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Comment by fwip | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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.

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.

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

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

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