[HN Gopher] Microsoft wins $21.9B contract with U.S. Army to sup...
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Microsoft wins $21.9B contract with U.S. Army to supply AR headsets
Author : ycom13__
Score : 183 points
Date : 2021-03-31 19:34 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.reuters.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.reuters.com)
| frisco wrote:
| On the plus side, this means we are much more likely now to get
| actually awesome prosumer/consumer-grade AR systems with many of
| the current issues worked out in the next N years. It's starting
| to get to a point where, though it's still kind of lame, you can
| see how it would be awesome, but still needs $B of R&D so... I'll
| take it.
| blunte wrote:
| Sure, but the process of getting there will either directly
| physically harm some humans or just otherwise be highly
| financially inefficient (in the case of developing wartime
| technologies which have no wartime purpose).
| megaman821 wrote:
| These aren't bombs. A heads-up-display has more chance
| keeping infantry safe and reducing the chances of
| misidentifying an innocent bystander as an enemy combatant.
| verdverm wrote:
| HL2 is the best device I've ever used, the future is definitely
| AR. Once you try it you will never want to have a smartphone
| again. Smart glasses all the way. MSFT just needs to
| miniaturize at this point, the UX is already there
| encryptluks2 wrote:
| Yes, you now have a much bigger chance of getting your
| proprietary AR headset for $499 linked to your microsoft.com
| account with the development paid for by US tax dollars used to
| kill children in Yemen with drones.
| jtdev wrote:
| "That war only made billionaires out of millionaires. Today's war
| is making trillionaires out of billionaires. Now I call that
| progress."
|
| -- Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without a Country
| lvs wrote:
| BSOD on your face.
| blunte wrote:
| I don't look like a hippie, but I totally subscribe to the idea
| of "make love, not war".
|
| I imagine what the possibilities would be if we funded general
| non-military projects with the kind of money that goes into the
| military.
|
| Trillions have been spent on wars or war preparation, and of
| course the net result is worsening for humanity. What if instead
| that money were spend on helping humanity?
|
| Do we really need a conflict to be willing to stand behind an
| expense?
|
| Now in the case of AR, most of our lives are not lacking because
| we don't have AR headsets. But there are a lot of workplace (and
| entertainment) situations where good AR headsets would be
| beneficial or simply fun. Wouldn't it be great if that were a
| technology funded for the general benefit of all people?
| chrisseaton wrote:
| How well does your idea work in practice if we look at examples
| from history?
|
| Before the Second World War Lloyd George tried to make love not
| war with Germany. How did that end up?
|
| Sometimes the bad people are just absolutely intent on fucking
| you up no matter what and you need to be able to defend
| yourself.
| datavirtue wrote:
| Right, but our gnee-jerk response can't just be to smash the
| pedal on military spending. You need to have a strategy for
| trade and innovation.
| hutzlibu wrote:
| WW2 (at least in europe) was pretty much a result of the
| harsh on the loosers of WW1 treaty of Versailles. So germany
| did not feel much love from the world - the world was
| demanding lots of pay as reparations every year(I think it
| was originally planned till 1990!). They felt they have to
| get strong to reclaim what was theirs. (Very simply put)
| chrisseaton wrote:
| No matter how much 'love' you give, someone somewhere will
| want to take more from you. And if you have nothing to
| defend yourself with they're going to walk all over you.
|
| What 'love' do you think the US should have given to Japan
| to stop them attacking?
|
| What do you do when you've given all your 'love' and have
| nothing left and they ask for more or they'll attack? You
| need a military and it needs to be good.
| hutzlibu wrote:
| Oh, sure. Si vis pacem, para bellum.
|
| But the thing is: for example switzerland can claim they
| are honestly doing this. The US not really. There it
| seems more "to prepare for war to go for war".
| ativzzz wrote:
| > What 'love' do you think the US should have given to
| Japan to stop them attacking?
|
| Oil and military equipment.
|
| > After the Japanese invasion of China in 1937 and French
| Indochina in 1940, the United States began to restrict
| trade with Japan. In 1940, it ceased exporting airplanes,
| airplane parts, aviation fuel and machine tools to Japan,
| and in 1941, it stopped the export of oil. This
| intensified the Japanese need for rubber from Malaya and
| oil from the Dutch East Indies [0]
|
| [0] https://www.reference.com/history/did-japan-attack-
| united-st...
|
| I kid though, it was a war situation for the US anyway.
| They stop supplying Japan, Japan goes to war. They keep
| supplying Japan, Japan gets stronger and secures more
| resources until it feels confident in going to war.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| > I kid though, it was a war situation for the US anyway.
|
| Right.... so we needed a strong military, right? No point
| relying on 'love' alone?
| DubiousPusher wrote:
| That is a gross over-simplification but it is based in a
| popular narrative so I don't blame you for it. The men who
| tried to avert WWII are mocked and shunned without any
| thought for the context they occupied.
|
| The popular consensuse after WWI was that ambitious elites
| had funelled the world into war seeking the glory of a
| previous age. And in the end, average people paid a terrible
| cost. Due to their ignorance of the changes in mobilization
| and military technology they embarked on something frivolous
| that in previous centuries would've only touched a few but
| instead created misery across several continents.
|
| There was an intrinsic logical reaction. Most cries for
| national glory and exceptionalism should be ignored. If there
| wasn't a direct benefit to the widespread populace, war
| should be avoided. This reaction is most evidentary in how so
| many European countries significantly democratized after the
| war with most monarchies disappearing or being sidelined
| completely to honorific status.
|
| The lessons of WWI couldn't have been timed any worse (though
| this doesn't make them wrong). The intent and tyrannay of the
| axis powers are fairly unique in history (I only know a few
| as totalitarian, brutal and empirical as they; the Assyrian
| Empire comes immediatly to mind). Their kind is not common in
| world history. It was easy to see Hitler as just another
| would be king who might goad the world into conflict but
| might also receded if not attended too.
|
| Edit: Bruce Carlson did a fantastic set of podcasts examining
| Neville Chamberlain's peace efforts. I think you have to pay
| for access to back episodes of his show now but they are well
| worth it.
|
| http://myhistorycanbeatupyourpolitics.blogspot.com/
| chrisseaton wrote:
| With the situation that we had at the time, what do you
| think the Allies should have done as Hitler marched into
| Poland?
|
| Declared war?
|
| Or offered to make love?
|
| Sometimes you need to be prepared to say 'no' and back it
| up with a stick. If you've only invested in 'love' what the
| fuck are you going to do now?
| someonehere wrote:
| If China had the same attitude, yes. The military is in a
| constant race with China to get a leg up on them. It goes back
| and forth.
| datavirtue wrote:
| "I imagine what the possibilities would be if we funded general
| non-military projects with the kind of money that goes into the
| military."
|
| Amen.
|
| China is. They are building a new silk road that they will
| control.
|
| What's our answer? A bomb?
| hutzlibu wrote:
| So china does not have a big military budget, too?
| rurp wrote:
| Compared to the US? No, not at all.
| datavirtue wrote:
| Yes! AND strategies for innovation and trade that are well
| underway.
| wcarss wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_military
| _...
|
| 4x as many people, roughly 1/3rd of the budget.
| break_the_bank wrote:
| Stuff is cheaper in China too.
| wcarss wrote:
| That's a pretty interesting point! I hadn't ever really
| considered how cost of living or cost of goods
| differences in different nations would impact a graph
| like that.
|
| I'm a bit skeptical that many military supplies (e.g. the
| cost of a grenade or of a standard issue rifle with
| comparable specs) vary dramatically, but personnel wages,
| basic supplies, housing, repairs, etc. all probably have
| a big impact.
| hutzlibu wrote:
| "I'm a bit skeptical that many military supplies vary
| dramatically"
|
| Well, how much do you think china is paying for one of
| their own developed (or copied) and manufactured assaults
| rifles - and how much is the US?
|
| I didn't look up the numbers now, but I am pretty sure
| they do vary dramatically.
|
| The change might get less, when we are talking about very
| advanced war tech, like fighter missiles and radar
| systems, but overall China with all of its big factories
| and strong central controlled government - might have an
| edge there.
| harikb wrote:
| When we say "military spending", much of it is not actually
| spent on wasted resources - it is sort of welfare for the
| military industrial complex and its dependent people.
|
| It is just like social security, medicare etc, some amount is
| earmarked for a different group.
|
| What we shouldn't assume is that "not spending on military"
| automatically implies spending on stuff that is actually good
| for the country.
| spaced-out wrote:
| > When we say "military spending", much of it is not actually
| spent on wasted resources - it is sort of welfare for the
| military industrial complex and its dependent people.
|
| And what if instead of paying those people to develop
| weapons, we paid them to develop tech and infrastructure that
| would provide utility to every day people?
| lifeisstillgood wrote:
| Most economists would say it does not matter what they
| build. The economic results would be the same if the
| Military Industrial complex were paid to dig holes and fill
| them in again.
| enriquec wrote:
| not a single economist worth his salt would say this
| ahepp wrote:
| Keynes famously quipped about burying money for people to
| dig up, but I'm not aware of any economists who think
| that's preferable to employing labor for truly productive
| work.
| missedthecue wrote:
| I don't think he's talking about Raytheon engineers. ~50%
| of the military budget is literally just compensation and
| personnel costs for the enlistees.
| cryptica wrote:
| The military is a great vehicle for cronies to launder large
| amounts of money to each other... All paid for by the tax payer
| of course through taxes and asset inflation. Straight from the
| money printer.
|
| Millennials can say goodbye to ever owning a property.
| Microsoft executives will own all the real estate (thanks to
| their bonuses coming straight from the government; taxpayer
| funded) and we can all rent from them. Millennials love it when
| the government takes away their earning power to subsidize
| their own slavery.
| proc0 wrote:
| I think war preparations probably prevent war, especially in
| the intelligence/communications area. Also the military does
| much more than just fight wars. There are many ways defense and
| recon tech can be used that have nothing to do with eliminating
| a target.
| judge2020 wrote:
| If it helps, I doubt the contract forbids MS from using any of
| its R&D on other projects, ie. Hololens 3/a consumer edition
| hololens.
| blunte wrote:
| I just watched a not-incredibly-terrible Russian (English
| overdub) Netflix war film that featured a Boston Robotics dog
| with a mounted gun. Maybe it was a fake (probably).
|
| Either way, it's a bit like selling your sister into
| prostitution but agreeing that you all get some financial
| benefits. It's not how humanity should progress.
| w0m wrote:
| It is how humanity has (in large part) progressed though
| unfortunately. Not sure when or how we can ~ever expect
| that to change, raw capitalism doesn't have the right
| motivations.
| TomK32 wrote:
| How about putting AR helmets onto generals, politicians and
| soldiers, all at once due to some special occasion, and never
| ever bringing them back from that alternative reality where
| they can keep playing eNdlessWar[1] while we get on with a
| better reality?
|
| [1] maybe we are already playing it
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/eXistenZ
| high_priest wrote:
| Life is one big war. Just because you live in a pleasant
| neighbourhood, doesn't mean there are no malevolent people in
| the world...
| munk-a wrote:
| It isn't general human nature to fight - it's the survival
| instinct kicked in by desperation. Some people are naturally
| unbalanced and society needs to deal with that, but most
| people just want to live and let live.
|
| The military is important as a show of force to crazies, but
| if we diverted a good chunk of the cash that goes to it to
| raise the standard of living here and abroad then the need
| for conflict could be minimized.
| HNewsInfosec wrote:
| Only because you live in a pleasant neighbourhood, doesn't
| mean you are not living in the neighbourhood that is causing
| tremendous suffering to the rest of the world.
| [deleted]
| KorematsuFred wrote:
| Sure but then the US military and its associated
| establishment surely seems like one of those malevolent
| people in the world.
|
| US taxpayer money is being spent in protecting Saudi Arabia
| and Pakistan two largest sponsors of all kind of Salafi
| terrorism all around the world. Most of the terrorists were
| funded and armed by USA.
|
| Entire south american political instability has USA behind
| it.
| atoav wrote:
| Even if we assume military is not only necessary, but
| actually _good_ , wouldn't there still be a point where a
| society spends too much on it's military and everything goes
| to shables because of it?
|
| Let's assume the US would reach this point -- how would it
| look from the inside? Would the downfall happen fast or would
| it spawn decades? What if we are already in it?
|
| The US could spend half of what it currently spends on the
| military and still be twice as powerful in terms of military
| force as the rest of the world combined. I'd argue investing
| a chunk of that money in domestic infrastructure, healthcare,
| poverty and a chunk of it in diplomacy would give you a more
| powerful US in two decades than if you would raise military
| spending even more.
| whomst wrote:
| >The US could spend half of what it currently spends on the
| military and still be twice as powerful in terms of
| military force as the rest of the world combined.
|
| Do you have a source for that?
| bhupy wrote:
| > The US could spend half of what it currently spends on
| the military and still be twice as powerful in terms of
| military force as the rest of the world combined. I'd argue
| investing a chunk of that money in domestic infrastructure,
| healthcare, poverty and a chunk of it in diplomacy would
| give you a more powerful US in two decades than if you
| would raise military spending even more.
|
| I broadly agree that we should spend less on our military,
| but this is untrue on a couple major counts.
|
| Firstly, the US doesn't outspend the rest of the world
| combined. This is a talking point that started going viral
| some time in the early 2010's (I think it was on some TV
| show?), but the statistic is misleading because it compares
| nominal dollar amounts rather than PPP adjusted dollars.
| When you do that adjustment, the next 2 countries combined
| outspend the US[1]. This is important because (1) the
| personnel in each country are paid in the wages
| commensurate the cost-of-living of the home country (e.g.
| the wage for a Chinese soldier is 1/10 the wage of an
| American soldier in nominal dollars), and (2) military
| goods aren't global commodities; the US can't procure its
| equipment from China like it does every other good, it has
| to procure them either domestically or from allies which
| are typically high purchasing power countries. A single
| nominal US dollar goes a lot further in China's or India's
| military than it does in the US's, and that needs to be
| accounted for in these comparisons. PPP adjustment isn't
| perfect in this context, but it's _much_ less wrong and
| vulnerable to low hanging fruit criticism than simply using
| nominal amounts.
|
| Secondly, I think the percentage of the Federal budget
| that's spent on the military is overstated. It's not even
| close to being the biggest line item; it accounts for 15%
| of the Federal budget[2], and much much lower than that
| (about 8%) when you look at military spending as a
| percentage of total government expenditure across all
| levels of government. The lion's share of spending today is
| already healthcare and welfare.
|
| Thirdly, I think that the actual cost of healthcare et al
| are understated; in FY2019 the US government spent $676
| billion on Defense, while the cost of healthcare every year
| by most estimates amounts to $3 trillion _per year_. Even
| if you were to divert the entire military budget to
| healthcare, you 'd have to find $2T somewhere.
|
| While I agree that we should spend less on fighting and war
| (because I dislike fighting and war), military spending is
| a convenient scapegoat for other problems, the solutions
| for which are not so simple.
|
| [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/gijt8
| 1/oc_...
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_federal_bud
| get#/...
| blunte wrote:
| I believe that many malevolent people, or at least their
| followers, would be much less malevolent or active if they
| had their basic needs met plus a little bit of cushion to
| enjoy life.
|
| To be more specific, many of the worst people have lived
| through some truly horrible childhoods (often experiencing
| war and poverty as a child). Stop the cycle of war and
| poverty, and then see how naturally malevolent people are.
|
| We have the productivity to afford that; we just have chosen
| to consolidate it to a relative few.
| xd wrote:
| "their basic needs met plus a little bit of cushion to
| enjoy life"
|
| Who's responsibility is it to meet these needs?
| Shacklz wrote:
| Irrelevant of the answer, it helps in general if your
| efforts & hard work towards a better life aren't bombed
| into oblivion
| [deleted]
| rtx wrote:
| This is half true, today religion is the primary driver of
| conflict.
| kleer001 wrote:
| tribalism is the primary driver of conflict and has
| always been
| hutzlibu wrote:
| " Stop the cycle of war and poverty, and then see how
| naturally malevolent people are."
|
| So far it is only a hypothesis, that war can be avoided if
| people just would not starve anymore.
|
| (I don't think there was really hunger in europe pre WW1
| for example)
|
| Also, assuming we would distribute ressources equally
| (nevermind the political means to achieve that for a
| moment):
|
| It no doubt would be enough for everyone today.
|
| But the world population is already going steeply up - with
| people starving.
|
| So if it would go even much more up, if no one would be
| starving - would it then also be enough for 10 billion
| people? 20 billion? How much more roundup can the fields
| take?
|
| So don't get me wrong. A world with no wars and where no
| one has to starve is definitely a noble cause I agree to. I
| just thinkt it is not so easy, if it is possible at all,
| since there was never a time in human history without. We
| don't know whether it can work out at all.
| InitialLastName wrote:
| > (I don't think there was really hunger in europe pre
| WW1 for example)
|
| IIRC gaining and ensuring continued access to food
| production centers in central Europe was one of Germany's
| primary motivating factors leading into WWI.
| hutzlibu wrote:
| I learned it a bit different, but in either case - you
| don't have to starve if you can buy food. And the market
| was working in europe.
|
| So it was more about hunger for power. Because sure,
| owning something is better than having to buy something.
| munk-a wrote:
| Pre-WWI gets a lot of rose-tinted views due to fact that
| a lot of our accounts of living from that time come from
| well off folks - there isn't much literature and art that
| came out of the working classes - there were certainly a
| few good examples but it would become much more prominent
| when the great depression equalized classes and forced
| well educated folks to endure the same life the poor had
| been enduring.
|
| I would still consider WWI the last hurrah of prestige
| wars (where an essentially divine monarch instigated war
| for personal reasons and had the authority to enforce his
| will over the entire nation) but the hardships were real
| going into it.
|
| Content people tend to lean away from conflict - the
| marshall plan in europe seems to bear that out pretty
| clearly in my eyes. I think it's a rather successful
| demonstration of the fact that stability breeds peace
| and, honestly, the US military agrees with me... a decent
| chunk of money in Iraqi Freedom was invested into
| infrastructure repair and, especially, education.
|
| To achieve peace you need to make life worth more than
| death.
| hutzlibu wrote:
| "I would still consider WWI the last hurrah of prestige
| wars (where an essentially divine monarch instigated war
| for personal reasons and had the authority to enforce his
| will over the entire nation)"
|
| I agree to that, but I would add, that the monarch did
| not had to enforce their will on the nation. At least
| germany was very willing to go cheering into war. And I
| believe england, too and france (without a monarch), too.
| In russia it was more enforced, but the tsar eventually
| lost his power and life over it.
|
| It was a nationalistic war - each side fought for the
| glory and power of their nation (whether with a monarch,
| or not). And maybe yes, the last big hurah war - where
| war was welcomed by the majority of the population.
|
| WW2 had to be presented as neccessary and forced upon
| from the outside. Even in Nazi-germany. Some youth went
| into the fight eagerly, but most of the elder generations
| had way too many memories of the last one, which was not
| so glorious alltoghether.
|
| (Oh and I certainly do not have a rose tinted view of pre
| WW1.)
| Shacklz wrote:
| > But the world population is already going steeply up -
| with people starving.
|
| The interesting part is that it is only really going up
| in nations that have not yet the comfort-level of western
| civilizations. I don't have the exact numbers at hand but
| in most European countries, and I guess vast parts of the
| US too, the population is actually stagnant or even
| shrinking if immigration is not considered.
| hutzlibu wrote:
| Thats the hope, I know. But it might just as well have to
| do mainly with culture.
|
| Meaning, if peoples culture does not change, but the
| avaiable food does - we get the "unwanted" result of the
| ugly word of overpopulation - or birth control. Which is
| ugly as hell, too.
| Shacklz wrote:
| > But it might just as well have to do mainly with
| culture.
|
| Absolutely not. Fertility rates have been going down
| steadily for decades in every developed nation - when
| children are no longer a requirement to have someone that
| will care for you once you reach old age, fertility rates
| start to drop.
| hutzlibu wrote:
| Well, this I call change of culture ...
|
| It happens. But not overnight. And being rich in children
| is not only viewed as retirement savings, there are other
| reasons too ... which might change with general
| development. But again, maybe not overnight. Which was
| the scenario I was talking about.
| FlyMoreRockets wrote:
| > But the world population is already going steeply up -
| with people starving.
|
| True, but the growth rate is on a steady decline and
| looks like it will be negative soon.
| https://www.worldometers.info/world-
| population/#growthrate
| trentnix wrote:
| > We have the productivity to afford that; we just have
| chosen to consolidate it to a relative few.
|
| And absent the threat of violent force, how do you suppose
| we take that productivity from this relative few? My
| government threatens me with penalties and imprisonment if
| I don't give up my "fair share" via various taxes. And if I
| resist that, they use weapons to force me to comply.
|
| Are you not just trading one definition of war for another?
| wavefunction wrote:
| I can't speak for your country but at least in the US the
| government is "We the People" or at least those of us
| interested enough to get involved whether by voting or
| running for office. If my democratic society has decided
| through an open and fair democratic process to require
| certain levels of taxation then it's my responsibility to
| society to meet those regulations. If I disagree with
| what has been collectively decided then my recourse is to
| convince enough of my fellow citizens to change the
| regulations. I don't see how that has anything to do with
| war. It seems like a very hyperbolic claim to make to me.
| trentnix wrote:
| _my responsibility to society_
|
| That's the rub. Your responsibility is determined by the
| mob. If you resist, the mob, via the justice system,
| forces you to comply with the threat of physical
| violence.
|
| If I resist with force, is that not war? If two of us
| resist with force, is that not war? If 10000 of us resist
| with force, is that not war? Was the Civil War not war?
|
| Is it really any more poetic when it's done by large
| groups of people than when it's done by a few?
| nwienert wrote:
| I think the only reason you have all your needs met is due
| to war, and now you sit on a pile of blood-stained surplus
| with clean gloves and make faces as though better.
|
| It's all pointless moralizing. Sure, prosperity may reduce
| war. I tend to think MAD and global trade have done most of
| the reducing. But just dismissing war as if you have some
| superior moral compass to anyone with absolutely no sign of
| any insight to reduce it, or understanding of why it
| happens, just reeks of privilege and cheap moralizing that
| I'd prefer stay on Twitter and Reddit.
| trentnix wrote:
| _People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because
| rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf._ -
| commonly attributed to Orwell
| atoav wrote:
| And others die in their bed because rough men stand ready
| to do violence on someones behalf.
|
| Maybe we don't need _rough_ men, but men who _won 't_ let
| themselves be sold as fools for yet another geopolitical
| proxy war. A war with questionable (and arguably even
| negative!) results for our all safety. Because if we look
| at the last 3 decades of war, I am not too sure if the net
| result made the world a safer place. Yeah some geoplitical
| or monetary interests got defended, a lot of people made
| money, a lot of people lost their lives, many war crimes
| fuled a entirely new generation of terrorists, but if this
| would have been about saving lifes the money would have
| been better invested in healthcare or the prevention of
| future pandemics.
| savanaly wrote:
| ...But only because there are other rough men ready to
| violence against them. What was proposed was getting rid of
| rough men willing to do violence, not rough men willing to
| do violence on our side only.
| trentnix wrote:
| What was proposed was wealth distribution. Wealth
| distribution necessarily requires taking from one person
| and giving their wealth to others. If history is any
| indicator, this can only be accomplished through the
| threats or administration of violence.
|
| How much violence is necessary to create your violence-
| free utopia?
| intrepidhero wrote:
| I strongly disagree.
|
| If some level of violence is necessary to ensure peace, the
| people entrusted with the power to inflict said violence
| should be compassionate and wise humans not, "rough men".
|
| And at the same time we should be putting our resources to
| work at lowering that necessary level of violence.
| moolcool wrote:
| Beware "rough men" who project themselves be
| "compassionate and wise", lest you end up with a John
| McCain-type who says all the right things at home, but
| then wants to kill people overseas for profit.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| For a lot of us, what McCain said (and even more,
| concretely acted on) at home for the bulk of his
| political career wasn't any better than his position on
| foreign adventures.
| moolcool wrote:
| Oh I agree, but during the Trump years he (and even W.
| Bush) were lionized as these "class act" figures just
| because they didn't tweet recklessly, as if there's any
| class to their foreign policy.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| Well, yeah, Trump did an amazing job of lowering the bar.
| darepublic wrote:
| You can't handle the truth!!!
| octopoc wrote:
| To be clear this is a reference to this scene:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9FnO3igOkOk
|
| edit: it's a scene where this exact conversation is playing
| out.
| akudha wrote:
| It is not a question of spending money on military, it is a
| question of _how much_. Last I checked, the US military
| budget is around 700B, while healthcare, education etc
| account for a tenth of that amount. Another question is, how
| much of this eye popping amount is wasted?
| glitchc wrote:
| Give people something to lose and they'll stop fighting.
| tartoran wrote:
| Or give people something to do and they will stop fighting.
| (something that brings some meaning to their lives).
| void_mint wrote:
| > Just because you live in a pleasant neighbourhood, doesn't
| mean there are no malevolent people in the world...
|
| is so extremely far from
|
| > Life is one big war.
|
| It's an interesting idea to see them in the same post.
|
| "Bad people exist; better prepare for all of humanity to be
| bad"
| moolcool wrote:
| The last time the US went into a war because there were
| malevolent people in the world who posed a direct threat to
| the nation was in the 1940s
| exclusiv wrote:
| Depends how you define direct threat. The threats changed
| after WW2 for technological, industrial and economic
| reasons.
|
| Also, I don't follow the spirit of your comment. The United
| Nations came out of WW2. And the US is a key member of
| those coalitions against any malevolent regimes.
|
| Just how it works. A direct threat isn't a thing anymore of
| relevance when you're a member of a coalition.
| [deleted]
| ativzzz wrote:
| How about the Korean and Vietnam wars? Iraq? Afghanistan?
| Maybe they weren't officially declared wars like WW1/2 but
| if sending troops to a country to fight doesn't constitute
| wars I don't know what does.
| moolcool wrote:
| The implication of my post is that those wars were not
| "because there were malevolent people in the world who
| posed a direct threat to the nation". The US could just
| as well not have not gone to war in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq,
| or Afghanistan.
| ljm wrote:
| > Do we really need a conflict to be willing to stand behind an
| expense?
|
| I think not, considering the situation veterans find themselves
| in.
|
| The US won't stand behind an expense unless there's money to be
| made from it.
| mirekrusin wrote:
| Ask any history teacher that question if you find opportunity.
| fermienrico wrote:
| I have the complete opposite view: it's such a naive thing to
| say we don't want wars - ofcourse no one wants wars. Spending
| on defense and being prepared isn't going to war, it's
| preventing it in the first place.
| sneak wrote:
| > _if Jeff Bezos gave up his entire networth, you could run the
| US military for ~90 days_
|
| > _If you liquidated both Bill Gates & Elon Musk too, you could
| get to maybe ~180 days_
|
| > _Throw Zuck into the grinder & you squeeze out another ~45
| days_
|
| > _You'd still need ~$200B+ to finish the year_
|
| Source: https://twitter.com/visakanv/status/1291970792293425152
| peruvian wrote:
| The internet itself is a military project and its pioneers were
| all either military-employed or had contracts early on, for
| actual military applications or surveillance. Read Yasha
| Levine's Surveillance Valley. Unfortunately it seems tech is
| forever tied with the military industrial complex.
| potatoman22 wrote:
| 60 years isn't the best sample size for "forever".
| nickff wrote:
| Lots of non-military projects/programs are funded at similar or
| greater levels than military ones. Look at education, wealth-
| transfer programs (social security), and healthcare (medicare
| and medicaid); each of these gets more money than the DoD.
|
| Very expensive science projects (such as JWST @ $10BB) also get
| funded, though they're often pillaged for either pork or
| increased welfare spending.
| wcarss wrote:
| > as Forbes' Erik Kain points out -- that state and local
| governments generally foot the bill when it comes to
| education spending in America. If you factor those
| contributions in, the US spent about $880 billion on
| education in 2011, compared to $966 billion total on defense.
|
| Maybe 2011 was just a really bad year for education, but I
| think you could stand to add citations on what seems like a
| pretty eyebrow-raising claim, that _each_ of these things
| blanket "get more money" than the military -- let alone a
| whole discussion of the spending per user capita on these
| things and the value they have to society.
|
| Also, the James Web telescope, at $10BB, has been in
| development for 20+ years, so that's ~$1B/year or less in
| total expenditures, on a program that's the poster child for
| massive cost overruns and bungling. If it had been presented
| as $10B originally, especially as an instantaneous cost, it
| likely would never have happened.
|
| 1 - https://www.businessinsider.com/education-military-
| spending-...
| nickff wrote:
| Educational spending has continued to increase since 2011:
|
| >"Expenditures of educational institutions were an esti-
| mated $1.3 trillion for the 2016-17 school year
| (table106.20 and figure 2). Elementary and secondary
| schools spent 57 percent of this total ($759 billion), and
| degree-granting postsecondary institutions spent the
| remaining 43percent ($583 billion)."
|
| https://nces.ed.gov/pubs2018/2018070.pdf
|
| Total US Military budget was 619.5BB for 2017.
|
| https://defense360.csis.org/wp-
| content/uploads/2016/08/Analy...
|
| Educational spending was a little more than double military
| spending.
| hayst4ck wrote:
| > I don't look like a hippie, but I totally subscribe to the
| idea of "make love, not war".
|
| I used to be exactly like this. Republicans being bad faith
| actors and then asking democrats for unity is a key example to
| me of why war is inevitable and it's better to have all the
| power than no power. You cannot convince these people out of
| their delusions. We share real space, but have two mutually
| exclusive realities. We can't agree on masks, we can't agree on
| vaccinations. We can't agree that science is a higher authority
| than religious leaders. Half of America was almost "dominated"
| rather than compromised with. Our own cities were referred to
| as "battlespaces" and our own people were combatants. The
| democrats tried to make love (compromise) but failed to prepare
| for war.
|
| Then on the macro scale, I look at situations like China. China
| has no problem abusing human rights or acting
| imperialistically. America built business in china. America
| thought China would democratize, educate their citizens, and
| improve human rights abuses as its prosperity went up. In
| reality power was ceded and now we have both less overall peace
| and an ambitious highly nationalistic enemy with a weak moral
| system. Unless China deals with Xi and its nationalism, war is
| likely inevitable.
|
| How many conversations online have you run into where a
| person's stance is completely unalterable and a mutual
| understanding cannot be reached? Expand that idea to world
| politics. Pretend the issue isn't something trivial, but
| instead global warming or genocide. Who's side ends up being
| right? The one with more power.
|
| When you live in a moral system that says "do unto others as
| you would have done to you," it's easy to fall into the idea of
| make love, not war... But there are many moral systems,
| competing on the global stage. "Might makes right" is a moral
| system, "my culture above all others" is a moral system, "I
| will do anything to feed myself" is a moral system, "everyone
| should be made 'equal'" is a moral system, "the most effective
| competitor should win everything" is a moral system, "what my
| pastor says is the truth" is a moral system, "the emperor is
| the incarnation of gods will" is a moral system.
|
| You look at all the resources spent on military and ask "what's
| the opportunity cost." What's the opportunity cost of losing a
| war? What's the opportunity cost of ceding power? What's the
| opportunity cost of competing hegemonies?
|
| The prisoners dilemma is a _dilemma_. Cooperate is not always
| the best answer, and if you always choose cooperate when your
| opponent is defecting, you will lose.
| hooande wrote:
| Speaking to the current realities in the United States and not
| your general sentiment, $22B is nothing relative to the federal
| budget. Congress is getting set to spend $3 trillion dollars in
| much the manner you've requested. Infrastructure, green
| technology, etc. It really seems like the government is doing
| exactly what you want
| golemiprague wrote:
| Why do you think not financing an army prevents war or brings
| love and peace? There is no evidence to that, probably the
| contrary. We do spend a lot of money on a lot of other things,
| at the end of the day we need to spend some part of the budget
| on security. So the question is how much and if there is some
| objection to this specific spending it should be explained
| specifically.
| bushbaba wrote:
| There are about 300 million US citizens. 21.9 billion split
| evenly is $73 per person.
|
| And this is a multi year contract.
|
| It's a lot of money, but not a huge amount divided across the
| population. This money likely also generates ancillary US jobs
| so the cost to tax payers might not be as bad as it sounds.
| thanhhaimai wrote:
| Half of the US family has less than $500 in the bank. A large
| portion of people spent less than $10 per day on food. That's
| an absurd stand to argue that people can afford to go hungry
| for 7 straight days just so the military get some headsets.
|
| I'm not into heavy politics. But if you want to argue about
| job creation, I can bet that spending the above money on
| infrastructure (like last mile fiber internet) will create
| multiple magnitudes more jobs/opportunities for the economy
| than this.
| [deleted]
| missedthecue wrote:
| Half of the US pays $0 in federal taxes.
| thanhhaimai wrote:
| Exactly! There are around 155m people working. Half of
| them pays $0 in tax. That means ~77m people who pay
| positive tax now has to pay for that $22b contract. That
| $70 now has become $285. The math looks even worse.
|
| The idea that some unjustified spending is OK just
| because it's "cheap" per capital is an absurd idea.
| skluug wrote:
| nahh just give me $73
| Retric wrote:
| First infants are hardly paying 73$, more importantly a total
| is only relevant if this is the only money being spent.
| Instead this is simply more waste by a bloated system which
| delivers sub par results at extreme prices.
| onetimemanytime wrote:
| Sadly the world is not the simple. Small, defenseless nations
| and people are enslaved, one way or another. So, yeah, life is
| grand in USA and Western nations (relatively speaking) but
| maybe it's because their military defends it?
|
| Ukraine for example feels different
| https://i.insider.com/54ff45afeab8ea38458b4568?width=800&for...
| . War sucks so best to make sure no one dares to start one with
| you.
| RobRivera wrote:
| if you want peace, prepare for war.
| luckylion wrote:
| > What if instead that money were spend on helping humanity?
|
| There's a German saying that captures the consequence of that
| thought very well, I think: Soldaten hat man immer im Land,
| entweder eigene oder fremde (You'll always have soldiers in
| your country, either your own or foreign ones).
| quickthrowman wrote:
| > I imagine what the possibilities would be if we funded
| general non-military projects with the kind of money that goes
| into the military.
|
| The possibility of being invaded and a the invading country
| stealing all the nice stuff we built instead of defending
| ourselves. Oh wait, we'll just call 911 but for countries!
| [deleted]
| optimiz3 wrote:
| It's not zero-sum. Having a strong military allows you to
| pursue your (peaceful) interests without interference from
| others who disagree with your agenda.
| fweespeech wrote:
| https://www.pgpf.org/chart-archive/0053_defense-comparison
|
| Yes but spending as much as the next 10 countries combined is
| not needed.
| bastardoperator wrote:
| This ^
| quickthrowman wrote:
| Cool, let's pull out of all of our military bases globally
| and really speed up Chinese unipolar hegemony. Sounds fun!
| We can't remove ourselves from the position we inherited in
| 1946 without disrupting the global power balance on a
| massive scale.
|
| Idealism and global geopolitics don't mix. There's no
| supranational organization to mediate disputes between
| countries, at least yet. Without that, brute force/power
| projection is how it works.
| xvector wrote:
| Is it not? It's possible that the amount of funding
| required scales exponentially with relative military power,
| as you have more nations that would be willing to dethrone
| you, so you must be able to withstand your opponents'
| cumulative military strength.
|
| Even with as much as we spend, China is a formidable
| military threat.
| optimiz3 wrote:
| Debatable. R&D funding, job creation (including at overseas
| bases and embassies), massive economic benefits from being
| the world reserve currency, etc.
| jimbob45 wrote:
| "To be prepared for war is one of the most effective means of
| preserving peace."
|
| George Washington
| bronlund wrote:
| So that's like five headsets?
| screye wrote:
| Huh, I find it weird that Amazon and Msft fought so rabidly for
| the $10B JEDI contract, and this $22B contract seems to have gone
| through without any fanfare.
|
| This is 10x what Facebook paid for Oculus.
|
| I wonder what MSFT showed to them in the demos. I imagine it must
| have been mindblowing.
| manquer wrote:
| The JEDI contract was lot more competitive, AWS was technically
| on par or ahead of Azure, and they looked likely to be the
| front runners.
|
| Facebook/Occulus likely may not have been technically eligible-
| Holo lens and Occulus Rift are quite different platforms[1], or
| less likely Facebook was not interested in the deal[2].
|
| [1] Typical for enterprise contracts, vendors make sure the
| specs are custom fit for their products before the requirement
| becomes public, dictating the specs is most desirable way to
| win a deal as vendor.
|
| [2] Given the size of deal unlikely FB was not interested,
| perhaps their B2G/B2M sales is not as strong as Microsoft to be
| able to win a deal this size.
| ahepp wrote:
| >The contract could be worth up to $21.88 billion over 10
| years, a Microsoft spokesman told Reuters
|
| _could_ be worth _up to_
|
| I suspect those words are doing a lot of heavy lifting
| manquer wrote:
| I don't think so, these statements move stock prices, so SEC
| regulates what a public company can put out in their press
| releases / statements like these.
|
| The open ended wording is more likely due to some variability
| in the services being rendered, for example there could be
| agreed rate for services with minimum and expected and cap on
| spends, however the actual value would change during the
| course of the project, with the quoted value being a
| _reasonable_ estimate .
| notional wrote:
| What happened to Magic Leap?
|
| They pivoted to building their device for commercial use and
| had a bunch of military personnel images on their site before.
|
| -- Just did a search and found this Bloomberg article from 2018
| about it and it mentions MSFT bidding on the contract as well,
| so it looks like they tried but MSFT won it.
|
| https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-09-21/magic-lea...
| nonameiguess wrote:
| Not the way the JEDI and C2S contracts work. I'd need to go
| read a bunch of legal documents I don't feel like reading to
| see what those numbers really represent, but I imagine it's
| just reimbursement for standing up and operating the data
| centers while certifying them for classified data storage and
| connection to classified networks.
|
| They still get to actually sell services after that, though. If
| you just divide Amazon's original $600 million contract for 10
| years for C2S, that's $5 million a month. I can tell you when I
| was working for a single large program that hadn't even gone
| into ops yet last year, we were paying over $5 million a month
| per environment, and we had three environments. That's just a
| single tenant.
|
| In contrast, this contract for AR HUDs is much more likely just
| a straightforward charge once, build once order. There's no
| additional money to be made on the backend selling in app
| purchases to platoons or add-on services. For JEDI, after
| building the cloud, Microsoft still gets to actually sell its
| IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS services on top of that.
| colordrops wrote:
| Considering that there are around 150 million taxpayers in the
| US, this is around $150 a taxpayer. That's CRAZY.
| verdverm wrote:
| over 10 years, so like one fast food meal a year per person.
| gizmo385 wrote:
| $15 is pretty pricey for fast food.
| verdverm wrote:
| I would agree, but that's where it's getting to. Certainly
| less than one decent whisky drink at a bar
| quickthrowman wrote:
| Nobody tell this guy about the F35! At $1.7 trillion lifetime
| project cost, each of the 150 million taxpayers kick in
| $11,333.00 for one fighter plane platform
| ProAm wrote:
| The army probably misunderstood what they meant by telemetry.
| ghostwreck wrote:
| This makes me think of some of the battles that play out in
| Daemon and Freedom [1]. They're able to visualize all other
| parties in the area mapped by drones in real-time. They fight
| with massive AI swarms and are able to control the AI bots with
| hand gestures as they see them on the field, all while cruising
| around on modified motorcycles. We're in for a wild future.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daemon_(novel_series)
| judge2020 wrote:
| More fairly popular pop culture that this might mirror is the
| Black Mirror episode _Men Against Fire_ where the AR implants
| are being used to trick their soldiers into thinking regular
| humans are some mutant creature to make it easier to pull the
| trigger and kill them.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Men_Against_Fire
| nahuel0x wrote:
| Similar to this great short "Uncanny Valley":
| https://vimeo.com/147365861
| mrwnmonm wrote:
| They hope to train the soldiers with it, so they can be more
| ready in the real world? is that their thinking?
| IG_Semmelweiss wrote:
| Military is one of the few functions even the founders agreed to
| delegate to the state.
|
| So, it is a bit strage to suggest we should reduce the military,
| to then fund someone's opinion of a worthy cause. (Yet i fully
| agree that current military spending is out of control and needs
| to be reined in massively)
|
| Aside from assumptions made on what is worthy are truly eye of
| the beholder, what about letting people decide for themselves?
|
| We are willing to explore our altruistic desires first....instead
| of putting others first.
|
| That's likely why we need a military in the first place.
| jedberg wrote:
| > Yet i fully agree that current military spending is out of
| control and needs to be reined in massively
|
| Out military spending is 3.9% of our GDP. The worldwide average
| is 2.2%. So we aren't all that far out of line. Also, our
| military does a lot of humanitarian work (my friend ran a base
| in Ethiopia for example, and their entire purpose was to build
| water infrastructure there).
|
| The US is the "world police" in part because it protects the
| interests of US businesses. Peaceful areas are more likely to
| engage in international trade. We also do it for self-serving
| but peaceful reasons -- to extend the soft power of the State
| Department and aid in their negotiations (like building water
| infrastructure in Ethiopia).
|
| So I'm not so sure we're that out of line.
| LatteLazy wrote:
| After the 7/7 bombings on the tube, people wearing earbuds or
| headphones showed much less hearing damage. Given the nature of
| battlefields anything that protects the ear seems like an easy
| sell to me.
|
| https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/earphones-may-have-saved-...
| mupuff1234 wrote:
| "Could be worth up to".
|
| Not quite the same as actually worth.
| graycat wrote:
| Technology, useful for the US military and also useful later for
| US civilians? Are there any examples?
|
| (1) US Research Universities. For nearly all the US research
| universities, a huge fraction of their annual budgets comes from
| Federally funded research grants via the National Science
| Foundation (NSF), but, trust me on this, passes Congress and gets
| signed by the POTUS heavily for US national security, i.e., the
| US military.
|
| As a result, the teaching is heavily supported by that funding.
| Else college would cost much more.
|
| Yes, not all the Federal funding is so closely tied to the US
| military: Since the Members of Congress also like progress in
| medicine, there is also a lot of funding via the National
| Institutes of Health for bio-medical research and, thus, support
| for the research-teaching hospitals.
|
| (2) GPS.
|
| The Global Positioning System (GPS), now heavily used for non-
| military purposes, was done by the US Air Force (USAF) and built
| on the work of the earlier system for the US Navy. GPS has been
| terrific for the US military.
|
| (3) Aircraft Engines.
|
| Aircraft engine development got a big push during WWI and then
| again during WWII. By the end of WWII, the best piston aircraft
| engines were mechanical marvels.
|
| But near the end of WWII, both the Germans and the British saw
| that just for military purposes jet engines would be much better.
| And the US saw the same: GE had been making turbines for
| supercharging the piston engines so with their turbine experience
| moved to make some of the best jet engines.
|
| With an aircraft engine, we use energy from the fuel to generate
| gas pressure to push mass out the back of the engine. Then the
| momentem of that mass, (momentum is mass m times velocity v)
| provides force to propel the plane. But the mass moves out with
| kinetic energy (1/2)mv^2. So, we want to pick a pair, mass m and
| velocity v, to maximize the momentum for the given energy. Since
| in energy we pay for velocity v with v^2 but mass m with just m,
| we should pick the pair to have mass m large and velocity v
| small. So, going out the back of the engine (from a propeller or
| a jet) we want lots of mass moving slowly, not a small mass
| moving quickly.
|
| So, the US military saw this point for, e.g., their big cargo
| plane the C5A and developed "high bypass jet engines" where the
| turbine at the back of the engine drives a shaft to drive the
| compressor but also is used to drive a huge _fan_ at the front of
| the engine that acts as a propeller in a _duct_ to move huge
| amounts of cool air around, past ( _bypass_ ), the engine and out
| the back. Now essentially all large commercial aircraft have high
| bypass jet engines -- the cost of jet fuel makes this crucial.
|
| Actually a little before the high bypass development, could also
| get some of the same benefits with just an _aft fan_ : So, mount
| a _fan_ , turbine, on the back of the engine. Have the fan blades
| relatively long so that they extend pass the flow of the hot gas
| from burning the fuel. Then the hot gas turns the fan and the
| extended parts of the fan blades push cold air out the back. A GE
| engine did that early on; the French Dassault FanJet Falcon DA-20
| used two of those aft fan engines; and FedEx started with 33 of
| those planes modified for cargo.
|
| So, net, the jet engines used in commercial airplanes were
| heavily developed by the US military.
|
| (4) Digital Computers.
|
| So, sure, digital computers got developed in WWII for calculating
| artillery tables, etc. And after the war the US military was a
| big customer of digital computers and pushed the computer
| companies -- IBM, GE, Hewlett-Packard, Univac, Control Data,
| Systems Engineering Laboratories, etc. -- hard for more powerful
| computers.
|
| (5) Atomic Power.
|
| We have atomic power for the electric grid and applied nuclear
| physics more generally due mostly to developments paid for by the
| US military.
|
| Then it is common for the electronics on spacecraft -- often for
| science and not specifically for the military -- to be powered by
| nuclear power.
|
| (6) Radar.
|
| Commercial aviation is massively dependent on radar, and the
| first developments were for military purposes.
|
| (7) The Hubble Telescope.
|
| We can regard the Hubble telescope as used heavily for non-
| military science, but in simple terms the Hubble was a US
| military Keyhole surveillance telescope (supposedly can read car
| license plate numbers from orbit) but aimed away from the earth.
|
| (8) Rockets.
|
| Rockets are crucial for getting spacecraft into orbit (around the
| earth, the sun, Mars, etc.) or at escape velocity from the earth,
| and of course most of rocket development was for military
| purposes.
|
| (9) Optimization.
|
| Optimization, e.g., linear and non-linear programming, grew out
| of WWII military logistics efforts by G. Dantzig and others. Then
| asking for whole number solutions led us to the research on
| computational complexity and one of the most important research
| problems today, the question of P versus NP.
|
| (10) The Internet.
|
| Early on the Internet was ARPA-Net, funded by ARPA, the US
| military's Advanced Research Projects Agency.
|
| (11) The Interstate Highways.
|
| Early on President Eisenhower wanted the Interstate highways as a
| big contribution to US military logistics, that is, moving
| supplies and equipment.
| enriquec wrote:
| as usual, attributing taxed funds to the government,
| attributing discoveries/development to that funding and
| assuming it would otherwise not exist, and ignoring completely
| the concepts of opportunity cost, waste, or fraud.
|
| Typical blind government praise riddled with misinformation,
| meaningless platitutdes, and logical falacies.
| graycat wrote:
| > as usual, attributing taxed funds to the government,
| attributing discoveries/development to that funding and
| assuming it would otherwise not exist,
|
| We credit Newton, but we don't claim that without Newton we
| wouldn't have force equals mass time acceleration, the law of
| gravity, what he did with optics, etc.
|
| We credit Einstein for the photo electric effect, Brownian
| motion as evidence for rapidly moving molecules, special
| relativity, and general relativity, but we don't claim that
| without Einstein we would not have those results. Actually,
| the transformation between coordinate systems in special
| relativity was from before Einstein, and Poincare had a shot
| at doing general relativity.
|
| It goes on this way: Generally we credit the first or most
| successful, etc. without saying that otherwise we wouldn't
| have the results.
|
| Or, we are grateful for the results when we get them, know
| that we've got them, and are not at all sure that we would
| get the results soon from other sources later.
|
| Point: It is appropriate to credit the US military for the 11
| examples I gave.
|
| But for more, some of those military projects were big bucks
| efforts, and non-military funding sources would have been
| tough to find. So for those projects, we would have to have
| waited longer and might still be waiting.
|
| For more, the Internet with TCP/IP was not nearly the first
| digital communications network or even the first nationwide
| network. E.g., for a nation widenetwork, IBM had SNA (Systems
| Network Architecture) and used it to connect all the airports
| to a central reservation computer. But compared with TCP/IP,
| SNA was clumsy -- no way could it do much of what TCP/IP is
| doing now.
|
| > misinformation, meaningless platitutdes, and logical
| falacies.
|
| Examples?
| zabzonk wrote:
| While I am not a fan of enormous military spending, any
| improvement on necessary targeting that possibly avoids
| frightened little girls running down roads with their clothes
| blown off after indiscriminate napalm strikes gets my agreement.
|
| This improvement has seen us hitting the targets like ISIS
| fighters accurately, rather than flattening the whole city they
| happened to be in. I'm not in favour of war at all, but as it
| seems it isn't going away any time soon, more effective and
| accurate targeting seems to be the way to go.
| remarkEon wrote:
| Anyone work this technology and can talk about it (without
| breaking whatever NDA of course)? I'm a former infantryman and
| ... let's just say I'm _extremely_ skeptical of this kind of
| technology for all but the most niche use-cases (think, AR for
| the driver in the hole of the truck). Obviously for pilots stuff
| similar to this has been around for a while, but the article is
| not really clear about how exactly this would be used.
| gopalv wrote:
| > I'm a former infantryman and ... let's just say I'm
| _extremely_ skeptical of this kind of technology
|
| The question is how integral can you make this, without
| retraining everyone for it.
|
| For this to be successful there needs to be a whole generation
| who is probably 16 or 14 right now, who are used to putting on
| these headsets and be habituated to moving around in a VR world
| - wait till they turn 18 and put them on the battlefield at 19.
|
| I'd imagine this is already present in CAG or some other secret
| division, but we've always seen how it "should work" for
| friend-or-foe in the Terminator HUD clones[1].
|
| [1] -
| https://blogs.windows.com/windowsdeveloper/2017/03/06/buildi...
| remarkEon wrote:
| Well, it's true to a limited (but often exaggerated) extent
| that tech used in JSOC or other Tier 1 units eventually
| filters down to the grunts, but the limiting factor here is
| that the folks in CAG etc are operating at cognitive
| abilities way above the standard infantryman (sorry, it's
| true). So things that are interesting tech (NVGs) that are
| easy to use, yeah they will filter down. Suppressors being
| standard for USMC infantry units is another example. "Push
| button, see at night" and "screw on, shoot gun more quieter"
| vs "N hours of training and re-learning your field craft to
| distribute the weight".
| dogma1138 wrote:
| The PVS-21 is technically an AR night vision system, especially
| with the optional HUD video module so you already have battle
| tested AR systems used by infantrymen.
|
| For tanks etc. AR is very useful and is already implemented at
| least outside of the US, Elbit has a version of their F-35
| helmet for tanks and armored vehicles and the Israelis seem to
| be happy with the situational awareness they gain.
| remarkEon wrote:
| Right, but PVS-21s aren't networked devices are they? I
| thought the AR "features" were pretty limited and was more an
| evolution that combined what previous NVG and thermal imaging
| had done as separate devices. I haven't used them before.
| dogma1138 wrote:
| Well they can receive and display a video input from an
| external module some of those modules are networked and
| provide sensor fusion.
|
| I've seen modules that stream live navigation data, blue
| force tracking and video feeds. The only difference is that
| it's a bulky external module which connected via a cable.
|
| You also have small clip on modules for things like thermal
| imaging and video recording/streaming.
|
| Other than that the PVS-21 is an AR headset the intensified
| image is projected on the lenses which allows the user to
| see through the headset just like any AR headset and it can
| display data from an external source.
|
| https://www.steiner-defense.com/imaging-systems/cehud-
| confor...
|
| Edit: It's just not as sexy and tech loaded as the
| hololense but honestly I think the PVS-21 model is better
| the interface with the HMD is optical and the modules
| become smaller and more capable as technology advances.
|
| It looks like what used to take an external box the size of
| a hand radio is now wireless has an OLED display and fits
| in the screw cap of the optical interface port.
| verdverm wrote:
| Mission planning in the field, reducing costs for the field
| tents that the more senior officers use, 3d maps with plans
| shared to the team
|
| Imagine Battlefield like HUD for the soldiers, green is
| friendly, red is adversary. Think of these as a part in an
| overall sensor fusion and information asymmetry in the field.
| There are larger initiatives around info fusion across the
| branches and the real-time access to those who need to know
| lwansbrough wrote:
| From the perspective of infantry, the end goal would look like
| shared information: if any one else (other infantry, air
| support, satellites, drones) sees an enemy, you'd be able to
| see them as well, even through foliage, walls, etc. Being able
| to ping a location for your squad to see, marking targets for
| air support. I think there are a lot of practical applications
| to counteract fog of war.
| 323454 wrote:
| From what I've seen the two key use cases are 1) being able to
| see a "gun's eye" view, enabling you to poke your weapon out of
| cover and fire without exposing yourself 2) faster friend-foe
| identification through the AR overlay. Both of those seem like
| significant upgrades and arguably worth pursuing, but you can
| be sure a bunch of other nonsense will probably get tacked on
| that may make it worse than useless (like giving it excessive
| network connectivity: it wouldn't be fun to get a forced auto-
| update in combat).
| tootie wrote:
| Those are both great concepts similar to the HUD on a fighter
| jet but having worn a HoloLens before they'd have to make
| significant hardware enhancements for it to be remotely
| practical to wear in combat. They're chunky, have poor field
| of view, poor brightness and contrast, require substantial
| power and compute capacity to be towed along.
| freeone3000 wrote:
| What compute capacity? The compute device is in the
| headset, it's a self-contained unit and runs off of a 15W
| USB charger, with 2 hours of internal battery.
| harveywi wrote:
| Actually, Microsoft's involvement came about when leadership
| decided that the investment in Clippy needed to be recouped.
| After some creative brainstorming, it was determined that
| soldiers needed a heads-up display to track their ammo
| reserves. Ammo is stored in clips, which is a natural fit for
| Clippy to keep track of.
| [deleted]
| ryanmarsh wrote:
| Infantry here too, I think it would be cool for the TC to have
| the blue force tracker, maps, and any other sensors available
| in a heads up display.
|
| Also, seems like a no-brainer for tankers.
|
| I do not want to carry this shit on a patrol though.
| remarkEon wrote:
| Agree, the Armor community might really like this stuff.
| Especially if it can be paired with a sensor suite on the
| outside of the vehicle, so the TC (or maybe everyone) in the
| vehicle can "see" through the hull. The complexity of
| determining which surfaces within the truck should show as
| translucent in the HUD seems like a pretty tough problem to
| me though.
| verdverm wrote:
| HL2 consumer version weighs less than 1lb and will likely be
| built directly into your helmet. Might get to 1lb for
| extended battery life
| [deleted]
| Enginerrrd wrote:
| I'm inclined to agree. While it might be nice in theory to have
| your battlefield painted with where the friendlies are or
| something, there are so many issues with that in practice I
| can't imagine it actually getting used by infantry.
|
| Just off the top: All the electronics shit is gonna add weight,
| bulk, and power requirements.
|
| It's gonna get dirty, fogs up, w/e.
|
| It's gonna not work for one reason or another b/c it can't get
| a link, or it gets bashed against a humvee/wall. It doesn't get
| updated information, etc.
|
| If the enemy picks it up it either shows them where to shoot
| your guys, or it involves some authentication system that will
| make it useless to guys in a gunfight anyway. (What happens if
| your guys accidentally switch headsets after lunch?)
|
| It adds a bunch of extraneous bullshit in the form of
| information you don't need to be dealing with. Ever get lost
| while listening to the radio? Now raise your hand if the first
| thing you did was turn the music down. When shit is going south
| you need to REDUCE cognitive load. Pasting extra information
| into someone's field of view is likely to be unhelpful.
| remarkEon wrote:
| I agree with all of this.
|
| I'll add one more: _so much_ of what platoon leaders do now
| is teach about technology. There 's only so many hours in the
| day for training, and (even back in 2013!) the load was
| starting to cause deficiency in basic combat tasks. We just
| didn't have the time between all the requirements to get
| everyone proficient in the myriad of sensor tech we ended up
| carrying. Plus, if it's possible to break something _believe
| me_ a Private will figure out how to do it.
|
| >What happens if your guys accidentally switch headsets after
| lunch?
|
| This right here is a question I hope they're thinking about.
| In an actual fight, you may need to pick up gear off the
| ground. What happens if you can't, because "authentication"?
| Diederich wrote:
| > myriad of sensor tech we ended up carrying
|
| At that time, did you feel like that tech was useful?
| remarkEon wrote:
| No, and after a month or so I told everyone to drop it
| and put it back in the storage container where it sat for
| the rest of the deployment. There were some exceptions to
| this (some IED-defeat devices, for example).
| chrisseaton wrote:
| > What happens if you can't, because "authentication"?
|
| Aren't your radios already using cryptographic fills? What
| do you think the difference is?
| remarkEon wrote:
| It totally depends on how authentication would be handled
| for the headset device. If it's handled like it is for
| radios, where fills are added on a regular cycle and
| anyone can pick up and use the device, it's probably
| fine. If it's made unique-soldier-dependent, I don't
| think it's a good idea.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| > If it's made unique-soldier-dependent, I don't think
| it's a good idea.
|
| Lol well why would we do that? Just inventing random
| problems at this point.
| ectopod wrote:
| God forbid anyone would imagine how this would this work.
| I wonder which scenario is more plausible, the one you
| responded to, or the one linked below?
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26652386
| chrisseaton wrote:
| Well let's get it into troops' hands and give it a go and
| find out!
| remarkEon wrote:
| It isn't a "random problem".
|
| It's a legitimate question about the design principles
| that are being used here. Is the headset "dumb" and just
| shows the same HUD view for everyone, or is it custom to
| the soldier's position in the formation? We don't know,
| but it's a question to think about that has actual
| implications for how something like this could be used or
| even implemented.
| kodah wrote:
| I carried around the device that filled crypto for
| radios.
|
| Most people don't know how to use them and don't
| understand how to do a basic function check with them. It
| takes someone who has taken a class in receiving data
| with them and probably a patient Gunny who has been doing
| this stuff way too long.
| cbozeman wrote:
| AIUR - Augmented Infantry Universal Reality headset Patch
| 1.76 notes
|
| * Fixed a bug that occasionally caused friendly units to
| display as hostile ones.
|
| * Corrected AR ammo counter to correctly match actual rounds
| in small arm.
|
| * Adjusted networking code to ensure headsets remain synced
| with team leaders.
|
| And hundreds of other potentially dangerous and hilarious
| patch notes...
|
| Looking forward to everyone saying, "My life for AIUR!" while
| using these.
| warpech wrote:
| FTFY: Corrected off-by-one error in the AR ammo counter to
| correctly match actual rounds in small arm.
|
| ;)
| polyomino wrote:
| HL2 uses eye tracking for authentication so that one should
| be partially solved
| mnd999 wrote:
| I honestly don't see this being used by infantry for all the
| reasons you list foremost being that by the time the MIL STD
| folks are done with it, it'll be way too heavy.
|
| Most likely HQ so the brass can play command and conquer with
| the infantry and at a push on vehicles similar to the Helmets
| on the F-32.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| Do you mean F-35?
| patagonia wrote:
| Is used for me in 10 years when it all trickles down. I can't
| wait.
| xquarterly wrote:
| I think in these cases the actual utility of the product does
| not matter. What matters is that _someone_ gets a government
| contract and _something_ exchanges hands.
|
| _Something_ can be a failed national health platform, or toys
| like this one.
| nullserver wrote:
| Opinion. The goal is to make certain people a lot of money. See
| F22 for example.
|
| If actually works that's a bonus.
| thesuperbigfrog wrote:
| Imagine a rugged version of Google Glass that can act as a HUD
| with maps and current location and enhanced situational
| awareness.
|
| I think the long term goal is to have something like the XCOM 2
| Specialist class.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| Imagine being given a mission and being able to recreate the
| target area in VR and walk around while you conduct your
| estimate, orders, and rehearsals.
|
| Or imagine being able to look over a piece of ground and see
| the location of your people annotated through AR. Or driving a
| route and seeing your planned route annotated.
|
| Yes please absolutely get this into my hands.
| hooande wrote:
| The map is not the terrain. A VR walk through isn't as
| valuable if the layout of the target area changes. Same with
| troop locations and routes. Any training or planning use will
| still come down to quality of intelligence.
|
| In general, it seems very unlikely that all of this will work
| coordinated in battlefield conditions. It would be like
| pulling off an AR MMORPG, except everyone is carrying their
| Xbox on their back and running around randomly
| chrisseaton wrote:
| > The map is not the terrain.
|
| Where did I say it was?
|
| Let the recce give me a 3d sketch map of the target area as
| they understand it and let me walk around in it. Better
| than them trying to describe it and me imagining it!
| Enginerrrd wrote:
| Ok, now imagine you have to hump an extra 10lbs of crap in
| 120 degree heat for weeks on end while the glasses are fogged
| up and you got a sunscreen smudge on the lens. And your field
| of view is now greatly complicated with extraneous
| information you don't need to know like ammo capacity of your
| current magazine. And you need to low crawl through a
| drainage/sewer ditch and through a hole in a fence to get to
| another position with all that crap on your head/body without
| getting tangled up.
|
| And now your patrol got delayed for some reason so now none
| of that crap is charged or working anyway. And your glasses
| or the controller got dislodged during a sprint to cover. Or
| you need to find the reset button for some reason.
|
| You can have my set. It might be a valuable training tool
| though.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| > You can have my set.
|
| Thanks, I'll take it!
|
| You can say the same as you have about any technology. Why
| lug around a big heavy rifle when you could carry sharpened
| sticks? I guarantee you people said _exactly_ the same
| about the first radios, for example. Now you wouldn 't even
| consider leaving the wire without a radio under any
| circumstances whatsoever.
| remarkEon wrote:
| >You can say the same as you did about any technology.
| Why lug around a big heavy rifle when you could carry
| sharpened sticks?
|
| Because the enemy doesn't use sticks, first of all.
|
| >I guarantee you people said exactly the same about the
| first radios, for example.
|
| They did not, because it represented a fundamental change
| in how ground warfare could be conducted and not everyone
| carried them (not everyone carries them today either,
| which is telling). Namely, coordinating _accurate_
| indirect fire.
|
| >Now you wouldn't even consider leaving the wire without
| a radio under any circumstances whatsoever.
|
| Because I want to be able to call in air-support and
| indirect. The difference with all these examples is that
| the technologies you are mentioning represented a game-
| changing way in how to enable infantry- _support_
| operations. It 's not immediately clear to me that the
| same is true for a AR/VR helmet system used by infantry.
| It's possible that other branches could find uses for it
| in the same vein. Like the FSO using it to "see" the FLT
| and better coordinate indirect fire.
| lm28469 wrote:
| > I guarantee you people said exactly the same about the
| first radios, for example
|
| This doesn't prove anything and is 300% survivorship
| bias. There are thousands of tech innovations that were
| utter shit and we never hear about them. AR on the
| battlefield as describe above is a COD player wet dream
| and has no basis in reality.
|
| https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/research/a25644
| 619...
|
| > King estimates that the average soldier goes into
| action with a hefty 20 lbs of batteries.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| > AR on the battlefield as describe above is a COD player
| wet dream and has no basis in reality.
|
| I can only offer that I want to try it.
| jp555 wrote:
| Training - simulations.
|
| Eventually, a Danger Room anywhere.
| 867-5309 wrote:
| they're running Windows 7 because Candy Crush isn't
| preinstalled
| numakerg wrote:
| I don't work with the tech, but is there a use case for
| operating drones in the field?
|
| You want to peek around a corner or under a door, drop a tiny
| robot. Operate it with a handheld joystick and get a camera
| feed into your headset while still maintaining your regular
| field of vision.
|
| Final product won't necessarily take the form of the hololens.
| Might just be an attachment to whatever standard equipment they
| have, more like a Google glass.
| withinrafael wrote:
| Not really possible with HoloLens. This is AR not VR or a
| HUD.
| numakerg wrote:
| I'm curious, what's the obstacle? Can't they take the
| display from the hololens, make it smaller and integrate it
| into one eye of an existing headset that the military uses?
| withinrafael wrote:
| Existing HoloLens devices show semi transparent holograms
| overlaid on the real world so to speak, in a viewable
| frame size resembling something like a oversized postage
| stamp. (That is, holographic content does not fill your
| entire field of view.) It's not conducive to showing 100%
| opaque video content for a live drone feed, in my
| opinion, due to technical limitations (opacity, rendering
| proximity) and human comfort issues.
|
| I appreciate that they're offering "custom" units and
| could theoretically fix these issues. But it _sounds_
| like it'll be more of a ruggidization and compliance
| realignment of existing hardware. Pure speculation of
| course.
| freeone3000 wrote:
| HoloLens 2 devices offer an expanded field of view of
| approx 60 degrees. It's still semi-transparent, and
| opaque content has improved but still can't outshine
| looking directly at lighting.
| verdverm wrote:
| Not true, you can watch YouTube in HL2 out of the box.
| There are videos of hobbyists visualizing a self-driving RC
| car from the HL2.
| uyt wrote:
| I don't care how it is used as long as the technological advances
| transfer back to civilian headsets too. We already have unmanned
| weapons that can vaporize cities. Adding a human back into the
| mix doesn't sound all that bad.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_military_inventions
| bloopeels wrote:
| What's left for Microsoft to do? Open a Walmart-like?
| OnionBlender wrote:
| The funny thing is they actually closed (or are closing) all of
| their physical stores this past year.
| curiousgal wrote:
| Microvision's stock shot up ~50% because of this. Their
| technology powers the Hololens 2 apparently.
| tartoran wrote:
| Microsoft's stock didn't budge. Is this contract going to go
| directly to Microvision?
| quickthrowman wrote:
| > (MSFT) didn't budge
|
| ???
|
| The 2:00-2:05 (CDT) 5 minute candle for MSFT was a 2% move,
| that's not nothing for a 1.77T company lol
|
| The candle low was 234.47 and the candle high was 239.10,
| this is in a 5 minute span
| tartoran wrote:
| You're right. I just expected a larger dent in price but
| you're right, MS is too massive. I should have said it
| barely budged instead. What's $21.9B among titans anyway?
| paxys wrote:
| 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.
| axlee wrote:
| It's nothing more than welfare and stimulus that republicans
| can get behind.
| anon_tor_12345 wrote:
| There's a very obvious analogy here that proves you wrong: nvgs
| nordsieck wrote:
| > 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.
| remarkEon wrote:
| 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.
| ahepp wrote:
| 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)
| beeandapenguin wrote:
| 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
| wcarss wrote:
| for anyone else who was confused and about to google it:
| Night Vision Goggles[1].
|
| 1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night-vision_device
| remarkEon wrote:
| 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.
| MichaelMcG wrote:
| 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.
| remarkEon wrote:
| 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.
| munk-a wrote:
| 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.
| remarkEon wrote:
| 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.
| shubb wrote:
| 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.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| > 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.
| ryanmarsh wrote:
| Please point me to an example of this. Short of prepo supply, I
| never once saw an example of this.
| proc0 wrote:
| 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).
| fwip wrote:
| 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?
| therobot24 wrote:
| 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
| benja123 wrote:
| 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.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| 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.
| paxys wrote:
| 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.
| wcarss wrote:
| 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
| verdverm wrote:
| 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
| formercoder wrote:
| Given you'd only be making 500k units, and you're making them
| to milspec, sounds like a pretty good deal to me.
| Tossrock wrote:
| US air superiority fighters already include AR in their
| helmets.
| ausbah wrote:
| good for R&D I suppose
| paxys wrote:
| Private, patented R&D which benefits a single trillion-dollar
| corporation funded by public dollars. Too common in this
| country sadly.
| verdverm wrote:
| 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
| rtx wrote:
| >corporation
|
| Public corporation, buy shares and enjoy the loot.
| quickthrowman wrote:
| I own MSFT shares, why don't you?
| fasteddie31003 wrote:
| As a taxpayer this seems like a waste of money. AR is just a
| novelty. If I were a solider in a firefight, I don't think I'd
| want some annoying UI in my eye telling me were to shoot.
| verdverm wrote:
| HL2 is far more than a novelty, you should really try one out.
|
| Soldiers who have tried this absolutely love it and can see
| many places where this literally changes the game.
| politician wrote:
| On the other hand, if I were responsible for inspecting and
| maintaining vehicles or aircraft, I might find an AR HUD to be
| extremely useful.
|
| "Amateurs talk about tactics, but professionals study
| logistics." - Gen. Robert H. Barrow, USMC (Commandant of the
| Marine Corps)
| dirtyid wrote:
| Probably better investment than this:
|
| US Army trials augmented reality goggles for dogs
|
| https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-54465361
|
| On the other hand AR has civilians uses. This is just US civil
| military fusion at work.
| bpodgursky wrote:
| Soldiers spend about 1000x as much time training, inventorying,
| fixing things, learning, and communicating as they do in a
| firefight, and AR is potentially very high value-add in all of
| those spaces.
| RestlessMind wrote:
| Taxpayers in 1970's may have thought of internet as "a waste of
| money" or just a novelty. Same with taxpayers in 2005 with
| DARPA challenge for self driving cars. Sometimes, you need
| government level entity to truly move the needle on technology
| and private sector is simply too short-term oriented[1] or too
| risk-averse[2] to take on meaningful challenges like moon
| landing or atom bomb.
|
| [1] VC funds have a life-cycle of only 10 years. Internet
| evolution was a 2-3 decades process.
|
| [2] Government can write off a loss of 5-10B. I can't think of
| any private sector entity with that kind of risk tolerance.
| mrkstu wrote:
| And here, ladies and gents, is why companies like Microsoft, will
| eternally resist getting aligned with internal employee groups
| Resisting selling to government entities, whether ICE or the
| Army.
|
| There is way too much money to be lost.
| paxys wrote:
| Microsoft in general has employees who are happy to work 9-5
| and go home rather than the activist sorts. Pushback, if any,
| comes from a very _very_ small set. The articles mentions that
| 94 workers voiced concerns when they announced the original
| contracts, which isn 't worth even talking about.
| someonehere wrote:
| This makes me happy as we don't lose out to technologically
| leapfrogging China and their military.
| WebDanube wrote:
| True. This opinion is controversial, but I do feel if the
| United States doesn't invest in military tech R&D, someone
| else is going to do it.
|
| And that someone else is an authoritarian, one-party state
| that has a completely different set of values from the West.
|
| Of course, military efficiency can be made better, but it's
| super important to keep tabs on the 'enemy,' so to speak.
| We're in an arms race, whether we like it or not.
| tmotwu wrote:
| I mean, outspoken internal employee groups exist and higher ups
| acknowledge them. Satya drives home the empathy and feelings
| message more than any other CEO. And AFAIK, I don't recall an
| instance of Microsoft suppressing an employee's voice similar
| to what happens at Google frequently. They tried getting their
| employees to participate in their internal social networks but
| it never caught any attention. Microsoft just does a better job
| convincing their employees everything they do is for the
| greater good.
| gundmc wrote:
| Google has also had several high profile cases of abandoning
| pursuit of extremely lucrative military/government contracts
| due to backlash from employees.
| encryptluks2 wrote:
| If I had to choose between Google and Microsoft on which
| company I trusted the most to more good, I'd choose Google
| time and time again.
| [deleted]
| RestlessMind wrote:
| Microsoft is an American company[1]. Supporting government
| entities, including army, is essential to long term survival of
| any nation. If you believe that supporting your
| government/military is not essential, please go and take some
| history lessons. Pacifist societies are always conquered and
| occupied by their invaders; military might is essential (though
| not sufficient) for a thriving independent society.
|
| [1] yes, I know about global offices and global workforce. But
| it is still an American company in terms of leadership, culture
| and values.
| throwaway0x2 wrote:
| It's also why they weaponize "wokeism". They can virtue signal
| around changing the "master" branch to "main", and then pat
| themselves on the back and show their leftist employees they're
| on their side all while working directly with DoD, ICE, etc.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| And this is why people like me will take their place.
| neatze wrote:
| So what do you do if your neighbor decides to take you computer
| from your own house ?
|
| What nation should do if another nation decides to impose
| tariffs on resources that does not belong to them ?
|
| Army is about readiness to use directed violence to stop
| people/organization/nations taking what does not belong to
| them, there also support functions related to emergency
| services in case of natural, technological or other emergency
| situations.
|
| People who never experienced emergency situations, don't even
| think about what they would do and how they should they be
| prepared in case of fire in there own house. State of safety
| and security processes is taken for granted, unfortunately, by
| most people.
| f154hfds wrote:
| Disclaimer: I work for Microsoft. This idea that 'no military
| contracts can be justified for any reason' doesn't make sense
| to me.
|
| I think there's room for debate on each contract's potential
| value to civilians, but at a high level I see so many
| technologies in our world today that just simply wouldn't exist
| without the US defense budget. Employee groups like the ones
| you refer to above have an overly simplistic lens of the world.
| Even if I think a tech is dubious doesn't mean posterity will
| always agree.
|
| Did we understand the value of technologies like radar, GPS,
| ARPANET when they were simply dollar figures getting thrown at
| military contractors?
| golemiprague wrote:
| There is also a matter of principle, selling to the government
| is not something bad in itself. You are also benefiting from
| the protection that the soldiers give you, why do you thing you
| or some corporate should have an access to this technology but
| they shouldn't? If you think their job is unnecessary then just
| vote for someone who wills to abolish the army and live with
| the consquences but I don't think there is one person who
| thinks that's a good idea.
| mirekrusin wrote:
| Blue screen of death can have whole new meaning.
| king_magic wrote:
| ... but why?
|
| I'm not military, so maybe I'm just not seeing it... but what use
| cases does the Army really care enough about to spend $22B on AR
| headsets for? I could maybe see a billion here, a billion
| there... but $22B... on _AR headsets_ seems batshit insane.
|
| Certainly can't imagine soldiers in a firefight keeping them on.
| Maybe logistics use cases? It was hard enough to find commercial
| use cases for HoloLens, so I can't even begin to imagine what is
| important enough to source this kind of hardware.
| cryptica wrote:
| It's a scam obviously. Microsoft is using its connections to
| scam US tax payers.
| verdverm wrote:
| The soldiers definitely want them.
|
| This will likely save the army money in the long run, not to
| mention lives.
| cryptica wrote:
| BRRRR, straight from the money printer. May the US taxpayer
| continue to subsidize Microsoft. May Microsoft continue to fail
| to deliver projects.
|
| I still can't believe people don't see what's going on. People
| must be getting dumber.
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