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Comment by paxys | Hacker News Reader

People on the ground never have use for such tech. These deals are all political and the actual equipment arrives by the truckloads and sits unboxed.

When people rant about ridiculous military budgets and spending it isn't about cutting soldiers' salaries but shit like this.

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This is probably related to training.

Apparently, training is quite expensive - actually flying planes or firing guns and missiles, especially large ones, is expensive.

I think in an ideal world they would want to just strap soldiers into 'the matrix' and train them for free in a computer. Maybe they are hoping that they can do the cheap parts of the training with AR headsets on, and see the results of what they are doing (firing a very expensive missile at a helicopter target that would burn fuel if real) in simulation?

Traditionally I understand this has been done by shouting 'bang' and pretending a helicopter exploded. Do Hollywood special effects that only they can see actually make soldiers more effective?

Huge military research budgets usually mean that this kind of spending is driven by something like a clinical trial - maybe a 3rd military research contractor trained some soldiers the normal way, and some with VR, and then compared their performance at doing 'the real task'.

This was probably then sold as a cost saving.

There's a very obvious analogy here that proves you wrong: nvgs

for anyone else who was confused and about to google it: Night Vision Goggles[1].

1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night-vision_device

His take is a little cyclical, but it's not wrong necessarily. For every set of PVS-14s there were 3 or 4 little pieces of "tech" that were utterly useless.

Not just useless, but a major PITA when the next inventory rolls around and you have to find the individual sub-components of that "tech" when no one has any idea of what it looks like because it's never been used and ultimately serves no purpose.

Then if it somehow falls through the cracks, it's on the commanders shoulders to pay for that piece of high-speed unused tech that the lobbyist swore would revolutionize the battle-space.

I actually met some of the contractors who were "in-country", as they called it, to train and re-train folks on how to use all these sensors. While I was at KAF, I had dinner with one of them and very clearly explained that the equipment he was representing was completely useless to my platoon and me and the rest of the PLs in the company ordered our guys to not worry about it and toss it back in the container. He was fully aware of the feedback that infantry folks had for this stuff, which was really eyeopening to me for how the defense contracting world really works.

Is one in five such a bad ratio for useful innovation?

It might speak to there being some problems with state-side testing of devices for appropriateness on the battlefield but a 20% success rate of cutting edge equipment seems pretty good. Infantry folk are probably going to use the useful bits and pack away the useless ones - that feedback will eventually trickle back to fulfillment and the kit will be updated.

Also - I have a lot of faith in infantrymen finding really creative uses for tech that folks in the lab might disregard.

You make a good point. I don't know, it might be. I'm thinking of all the absolutely bonkers things that all sides in WWII came up with that were obviously expensive to develop but never really saw usefulness.

> There's a very obvious analogy here that proves you wrong: nvgs

Another example is red dot / holographic gun sights.

As an aside, while I agree with you broadly on NVGs, my experience with PVS-7's is that they're basically not much better than naked eyesight (I hope the more modern NVGs are better). The thing that makes NVGs really good is either IR lights or IR lasers.

I think the difference though is all those examples require no more understanding of technology than how to operate a TV remote. Push some buttons, laser goes on. Even zeroing a holo sight is trivially easy.

And yes, modern NVGs are a whole different world from PVS-7s.

I would think you could get a lot of utility from the hololens without actively operating anything.

The potential for passive blue force tracking alone seems pretty awesome to me (but you'd certainly know better)

Another example is optical zooming.

Companies like Mojo Vision have already built a contact lens prototype that could power “superhuman” traits like this.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=pV52DF5IrEc

> People on the ground never have use for such tech.

Strong disagree.

I would absolutely love to have access to field and barracks VR and AR tech. I think there are many immediate and practical and simple applications.

The army has a little under 500K active-duty soldiers. As a gross overestimation, if they were delivering one headset per soldier, napkin math shows: $22B / 500K = $44K per headset.

Even if the tech were super useful and every single soldier got one, that price tag seems absolutely absurd. How can anyone be okay with this?

I'm not necessarily supportive of the contract or the spending or whatever, but I just want to present a reframing of the costs: imagine it's just 1000 headsets, but they're so useful they cut $1B/year+ in costs (or allow for $1B/year+ in extra operational capacity) annually for the next 50+ years. This is, allegedly, foundational work on a transformative technology, so maybe that's "the dream".

Now ... is that realistic? haha

You're on point, these will save the military more money than they are spending. There are two very key areas off the battlefield, planning and maintenance, where this will save big time on people hours / salary

So say that they're for planning and maintenance, and we only need 50 thousand headsets. That's $450,000 per headset/person. You'd have to have some pretty amazing efficiency upgrades to save money on salary.

Given you’d only be making 500k units, and you’re making them to milspec, sounds like a pretty good deal to me.

contract award doesn't mean all 22B was spent, that often means the contract ceiling where money can be obligated to it as we buy

If the US army wants to supply one to every soldier then they will need much more than 500K units.

Military equipment breaks all the time and it’s not because of poor build quality, it is constantly being put through the most extreme conditions possible. Conditions that are hard to imagine as a civilian.

OK, they'll need much more than 1 per soldier. But a Hololens 2 Industrial Edition costs $5k. This works out to $44k per soldier, and obviously not every soldier in the Army will get or need one.

Let's get real, this is just outrageous, typical boondoggle military spending.

While I don't necessarily disagree with the sentiment, a good chunk of the contract must be for R&D. The US Army isn't buying a ready made, commercial off-the-shelf product.

Commercial AR/VR products also have the cost of R&D factored into the price tag.

Commercial AR/VR products are not designed to military specifications, nor have only one possible customer.

The article already mentions that it will be "backed by Azure cloud computing services", and you know there will be hefty consulting services added on.

It's $22b over 10 years and I doubt they'd be keeping a 2021 model around until 2031.

It's nothing more than welfare and stimulus that republicans can get behind.

US air superiority fighters already include AR in their helmets.

Let's not forget how the Internet started. Maybe a huge portion of the military is relatively low tech, but they're definitely on the cutting edge (probably have to).

Please point me to an example of this. Short of prepo supply, I never once saw an example of this.

good for R&D I suppose

Private, patented R&D which benefits a single trillion-dollar corporation funded by public dollars. Too common in this country sadly.

You might consider the awesome open-source software MSFT is developing for this device, the Mixed Reality Toolkit, which many benefit from. There are ancillary benefits. MRTK also works for non-MSFT products and with Unity

>corporation

Public corporation, buy shares and enjoy the loot.

I own MSFT shares, why don’t you?

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