embassy in Berlin, then to the Swiss Embassy, and eventually to the American legation in Berne, Switzerland. The note asserted that the use of shotguns by U.S. forces violated Article 23(e) of the 1899 and 1907 Hague Conventions and warned that any American captured with a shotgun or shotgun ammunition would be executed."
Stealth will always be important - it's just a numbers game to try and optimize RCS vs an opponent's radar systems. The big thing going forward will be creating resilient networks of shooters/sensors. This is where drones will make their money - spotting stuff via camera or radar for other manned planes, SAMs, or artillery.
It's not, actually. Minimizing RCS hits a hard, unavoidable wall once the wavelength of the radar is close to that of the object. So it's a matter of getting large wavelength radars that are accurate enough.
I think if you return to first principles, where the military exists as a tool of the state to conduct policy through violence (or threat of it) then most of the projects don't make sense given the abject failure of the military to achieve success over the last few decades.
A better use of technology for this kind of policy would be on offensive and defensive cyber capabilities, control and monitoring of social or media networks and telecommunications. The CCP seems to understand that those are better tools for conducting diplomacy with 21st century violence more than making it easier for a soldier to hit someone with a bullet, since that is mostly a solved problem (shoot more of them and care less about who they hit)
> I think if you return to first principles, where the military exists as a tool of the state to conduct policy through violence (or threat of it) then most of the projects don't make sense given the abject failure of the military to achieve success over the last few decades.
Tell it to Azerbaijan. The fact that the US didn't have a coincidence of plan and excution sufficient to achieve anything doesn't mean others can't, even with vastly fewer material resources.
Defensive cyber capabilities make sense but I dont know what offensive capabilities means when you are just completely cut off from Chinese networks. Maybe shoot a few Zuckerbergs into China or something...
The US has successfully conducted a lot of policy through violence and the military. As you point out, the purpose of the US military is not nation building, and it has been those steps that failed.
The US navy does test its weapons in live fire demonstrations for both offensive and defensive systems, and includes drones and other asymetric deliveries. You can find some cool videos on YouTube.
I think the real concern is that such live fire tests have been unrealistically small with only a few target drones at a time. There has never been a real all-up fleet defense exercise with hundreds of high speed antiship missiles coming in simultaneously from multiple axes. They run electronic simulations of those scenarios all the time but doing it for real would cost billions.
> There is such a distance from "kinda works in demo" to "killing active enemy" that it is barely worth thinking about for five years or more.
It depends on the level of investment. WW2 saw a tremendous technological progress in 5 years because that was it took to win the war. Nowadays, I don't see why AR would be so urgent.
I am a little dubious about the "war makes technological progress faster" meme. I think technology has a pace determined mostly by physics and what is possible. War perhaps only stops us getting in our own way( see torpedoes).
Just to (cherry) pick a few examples
- WW2 was not even going to start unless progress had already passed the point that doctrine could see a way past the stalemate of the previous war. Germany had proven this (to itself) in Spain in 1936 - that tanks with close air support was now a viable thing at the divisional level. Progress from
the say Panzer II to IV was not "quantum leaps" but solid well tested progress as was similar Russian tanks who were going up against them. Adding bigger engines and more armour, or sloping armour. This was progress by "failing fast". That is an organisational decision less than a technical one. for example :
- Torpedoes : In the battle of midway US torpedoes frankly did not work (it's a terrible thing to ask a pilot to fly low and slow into AA fire and not give them a torpedo that actually will shoot straight or explode on contact). That was fixed in the latter part of the Pacific war but not because of technological progress but organisational change. ie firing everyone who thought there was no need to test torpedoes by, you know, live firing even one.
- Manhattan Project. Yes and no
I mean in early 1939 science did not think it was actually possible to make a nuclear bomb. After Piles' memo that changed and so there was a race on. But the goal was so tempting / threatening that even without a war it would still have been a major strategic goal. just like Rockets
- Rockets. Frankly these are like VR glasses. Basically the technology was just possible in the late 30s. And we would have worked on it anyway - war or not. But despite going from toy demo to actual bombs on London, they were ... well the V2 was the biplane compared to the Apollo 20 years later. It was not war that made rockets go up, it was funding.
War perhaps gives a focus to develop at a pace that would not be seen otherwise, but the space race showed you can do it without an actual live war-
Technology cannot be forced -the materials science or energy equations either make it possible or not. No amount of investment in 1917 would have made a Panzer tank by 1920. You also could not turn a V2 into Apollo by 1950.
Ultimately my view is that war strips away the self-serving excuses that organisations build up around why their progress is slow. It makes things faster because it gives clear unmistakable feedback (see torpedoes) and focuses funding, prioritisation and talent.
It seems it would be nice if we could find ways to improve our organisations without the deaths of millions.
> Ultimately my view is that war strips away the self-serving excuses that organisations build up around why their progress is slow. It makes things faster because it gives clear unmistakable feedback (see torpedoes) and focuses funding, prioritisation and talent
Counter examples on both sides in WWII: A) The allied bombing campaign that failed to meet its strategic objectives for almost the whole duration of the war. B) The continued German development of strategically insignificant terror weapons (especially the V2). The bombing campaign did finally flatten German industry and transport, but not until the Germans were obviously going to lose anyway, in very late 1944 / early 1945. Its first several years had very little strategic effect but cost vast numbers of lives on both sides.
I guess "it can give, and does give such feedback more often than in peace time... if we are able to receive the feedback"
Anyway I hope I was saying that war is not necessary for us to learn to organise better.
And I would say that the Nazi "organisation" was so fucked up that anything that did not fit the internal psychosis of the Party was never going to make a difference.
Which I guess is the point.
A democracy has its blind spots - we should build a more perfect democracy with fewer prejudices and blind spots - and if we do we will I hope see a better society and more technological progress to boot.
Double down on democracy is kind of what I am saying.
(Strategic bombing seems to sit in that weird area of psychosis in military planners and politicians. See acoup.blog recently for it but it has never worked - London, Dresden, Tokyo, all made population more determined, drones killing people at weddings or roadsides is never going to make people give up. But we keep doing it.)
Would you want to virtually co-work with your co-workers Memojis using the oculus T instead of working in an office with them and or remotely from your couch no VR?
I've heard the contract team (PMs) over-promised (as usual) literal SciFi features that can't physically be implemented (especially around the size of the helmet).
Engineers on the project are leaving in droves (we got a couple interviewing for us, but I presume a lot more are just moving internally) to avoid the crunch and (likely) eventual crash & burn (because if they can't physically implement the requirements today I doubt they'll breakthrough in a year).
I've had multiple recruiters contact me this week representing contractual organizations working directly on and with aspects of IVAS.
AR, VR, sensor technology, battery technology and portable computing have come a long way for certain, but most of what's being promised is just grandiose.
I'm always surprised at how much snake oil and empty promises the federal government keeps buying in bulk. I realize why the DoD wants to invest in this, because you should to stay current if not ahead of adversaries, but why do they have to push it as a development effort when it's really a lot of research and exploratory engineering work. Does it take take big promise to get adequate funding for slightly less grandiose but still cutting edge work?
The older I get, the more tired I get of the constant oversell in technology.
I worked for a relatively mundane company that had to bid on government contracts. This lying made it nearly impossible to win bids for the longest time. Government was always happy to go with someone who was lying because everyone was lying and the one or two companies giving legitimate bids looked like they were below industry standards.
Based on these conversations, I'm curious what you think the chances are of the Army's IVAS program being implemented by September next '22 as they're suggesting.
* “The devices met the Army’s requirements of rugged, waterproof and shockproof. But no one had considered, for example, that the headsets needed to allow users to brace a rifle against a cheek.”*
Yeah, tell me you don't have any former Infantrymen on your product team without telling me you don't have any former Infantrymen on your product team.
Two things have kept "good enough" versions of these kinds of systems from being widely deployed:
1) Batteries are inherently dismal, and getting enough of a sci-fi aesthetic and feature set to wow the military brass will always demand enough power to be at the edge of battery logistics hell
2) Infantrymen will destroy any cable you come up with in five minutes
In what world does it take 22 billion dollars to develop an AR goggle program. Its not a mystery why we have out of control spending and certain groups lobby and get wonderfully rich off the governments incompetence and corruption.
In a world where engineers at MSFT make $300k+ - that pays ~70k engineers for a year.
There are nowhere near 70k engineers working on this - I'd be surprised if even 7k - but this has been in development for years, and will be in development for a few more.
Depending on how many headsets they planned to deliver - I wouldn't be surprised if they each cost more than $1k - there are like 60k infantry soldiers - so that could easily cost >$60M.
I'd imagine they spent >$100M lobbying on this and Jedi.
I can't see how this would cost anywhere near $22Bn - but military contractors are known to have profit margins >30%.
I'm obviously missing a lot of things - but I wouldn't be surprised if this cost MSFT >$10Bn.
The one piece of this that might end up costing a ton of money is the testing using live soldiers. Each of those deployments, along with all the heavy equipment is a lot of money.
I saw they already have 80k hours of soldier feedback, so in part, that's where some of the money goes. The rest, of course, is figuring out how to make the HoloLens light and reliable, which no one has ever done.
Idk, this could be a huge money pit. The Army has tried this idea before and failed. Now might be the time, or this could be another JSF spending fiasco. Either way, MSFT is doing well.
>but military contractors are known to have profit margins >30%.
Based on what data? Contract bidders must show all direct and indirect costs and are typically allowed to price in ~10% profit when submitting their proposal. In fact, you can look at historical financial data for LMT, NOC, GD, etc and see profit margin float around 7-10%. A proposal with 30% profit margin baked in would be laughed out of the selection committee.
I'm not sure about newer requirements but tricks I've heard of include exploding material costs after the fact, or exploiting some less tracked pressure relief in the contract that exists to eat up cost overruns.
This is BS. I know how the interview process works. All these big corporations optimize their recruitment processes around pedigree (matched to the curriculum of top universities). They don't look at track record at all; when track record is a far better indication of future performance. That's why their engineers are so incompetent and it costs so much money for them to produce anything.
They have become so incompetent that they don't even have the talent necessary to know what talent looks like when recruiting.
Corporate engineers will never hire other engineers who are better than them (for political reasons), so the engineering talent in these companies has been degrading for years as the bureaucracy and internal politics has increased.
You're comparing corporate big tech to what, the lean and scrappy traditional military contractors? The level of incompetence in the military sector (private and public) is unfathomable unless you experience it in person.
> when track record is a far better indication of future performance
Not all experience transfers over and developing completely new technology (both hardware and software in combination) is extremely hard. I think you're vastly underestimating the value people get from these university degrees when they're actually pioneering new things and actually learned the topics they were taught.
I know people who work at Microsoft and I can see what kind of software solutions they produce. Of course they do produce some good stuff, they have a few pockets of talent. They've always been strong with gaming and IDEs for example. But anything related to web technologies is just a failure. They don't understand the web. Most of the business they get is due to legacy reasons (e.g. companies who use Azure because their legacy software won't run on anything else). They just come up with solutions and then try to forcibly shove it down developers' throats.
One reason why they suck at web is because they suck at interoperability. They can't do open source properly. They don't know how to optimize software for maximum compatibility. This is because vendor lock-in is the enemy of compatibility and interoperability. Vendor lock-in is in their DNA; everything they do is about lock-in. Their software is all about complex, rigid interfaces; this is how they achieve lock-in but it makes it difficult to integrate their solutions into third party software (high friction, high entry barriers) and difficult to maintain/update.
Look at past software they've worked on, ask questions about it. If they have open source stuff, look at their code. Ask them about their design decisions; why they designed things a certain way.
I worked with a Federal Contractor once (you, as a rule, have to go through a middleman to work with US Govt, and that's where most of the profit ends up). Their requirement was that we use their hardware in their datacenter to do our work and never move data out of there. So they asked us for configs. I priced it out, it came to something like $120K in total, sent them the specs. They tore it up and bought $1.2M worth of hardware instead. Insane CPUs, maxed out RAM, Infiniband, you name it. We didn't need any of that. Literally 10x the price. Ever since then I have extra bad taste in my mouth when filing my taxes, and I know for a fact that merely passing money through the government makes most of it disappear into a black hole.
This is the classical "broken window fallacy", for which there are multiple convincing refutations. I'm sure you can find them yourself. But besides that, wouldn't you want most of your tax money spent on the things it is purportedly spent on (setting aside even whether spending it on those things makes sense in the first place, which is something we the people have zero control over), without leaving most of it in the pockets of whoever owns the federal contractor?
Playing devils advocate here, Magic Leap has managed to burn through $3.5 billion and has made no achievements of note - instead of solving the two primary optics challenges of AR, they allocated their capital to make blacks look slightly blacker.
- I'd be very surprised if Apple releases their AR headset without a similar-size (70% or more) investment over the preceding decade. RDT&E for environment-aware devices is incredibly expensive.
- Defense funding and procurement amounts often shock those not in the industry, but the truth is that the entire market for most of what the DoD funds is...the DoD. Sure, a lot of the components and IP can be reused in the commercial sector, but for most programs the DoD has to fund both the initial R&D and the unit sales, because the market is so much smaller and device sales are heavily restricted (e.g. ITAR). The DoD also has MUCH broader and stricter requirements for security, safety, reliability, and compliance with a daunting array of standards and processes than the commercial industry. To be clear, this is on net a good thing for the DoD and by extension the rest of the USA, but it does increase development costs.
Certainly there is profit being made by Microsoft here, that's kind of the point of partnering with the DoD. But the intuitive comparison of "DoD programs should cost the same as developing a commercial equivalent" that many of us make is fundamentally apples and oranges in both the product development and the economics.
A maze or requirement, bureaucracy, and interoperability with existing and TBD systems? Software is expensive to build. Reliable software all that much more.
If you consider an alternative, just make an app and stick phone on a rifle, sure, that will work for 90% of the stuff you want to do, but it would break and that's bad. A true "heads up display" that you can bet your life on, anywhere on earth, at any time, is just a truly massive undertaking.
I'm sorry but even taking into account the clusterf*** of government procurement this is a truly obscene price tag. Even by government standards, this is ridiculous.
It's half as much as the development of the entire flipping Space Shuttle. It's more than Apple's entire yearly R&D budget. It's more than the James Webb Space Telescope and the entire Hubble program (including operations and the repairs that were needed post-launch) combined. It's roughly the cost of 8 Mars rovers of the same type as Curiosity / Perseverance.
This is worse, even, than the Joint Strike Fighter program, which at least started out reasonably with only a pair of 1 billion dollar grants handed out to Boeing and Lockheed to develop two functional prototype fighter aircraft (never mind how the costs spiraled later).
Setting aside the question of how much it should or shouldn't cost to develop such a product, it's absolute insanity to do it with a single massive project. The DoD loves to claim in public they're trying to be more agile, and this is the exact opposite of that. This ought to have been done $100 million (or less) at a time with limited initial scope and incrementally expanding goals.
Don't make excuses for this. There is no possible justification.
> true "heads up display" that you can bet your life on, anywhere on earth, at any time, is just a truly massive undertaking.
At some point you have to make a cost-benefit analysis and look at the bigger picture. For example and in this particular case, yes, spending let’s say 10 billion instead of 22 billion for a rougher solution might increase the dead count on the battlefield in the near future, but if those 12 billion that you’ve now saved go to better free education at home (more engineers in the future to design better weapons) or/and to free healthcare (more fit soldiers in the future) maybe it will all even out at a higher threshold.
> If you consider an alternative, just make an app and stick phone on a rifle, sure, that will work for 90% of the stuff you want to do, but it would break and that's bad.
Given that soldiers are currently getting by with something that works 0% of the time, the assumption that 90% isn't good enough seems highly suspect. Exactly how many more soldiers will be saved by developing a true heads up display versus an off the shelf app running on a ruggedized phone?
This seems like an obvious case of a failure to actually define requirements and make real engineering decisions.
I don't think it's a question of "saving" soldiers, sadly, but rather, "how much more efficient will they be, especially on the attack.
I don't think it's a 0% solution right now: the infantry has a lot of technology: radios, drones, and is getting more. Integrated it is just the next step.
In your simplest web software, there's the first 80% and the second 80%. With projects like this, which are literally life and death, there's many more 80%s to be considered and executed.
Do you ask why space travel is expensive? It's arguably much simpler than this is.
If a pair of goggles fails, the soldier takes them off.
These are the same people who equipped soldiers in Vietnam with a rifle that jams due to mud. The idea that military hardware has to be many times more reliable than space hardware is absurd.
Sometimes the rocket fails but the astronaut makes it back (Apollo 13). Sometimes the goggles fail, and the soldier misjudges a drop and breaks his leg, or walks into a known blast radius and dies, or misidentifies and kills a civilian.
Either way, if this is worth doing -- and I agree with you that it's a big, big if -- it is worth doing right.
Astronauts surviving a failure is a once in a generation event that gets memorialized forever in movies and literature. Soldiers' equipment failing is a Tuesday.
Increased situational awareness has value, but it is a clear case of diminishing returns. Exactly what the cutoff ought to be is debatable, but that the cutoff exists is certain.
Agreed. We've been to space, understand the risks, and have a decent understanding that X dollars pays for Y in LEO. This is an almost entirely greenfield project, so who knows if the deliverables will even be useful.
We all have nuclear weapons, why do we need rifles and infantry? This narrative is total BS. Is the goal to waste money today in order to be able to waste even more money later on countries like Iraq and Afganistan? We've seen what those rifles are used for... These rifles would be more useful to society if politicians would just shove them up their ***!
It was a competitive bidding process, no? I don't mean to suggest there aren't huge problems with the army's acquisition process, but it seems no one wanted to make them for less.
I think a lot of what stifles competition is the military itself. They aren't a good customer. They have lots of broken legacy systems. There are serious reputational risks.
I don't really mean to suggest 22b is too low a cash prize, but I imagine it takes a lot to overcome the barriers that have been wilfully erected. Much less the ones discreetly erected by incumbent military contractors.
However, early prototype IVAS systems were simply not rugged enough for operational use, with one iteration notably unable to work in the rain. The Army has conducted more rigorous testing of the latest version, with what it had indicated were positive results. Soldiers have also experimented with using IVAS headsets within vehicles and during airmobile operations.
Questions have also been raised about the conformal batteries that soldiers need to carry in their gear to power the IVAS headsets, both in regard to how long they can keep the systems running and safety concerns about what might happen if they get shot or otherwise damaged in combat. The Army has said in the past that it has made progress on improving the capabilities of the batteries and their resistance to incoming fire.
That headline would be buried under reports of flying pigs, various people rising from graves, Hell freezing over, etc etc. But i might get my pink unicorn at long last.
I'm American and I don't consider myself to be brainwashed nor do I find anything horrifying about this technology being deployed by our military or by anyone else's military. I think that once you have developed tech like this it is inevitable that someone down the line will attempt to fit it into their own use case.
For heads-up goggles that incorporate real-time information and allow a user to understand more about their local environment than they could with their natural senses I think it is inevitable that a military use case would be high on the list. Once something like this is deployed by one nation, others find themselves needing to develop similar tools to maintain parity and they will focus their attention on meeting that goal or they will attempt to purchase or steal this tech from those that already have it.
Will that lead to more destruction, more control of the globe by America? Is the rest of the world shivering in their boots at the thought that American troops may eventually deploy with these cool goggles? I doubt it.
I don't know where you are from and I'm not in the habit of scouring other people's post histories in an attempt to find a reason to disagree with them or to criticize them. I just think you may be being a bit hyperbolic here and that you are failing to consider that the US military will not be the only military actively utilizing this tech.
I think we should all, regardless of where we are from and where we call home, be mindful that a lot of the technology being developed in Silicon Valley and other tech hubs will have a potential military use case and that some of it will be actively financed and supported by governments to that end, knowing that there will also be civilian use cases that can be explored and commercialized.
There is an active tech trend of improving tools that can be used for active surveillance of civilian populations; improving methods of identifying individuals who buy and use common products so that you can either slam them with ads for your product or use more discreet tools to suggest that they should switch products; developing technology that has the effect of throwing all of us into the pool of potential suspects, etc.
Those things worry me more than any goggles will.
A lot of people here on HN work writing the code that robs us all of our privacy rights, our individuality, our ability to live what used to be normal lives in relative obscurity. Those are the things that I consider more subversive since the people know in advance how their tool will be used and they actively work to optimize the functionality that in some cases actively destroys society and any sense of community that we formerly enjoyed.
Perhaps a trip to the mirror is in order? You can answer that for yourself better than I can.
This is just BS equipement. I mean you can't even wear ordinary glasses with a helmet without it getting in the way, bouncing around, fogging ... and they need no USB charging.
Statements like this imply that "lobbying" is the only reason the government does anything. That, in my experience, is simply not true. Government employees and even legislators are motivated by accomplishing their mission. An augmented reality system seems like an amazing tool to accomplish the Army's mission- I really don't think anyone needed to lobby them to much to be interested in an acquisition program.
Kinda makes one wonder what all the fuss about billionaires going to space is about. VR industry isn't exactly lacking in private funding rightnow. My guess is that this money is strategically aligned with shoring up chip manufacturing in the US (since I am guessing all the parts for this will be required to be sources domestically)
Prime content for /r/im14andthisisdeep right here. It easily cost microsoft more than $1MM just to put together the proposal alone, much less fight for it in front of technical audits and careful scrutiny of every part of the project. Did you not read the article, which made clear just how much scrutiny is being applied to this deal? Do you think someone can just hand out a million dollar check and be given $22B of work without being qualified?
Is having a disrespectful tone against the rules? Do I have to respect a conspiratorial comment as anything more than a shallow attempt to sow distrust against the government? I posted a critical comment that pointed out a significant flaw in his logic and I personally believe that it is indeed prime content for /r/im14andthisisdeep due to OP’s shallow attempt to understand how the world of government contracts and their callous disregard for any evidence to back up their musings
> Is having a disrespectful tone against the rules?
Yes. I will quote your original comment followed by the guideline that you're violating.
> [You] Prime content for /r/im14andthisisdeep right here.
> [Guideline] Be kind. Don't be snarky.
> [You] Do you think someone can just hand out a million dollar check and be given $22B of work without being qualified?
> [Guideline] Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
> [You] Did you not read the article
> [Guideline] Please don't comment on whether someone read an article.
Note that I'm not an admin of HN or anything. Just doing my part to keep things civic.
I understand why every billionaire is betting on this in some way.
I would however put these goggles firmly in the camp of weapons like the tank that fires hundreds of missiles that fly off independently and destroy a hundred passing tanks. There is such a distance from "kinda works in demo" to "killing active enemy" that it is barely worth thinking about for five years or more.
I would have to put other projects up top like
- when all the civilian engine development turns to batteries and electric, how the hell do we keep our planes trains and automobiles running. Just how expensive will getting the gas get?
- Do ship defences really work? I would want to be pretty sure we test fire every kind of drone and missile at real ships and see if they shoot them down.
- In defiance of everything i wrote above, Apparently there is a cool targeting sight that puts a red dot on where the bullet will land based on distance, weather etc etc. It "apparently" makes every squaddie a sniper and is going to roll out to US army real soon. My question is once soldiers get out of a vehicle, how lethal is the battlefield now? What's the survival time measured in minutes under sniper and artillery fire? The last time the battlefield was insanely lethal people just dig trenches to even survive the day.