[HN Gopher] Army delays $22B augmented reality goggle program
___________________________________________________________________
Army delays $22B augmented reality goggle program
Author : infodocket
Score : 85 points
Date : 2021-10-15 15:55 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (federalnewsnetwork.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (federalnewsnetwork.com)
| tech_timc wrote:
| Some decent pictures in this story: https://www.thedrive.com/the-
| war-zone/42739/army-halts-widel...
|
| This seems important. . .
|
| However, early prototype IVAS systems were simply not rugged
| enough for operational use, with one iteration notably unable to
| work in the rain. The Army has conducted more rigorous testing of
| the latest version, with what it had indicated were positive
| results. Soldiers have also experimented with using IVAS headsets
| within vehicles and during airmobile operations.
|
| Questions have also been raised about the conformal batteries
| that soldiers need to carry in their gear to power the IVAS
| headsets, both in regard to how long they can keep the systems
| running and safety concerns about what might happen if they get
| shot or otherwise damaged in combat. The Army has said in the
| past that it has made progress on improving the capabilities of
| the batteries and their resistance to incoming fire.
| debacle wrote:
| I wonder what the cost/benefit curve is for lobbying from $0.
|
| $22B is about $150 for every working American. It probably cost
| Microsoft less than $1mm to lobby for this deal.
| topkai22 wrote:
| Statements like this imply that "lobbying" is the only reason
| the government does anything. That, in my experience, is simply
| not true. Government employees and even legislators are
| motivated by accomplishing their mission. An augmented reality
| system seems like an amazing tool to accomplish the Army's
| mission- I really don't think anyone needed to lobby them to
| much to be interested in an acquisition program.
| aardvarkr wrote:
| Prime content for /r/im14andthisisdeep right here. It easily
| cost microsoft more than $1MM just to put together the proposal
| alone, much less fight for it in front of technical audits and
| careful scrutiny of every part of the project. Did you not read
| the article, which made clear just how much scrutiny is being
| applied to this deal? Do you think someone can just hand out a
| million dollar check and be given $22B of work without being
| qualified?
| oh_sigh wrote:
| Not to nitpick but your post would stand on its own without
| the insult in the first sentence.
| kaycebasques wrote:
| No need for the disrespectful tone. You're violating a lot of
| HN's community guidelines:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| aardvarkr wrote:
| Is having a disrespectful tone against the rules? Do I have
| to respect a conspiratorial comment as anything more than a
| shallow attempt to sow distrust against the government? I
| posted a critical comment that pointed out a significant
| flaw in his logic and I personally believe that it is
| indeed prime content for /r/im14andthisisdeep due to OP's
| shallow attempt to understand how the world of government
| contracts and their callous disregard for any evidence to
| back up their musings
| kaycebasques wrote:
| > Is having a disrespectful tone against the rules?
|
| Yes. I will quote your original comment followed by the
| guideline that you're violating.
|
| > [You] Prime content for /r/im14andthisisdeep right
| here.
|
| > [Guideline] Be kind. Don't be snarky.
|
| > [You] Do you think someone can just hand out a million
| dollar check and be given $22B of work without being
| qualified?
|
| > [Guideline] Please respond to the strongest plausible
| interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one
| that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
|
| > [You] Did you not read the article
|
| > [Guideline] Please don't comment on whether someone
| read an article.
|
| Note that I'm not an admin of HN or anything. Just doing
| my part to keep things civic.
| edge17 wrote:
| Kinda makes one wonder what all the fuss about billionaires
| going to space is about. VR industry isn't exactly lacking in
| private funding rightnow. My guess is that this money is
| strategically aligned with shoring up chip manufacturing in the
| US (since I am guessing all the parts for this will be required
| to be sources domestically)
| trident5000 wrote:
| In what world does it take 22 billion dollars to develop an AR
| goggle program. Its not a mystery why we have out of control
| spending and certain groups lobby and get wonderfully rich off
| the governments incompetence and corruption.
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| In a world where engineers at MSFT make $300k+ - that pays ~70k
| engineers for a year.
|
| There are nowhere near 70k engineers working on this - I'd be
| surprised if even 7k - but this has been in development for
| years, and will be in development for a few more.
|
| Depending on how many headsets they planned to deliver - I
| wouldn't be surprised if they each cost more than $1k - there
| are like 60k infantry soldiers - so that could easily cost
| >$60M.
|
| I'd imagine they spent >$100M lobbying on this and Jedi.
|
| I can't see how this would cost anywhere near $22Bn - but
| military contractors are known to have profit margins >30%.
|
| I'm obviously missing a lot of things - but I wouldn't be
| surprised if this cost MSFT >$10Bn.
| texasbigdata wrote:
| The headsets currently retail for $6k each and they are
| consumer not military specs.
| ahepp wrote:
| $1k? I would guess $10k+
| wespiser_2018 wrote:
| The one piece of this that might end up costing a ton of
| money is the testing using live soldiers. Each of those
| deployments, along with all the heavy equipment is a lot of
| money. I saw they already have 80k hours of soldier feedback,
| so in part, that's where some of the money goes. The rest, of
| course, is figuring out how to make the HoloLens light and
| reliable, which no one has ever done. Idk, this could be a
| huge money pit. The Army has tried this idea before and
| failed. Now might be the time, or this could be another JSF
| spending fiasco. Either way, MSFT is doing well.
| wtf_is_up wrote:
| >but military contractors are known to have profit margins
| >30%.
|
| Based on what data? Contract bidders must show all direct and
| indirect costs and are typically allowed to price in ~10%
| profit when submitting their proposal. In fact, you can look
| at historical financial data for LMT, NOC, GD, etc and see
| profit margin float around 7-10%. A proposal with 30% profit
| margin baked in would be laughed out of the selection
| committee.
| cryptica wrote:
| This is job creation porn. These engineers don't deserve any
| public money, let alone to prop up their $300K per year
| salaries.
|
| Microsoft could get better engineers for cheaper. Including
| within the US. The problem is that this isn't about
| engineering. It's a scheme.
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| If MSFT could get better engineers for cheaper - they
| would. They're a business... Not a charity to engineers.
| cryptica wrote:
| This is BS. I know how the interview process works. All
| these big corporations optimize their recruitment
| processes around pedigree (matched to the curriculum of
| top universities). They don't look at track record at
| all; when track record is a far better indication of
| future performance. That's why their engineers are so
| incompetent and it costs so much money for them to
| produce anything.
|
| They have become so incompetent that they don't even have
| the talent necessary to know what talent looks like when
| recruiting.
|
| Corporate engineers will never hire other engineers who
| are better than them (for political reasons), so the
| engineering talent in these companies has been degrading
| for years as the bureaucracy and internal politics has
| increased.
| y4mi wrote:
| > _when track record is a far better indication of future
| performance_
|
| Not all experience transfers over and developing
| completely new technology (both hardware and software in
| combination) is _extremely_ hard. I think you 're vastly
| underestimating the value people get from these
| university degrees when they're actually pioneering new
| things and actually learned the topics they were taught.
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| > They have become so incompetent that they don't even
| have the talent necessary to know what talent looks like
| when recruiting.
|
| Do you work at MSFT? How do you know so much about their
| competence?
| zeusk wrote:
| I work at MSFT, and all I can say is you're quite wrong
| ahepp wrote:
| You're comparing corporate big tech to what, the lean and
| scrappy traditional military contractors? The level of
| incompetence in the military sector (private and public)
| is unfathomable unless you experience it in person.
| wespiser_2018 wrote:
| A maze or requirement, bureaucracy, and interoperability with
| existing and TBD systems? Software is expensive to build.
| Reliable software all that much more.
|
| If you consider an alternative, just make an app and stick
| phone on a rifle, sure, that will work for 90% of the stuff you
| want to do, but it would break and that's bad. A true "heads up
| display" that you can bet your life on, anywhere on earth, at
| any time, is just a truly massive undertaking.
| jjk166 wrote:
| > If you consider an alternative, just make an app and stick
| phone on a rifle, sure, that will work for 90% of the stuff
| you want to do, but it would break and that's bad.
|
| Given that soldiers are currently getting by with something
| that works 0% of the time, the assumption that 90% isn't good
| enough seems highly suspect. Exactly how many more soldiers
| will be saved by developing a true heads up display versus an
| off the shelf app running on a ruggedized phone?
|
| This seems like an obvious case of a failure to actually
| define requirements and make real engineering decisions.
| dralley wrote:
| I'm sorry but even taking into account the clusterf*** of
| government procurement this is a truly obscene price tag.
| Even by government standards, this is ridiculous.
|
| It's half as much as the development of the entire flipping
| Space Shuttle. It's more than Apple's entire yearly R&D
| budget. It's more than the James Webb Space Telescope and the
| entire Hubble program (including operations and the repairs
| that were needed post-launch) _combined_. It 's roughly the
| cost of 8 Mars rovers of the same type as Curiosity /
| Perseverance.
|
| This is worse, even, than the Joint Strike Fighter program,
| which at least started out reasonably with only a pair of 1
| billion dollar grants handed out to Boeing and Lockheed to
| develop two functional prototype fighter aircraft (never mind
| how the costs spiraled later).
|
| Setting aside the question of how much it should or shouldn't
| cost to develop such a product, it's absolute insanity to do
| it with a single massive project. The DoD loves to claim in
| public they're trying to be more agile, and this is the
| _exact opposite of that_. This ought to have been done $100
| million (or less) at a time with limited initial scope and
| incrementally expanding goals.
|
| Don't make excuses for this. There is no possible
| justification.
| darkerside wrote:
| In your simplest web software, there's the first 80% and the
| second 80%. With projects like this, which are literally life
| and death, there's many more 80%s to be considered and
| executed.
|
| Do you ask why space travel is expensive? It's arguably much
| simpler than this is.
| jjk166 wrote:
| If a rocket explodes, the astronauts die.
|
| If a pair of goggles fails, the soldier takes them off.
|
| These are the same people who equipped soldiers in Vietnam
| with a rifle that jams due to mud. The idea that military
| hardware has to be many times more reliable than space
| hardware is absurd.
| darkerside wrote:
| Sometimes the rocket fails but the astronaut makes it
| back (Apollo 13). Sometimes the goggles fail, and the
| soldier misjudges a drop and breaks his leg, or walks
| into a known blast radius and dies, or misidentifies and
| kills a civilian.
|
| Either way, if this is worth doing -- and I agree with
| you that it's a big, big if -- it is worth doing right.
| jjk166 wrote:
| Astronauts surviving a failure is a once in a generation
| event that gets memorialized forever in movies and
| literature. Soldiers' equipment failing is a Tuesday.
|
| Increased situational awareness has value, but it is a
| clear case of diminishing returns. Exactly what the
| cutoff ought to be is debatable, but that the cutoff
| exists is certain.
| wespiser_2018 wrote:
| Agreed. We've been to space, understand the risks, and have
| a decent understanding that X dollars pays for Y in LEO.
| This is an almost entirely greenfield project, so who knows
| if the deliverables will even be useful.
| cryptica wrote:
| We all have nuclear weapons, why do we need rifles and
| infantry? This narrative is total BS. Is the goal to waste
| money today in order to be able to waste even more money
| later on countries like Iraq and Afganistan? We've seen what
| those rifles are used for... These rifles would be more
| useful to society if politicians would just shove them up
| their ***!
| paganel wrote:
| > true "heads up display" that you can bet your life on,
| anywhere on earth, at any time, is just a truly massive
| undertaking.
|
| At some point you have to make a cost-benefit analysis and
| look at the bigger picture. For example and in this
| particular case, yes, spending let's say 10 billion instead
| of 22 billion for a rougher solution might increase the dead
| count on the battlefield in the near future, but if those 12
| billion that you've now saved go to better free education at
| home (more engineers in the future to design better weapons)
| or/and to free healthcare (more fit soldiers in the future)
| maybe it will all even out at a higher threshold.
| ahepp wrote:
| It was a competitive bidding process, no? I don't mean to
| suggest there aren't huge problems with the army's acquisition
| process, but it seems no one wanted to make them for less.
| trident5000 wrote:
| I dont think the list of contractors the Army considers is
| very deep; its not competitive in a true sense. That may be
| part of the problem.
| ahepp wrote:
| I think a lot of what stifles competition is the military
| itself. They aren't a good customer. They have lots of
| broken legacy systems. There are serious reputational
| risks.
|
| I don't really mean to suggest 22b is too low a cash prize,
| but I imagine it takes a lot to overcome the barriers that
| have been wilfully erected. Much less the ones discreetly
| erected by incumbent military contractors.
| jakey_bakey wrote:
| Playing devils advocate here, Magic Leap has managed to burn
| through $3.5 billion and has made no achievements of note -
| instead of solving the two primary optics challenges of AR,
| they allocated their capital to make blacks look slightly
| blacker.
| ydkme wrote:
| Two thoughts:
|
| - I'd be very surprised if Apple releases their AR headset
| without a similar-size (70% or more) investment over the
| preceding decade. RDT&E for environment-aware devices is
| incredibly expensive.
|
| - Defense funding and procurement amounts often shock those not
| in the industry, but the truth is that the entire market for
| most of what the DoD funds is...the DoD. Sure, a lot of the
| components and IP can be reused in the commercial sector, but
| for most programs the DoD has to fund both the initial R&D and
| the unit sales, because the market is so much smaller and
| device sales are heavily restricted (e.g. ITAR). The DoD also
| has MUCH broader and stricter requirements for security,
| safety, reliability, and compliance with a daunting array of
| standards and processes than the commercial industry. To be
| clear, this is on net a good thing for the DoD and by extension
| the rest of the USA, but it does increase development costs.
|
| Certainly there is profit being made by Microsoft here, that's
| kind of the point of partnering with the DoD. But the intuitive
| comparison of "DoD programs should cost the same as developing
| a commercial equivalent" that many of us make is fundamentally
| apples and oranges in both the product development and the
| economics.
| m0zg wrote:
| I worked with a Federal Contractor once (you, as a rule, have
| to go through a middleman to work with US Govt, and that's
| where most of the profit ends up). Their requirement was that
| we use their hardware in their datacenter to do our work and
| never move data out of there. So they asked us for configs. I
| priced it out, it came to something like $120K in total, sent
| them the specs. They tore it up and bought $1.2M worth of
| hardware instead. Insane CPUs, maxed out RAM, Infiniband, you
| name it. We didn't need any of that. Literally 10x the price.
| Ever since then I have extra bad taste in my mouth when filing
| my taxes, and I know for a fact that merely passing money
| through the government makes most of it disappear into a black
| hole.
| hooande wrote:
| The tax dollars didn't completely disappear. They were used
| to pay you and hundreds of thousands of others
| m0zg wrote:
| This is the classical "broken window fallacy", for which
| there are multiple convincing refutations. I'm sure you can
| find them yourself. But besides that, wouldn't you want
| most of your tax money spent on the things it is
| purportedly spent on (setting aside even whether spending
| it on those things makes sense in the first place, which is
| something we the people have zero control over), without
| leaving most of it in the pockets of whoever owns the
| federal contractor?
| sneak wrote:
| A good reminder that working at MSFT means that your code may one
| day be applied in products used to conduct mass murder.
| rightbyte wrote:
| So does working on Linux. Or like the 7zip lib.
| memonkey wrote:
| Think the difference is who is explicitly signing contracts.
| teakettle42 wrote:
| This is true working just about anywhere.
|
| I'm far more concerned about the demand-side of this equation.
| sneak wrote:
| > _This is true working just about anywhere._
|
| I've worked at a lot of places, and none of the code I've
| ever written has been used to conduct warfare.
| Invictus0 wrote:
| A good reminder that working at Bell Labs means that your phone
| lines may one day be used by mass murderers.
|
| Technology is amoral; the science of the atom is not evil just
| because it led to the atomic bomb.
| sneak wrote:
| General purpose technology is amoral; specialized tools are
| not. Microsoft makes custom software for military
| applications.
| stefan_ wrote:
| Remember, the F16 runs Kubernetes!
| rmdashrfstar wrote:
| https://gcn.com/articles/2020/01/07/af-
| kubernetes-f16.aspx?m... What a world we live in...
|
| Edit: here's the DOD case study by the CNCF:
|
| https://www.cncf.io/case-studies/dod/
| asah wrote:
| By that logic, so does buying cereal and paying taxes.
| keewee7 wrote:
| I would be proud to code stuff that the Danish military and
| allies use.
| nova22033 wrote:
| * "The devices met the Army's requirements of rugged, waterproof
| and shockproof. But no one had considered, for example, that the
| headsets needed to allow users to brace a rifle against a
| cheek."*
|
| I mean...
| remarkEon wrote:
| Yeah, tell me you don't have any former Infantrymen on your
| product team without telling me you don't have any former
| Infantrymen on your product team.
| Arrath wrote:
| Designer's solution: a 3lb camera and battery pack you strap
| onto the muzzle to give you a Picture-in-Picture boresight
| reticle on your goggle lens.
| Frost1x wrote:
| Strap some remote firing mechanism on there and you can
| setup little remote controlled booby traps while you're at
| it.
| fsagx wrote:
| Seems like delay of such a big program would have at least a
| little negative effect on MSFT, but there doesn't appear to have
| been any at all.
| darkerside wrote:
| Maybe the good news they didn't cancel it offsets the bad news
| that they postponed it
| lucasmullens wrote:
| Maybe MSFT is already locked in to the profits from the deal,
| regardless of delays?
| wtf_is_up wrote:
| Gov't acquisition always involves shifts 'to the right'. Even
| in 100x smaller programs than IVAS.
| lifeisstillgood wrote:
| I recently bought my children an Oculus Quest because ...
| nagging. And I was utterly blown away.
|
| I understand why every billionaire is betting on this in some
| way.
|
| I would however put these goggles firmly in the camp of weapons
| like the tank that fires hundreds of missiles that fly off
| independently and destroy a hundred passing tanks. There is such
| a distance from "kinda works in demo" to "killing active enemy"
| that it is barely worth thinking about for five years or more.
|
| I would have to put other projects up top like
|
| - when all the civilian engine development turns to batteries and
| electric, how the hell do we keep our planes trains and
| automobiles running. Just how expensive will getting the gas get?
|
| - Do ship defences really work? I would want to be pretty sure we
| test fire every kind of drone and missile at real ships and see
| if they shoot them down.
|
| - In defiance of everything i wrote above, Apparently there is a
| cool targeting sight that puts a red dot on where the bullet will
| land based on distance, weather etc etc. It "apparently" makes
| every squaddie a sniper and is going to roll out to US army real
| soon. My question is once soldiers get out of a vehicle, how
| lethal is the battlefield now? What's the survival time measured
| in minutes under sniper and artillery fire? The last time the
| battlefield was insanely lethal people just dig trenches to even
| survive the day.
| na85 wrote:
| >The last time the battlefield was insanely lethal people just
| dig trenches to even survive the day.
|
| This occurred during a time when trenches actually protected
| those soldiers. Modern artillery with GPS-guided rounds can not
| only target a specific building (so far away that you need to
| account for the rotation of the earth as it spins underneath
| the round) but you can pick the window of the building you want
| the round to go through.
|
| For a fraction of the cost there's also the ol' hand-grenade-
| duct-taped-to-a-quadcopter.
|
| Hiding in a trench isn't really going to save anyone.
| mc32 wrote:
| Can't do much about missiles but against quadcopters with
| grenades just add a storm fence dome over your trench. And
| unless the quadcopters get equipped with high strength wire
| cutters they're not going to do much.
| lifeisstillgood wrote:
| first one blows up next to the fence, the rest go through
| the hole?
| mc32 wrote:
| I don't think grenades can successfully punch large holes
| into a storm fence. It's flexible and very little surface
| to hit. They're affective against people because we
| perforate easily.
| adventured wrote:
| The answer to the trench storm fence with a (larger)
| quadcopter is a fuel shower, promptly ignited. A sort of
| flying molotov cocktail.
|
| The target trench area/s would need something like a small
| Phalanx CIWS to play defense.
| dragontamer wrote:
| > For a fraction of the cost there's also the ol' hand-
| grenade-duct-taped-to-a-quadcopter.
|
| Its like people don't know we have CIWS or something.
|
| Rockets flying at 500mph are shot down regularly by aimbot
| defensive weapons. But suddenly a drone flying at 20mph is
| too tough to handle?
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0d_h5uqnYOI
|
| --------
|
| "Duct-taped grenade on drone" is just a crappy TOW missile.
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BGM-71_TOW), which were around
| in the 70s. That's not a new strategy. We have CIWS today
| that provide mild-protection against weapons like this.
|
| Wire-guided missiles are older than the TOW system. But I
| assume most military buffs would know about the TOW.
|
| EDIT: Wow, I knew that there were wire-guided missiles before
| TOW. I didn't know that wire-guided missiles were in play in
| Nazi Germany during WW2:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruhrstahl_X-4
|
| In any case: the problem with pure wire-guided missiles is
| that when people are shooting guns at you, and you're hiding
| in a trench... fiddling around with a joystick trying to move
| your "drone" (or wire-guided missile) to hit them is a lot
| harder than it looks. Even if the enemy is the size of a tank
| (remember: the tank is moving surprisingly fast)
|
| TOW were optical-guided + wire-guided, meaning a computer
| calculates the positioning, and you "only" need to point the
| optical scanner towards your target, no joystick involved.
| 1940s style joysticks being used in modern combat would be a
| significant disadvantage compared to modern systems.
|
| --------
|
| EDIT2: CIWS is the big version we put onto the Iron Dome or
| Cruisers / Supercarriers. Apparently the smaller version is
| called APS (active protection system), when its put onto a
| tank or IVF: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-JI0cYo6rag
|
| -------
|
| For an actual anti-tank weapon (or really, anti-anything
| weapon), look up what TOW missiles can do today with their
| simple point-and-shoot interfaces: https://www.popularmechani
| cs.com/military/weapons/a17654/wat...
|
| That's two explosions: once "over" the target, the TOW 2B
| Missile (one of the many, many variants of TOW) explodes,
| sending an armor-piercing round over the top of a tank where
| the armor is weaker.
|
| The 2nd explosion is the actual explosion designed to kill
| the tank.
|
| TOW missiles fly at 300m/s (or ~650+ miles per hour).
| ortusdux wrote:
| Air-burst rounds have definitely rendered trenches obsolete.
|
| https://imgur.com/c17lPxF
| pasabagi wrote:
| Airburst rounds existed in WW1 too. The point is, you hide
| in a bunker until the shelling is over, then you come up
| and man positions before the enemy can reach your trenches,
| or failing that, counterattack while they are cut off from
| supplies and reinforcements.
| jeffdn wrote:
| Airburst rounds with timers set by calculation, not
| airburst rounds that can blow up when they reach a
| specific point determined by proximity, distance, GPS,
| etc. It's a completely different kind of airburst.
| dragontamer wrote:
| That's not how modern warfare works.
|
| Air-burst rounds beat trenches.
|
| Armor piercing rounds beat tanks (and bunkers).
|
| So the solution: have tanks next to your trenches. If your
| opponent loads air-burst rounds into their weapon, charge
| at them with your tank.
|
| If your opponent loads armor-piercing rounds into their
| weapon, run into the trench. Armor-piercing (neither HEAT
| nor Sabot) can do much vs a trench. (I'm ignoring the
| AC-130, just assuming land-based combat for now cause
| AC-130 is beaten by a totally different strategy: air
| superiority)
|
| ---------
|
| "Combined arms". Your opponent has to load his weapon with
| the right bullet for the right circumstance. Mix up your
| strategies (both defensive and offensive strategies).
|
| * HEAT-armor piercing loses to reactive armor on a tank.
|
| * Reactive-armor loses to sabot-rounds.
|
| * Sabot rounds lose to long-distance battle (air-resistance
| slows down the round). HEAT is better at long-distance
| (HEAT always was kinda slow: most of the "power" comes from
| the explosion that occurs after-the-collision... which is
| beaten by reactive armor).
|
| You can't guard against everything. Instead, you rely upon
| mixing up the strategies enough so that enemies are kept
| "guessing" as to which weapon to load / unload.
| treeman79 wrote:
| It will once the various factories have been blown up.
| Imagine they are in the short list.
| mr_overalls wrote:
| > The last time the battlefield was insanely lethal people just
| dig trenches to even survive the day.
|
| Trench warfare proliferated when a revolution in firepower was
| unmatched by similar advances in mobility.
|
| Most likely, ongoing advances in stealth, armor, area denial,
| anti-drone tech, etc. will preclude its reappearance on the
| battlefield.
| Qworg wrote:
| Also, among other things, laser guided airburst 40mm grenades
| make trenches not a great option.
| horsawlarway wrote:
| I mean, shotguns also made trenches a really not great
| option.
|
| Bad enough that Germany literally tried to get them banned,
| and considered them a violation of the Hague conventions...
|
| Video games make a joke of shotguns, but they're
| _disgustingly_ effective in real life.
|
| ---
|
| "On September 15, 1918, the German government officially
| protested the use of the shotgun in a note verbale--an
| unsigned diplomatic note--transmitted to the Spanish
| Embassy in Berlin, then to the Swiss Embassy, and
| eventually to the American legation in Berne, Switzerland.
| The note asserted that the use of shotguns by U.S. forces
| violated Article 23(e) of the 1899 and 1907 Hague
| Conventions and warned that any American captured with a
| shotgun or shotgun ammunition would be executed."
| fennecfoxen wrote:
| Trenches weren't even all that great at protecting people in
| their days. What the multi-layer trench systems were good at
| was more or less "making it hard for the enemy to hold this
| territory for more than a few hours or days after taking it."
| nvelty wrote:
| During the more conventional phase of the 1st Chechen War,
| the Chechens made good use of hastily dug zig-zag trenches to
| limit the effects of Russian artillery and air support. The
| real revolution now is the proliferation of precision weapons
| and the use of drones to enable targeting for supporting
| fires. The trench still matters, but now camouflage and
| deception is equally important to prevent accurate targeting
| of a position. The marines did some testing in a drone-
| saturated environment and had to reshuffle their tactical
| doctrine to put a much higher emphasis on immediately
| camouflaging their position.
| sudosysgen wrote:
| There aren't really anymore advances in stealth and armor. If
| anything anti-stealth and anti-armor tech is advancing much
| more rapidly.
|
| What is advancing is area denial, anti-drone tech, and active
| protection systems.
| nvelty wrote:
| Stealth will always be important - it's just a numbers game
| to try and optimize RCS vs an opponent's radar systems. The
| big thing going forward will be creating resilient networks
| of shooters/sensors. This is where drones will make their
| money - spotting stuff via camera or radar for other manned
| planes, SAMs, or artillery.
| sudosysgen wrote:
| It's not, actually. Minimizing RCS hits a hard,
| unavoidable wall once the wavelength of the radar is
| close to that of the object. So it's a matter of getting
| large wavelength radars that are accurate enough.
| nextaccountic wrote:
| > There is such a distance from "kinda works in demo" to
| "killing active enemy" that it is barely worth thinking about
| for five years or more.
|
| It depends on the level of investment. WW2 saw a tremendous
| technological progress in 5 years because that was it took to
| win the war. Nowadays, I don't see why AR would be so urgent.
| lifeisstillgood wrote:
| I am a little dubious about the "war makes technological
| progress faster" meme. I think technology has a pace
| determined mostly by physics and what is possible. War
| perhaps only stops us getting in our own way( see torpedoes).
|
| Just to (cherry) pick a few examples
|
| - WW2 was not even going to start unless progress had
| _already_ passed the point that doctrine could see a way past
| the stalemate of the previous war. Germany had proven this
| (to itself) in Spain in 1936 - that tanks with close air
| support was now a viable thing at the divisional level.
| Progress from the say Panzer II to IV was not "quantum
| leaps" but solid well tested progress as was similar Russian
| tanks who were going up against them. Adding bigger engines
| and more armour, or sloping armour. This was progress by
| "failing fast". That is an organisational decision less than
| a technical one. for example :
|
| - Torpedoes : In the battle of midway US torpedoes frankly
| did not work (it's a terrible thing to ask a pilot to fly low
| and slow into AA fire and not give them a torpedo that
| actually will shoot straight or explode on contact). That was
| fixed in the latter part of the Pacific war but not because
| of technological progress but organisational change. ie
| firing everyone who thought there was no need to test
| torpedoes by, you know, live firing even one.
|
| - Manhattan Project. Yes and no I mean in early 1939 science
| did not think it was actually possible to make a nuclear
| bomb. After Piles' memo that changed and so there was a race
| on. But the goal was so tempting / threatening that even
| without a war it would still have been a major strategic
| goal. just like Rockets
|
| - Rockets. Frankly these are like VR glasses. Basically the
| technology was just possible in the late 30s. And we would
| have worked on it anyway - war or not. But despite going from
| toy demo to actual bombs on London, they were ... well the V2
| was the biplane compared to the Apollo 20 years later. It was
| not war that made rockets go up, it was funding.
|
| War perhaps gives a focus to develop _at a pace_ that would
| not be seen otherwise, but the space race showed you can do
| it without an actual live war-
|
| Technology cannot be forced -the materials science or energy
| equations either make it possible or not. No amount of
| investment in 1917 would have made a Panzer tank by 1920. You
| also could not turn a V2 into Apollo by 1950.
|
| Ultimately my view is that war strips away the self-serving
| excuses that organisations build up around why their progress
| is slow. It makes things faster because it gives clear
| unmistakable feedback (see torpedoes) and focuses funding,
| prioritisation and talent.
|
| It seems it would be nice if we could find ways to improve
| our organisations without the deaths of millions.
|
| Thank you had not thought about that before.
| KineticLensman wrote:
| > Ultimately my view is that war strips away the self-
| serving excuses that organisations build up around why
| their progress is slow. It makes things faster because it
| gives clear unmistakable feedback (see torpedoes) and
| focuses funding, prioritisation and talent
|
| Counter examples on both sides in WWII: A) The allied
| bombing campaign that failed to meet its strategic
| objectives for almost the whole duration of the war. B) The
| continued German development of strategically insignificant
| terror weapons (especially the V2). The bombing campaign
| did finally flatten German industry and transport, but not
| until the Germans were obviously going to lose anyway, in
| very late 1944 / early 1945. Its first several years had
| very little strategic effect but cost vast numbers of lives
| on both sides.
| [deleted]
| RangerScience wrote:
| Having worked in AR, the first place to use it in the military
| isn't in weapons; but rather training, logistics and
| construction.
| paul7986 wrote:
| Would you want to virtually co-work with your co-workers
| Memojis using the oculus T instead of working in an office with
| them and or remotely from your couch no VR?
| duped wrote:
| I think if you return to first principles, where the military
| exists as a tool of the state to conduct policy through
| violence (or threat of it) then most of the projects don't make
| sense given the abject failure of the military to achieve
| success over the last few decades.
|
| A better use of technology for this kind of policy would be on
| offensive and defensive cyber capabilities, control and
| monitoring of social or media networks and telecommunications.
| The CCP seems to understand that those are better tools for
| conducting diplomacy with 21st century violence more than
| making it easier for a soldier to hit someone with a bullet,
| since that is mostly a solved problem (shoot more of them and
| care less about who they hit)
| goagw wrote:
| Defensive cyber capabilities make sense but I dont know what
| offensive capabilities means when you are just completely cut
| off from Chinese networks. Maybe shoot a few Zuckerbergs into
| China or something...
| jvanderbot wrote:
| The US navy does test its weapons in live fire demonstrations
| for both offensive and defensive systems, and includes drones
| and other asymetric deliveries. You can find some cool videos
| on YouTube.
|
| Source: built one such system for US Navy.
| nradov wrote:
| I think the real concern is that such live fire tests have
| been unrealistically small with only a few target drones at a
| time. There has never been a real all-up fleet defense
| exercise with hundreds of high speed antiship missiles coming
| in simultaneously from multiple axes. They run electronic
| simulations of those scenarios all the time but doing it for
| real would cost billions.
| gigel82 wrote:
| I've heard the contract team (PMs) over-promised (as usual)
| literal SciFi features that can't physically be implemented
| (especially around the size of the helmet).
|
| Engineers on the project are leaving in droves (we got a couple
| interviewing for us, but I presume a lot more are just moving
| internally) to avoid the crunch and (likely) eventual crash &
| burn (because if they can't physically implement the requirements
| today I doubt they'll breakthrough in a year).
| Frost1x wrote:
| I've had multiple recruiters contact me this week representing
| contractual organizations working directly on and with aspects
| of IVAS.
|
| AR, VR, sensor technology, battery technology and portable
| computing have come a long way for certain, but most of what's
| being promised is just grandiose.
|
| I'm always surprised at how much snake oil and empty promises
| the federal government keeps buying in bulk. I realize why the
| DoD wants to invest in this, because you should to stay current
| if not ahead of adversaries, but why do they have to push it as
| a development effort when it's really a lot of research and
| exploratory engineering work. Does it take take big promise to
| get adequate funding for slightly less grandiose but still
| cutting edge work?
|
| The older I get, the more tired I get of the constant oversell
| in technology.
| frashelaw wrote:
| Horrifying to imagine such technology in the hands of the US
| military. The rest of the world dreads the death and destruction
| that will result from this, while brainwashed Americans cheer
| them on.
| rightbyte wrote:
| This is just BS equipement. I mean you can't even wear ordinary
| glasses with a helmet without it getting in the way, bouncing
| around, fogging ... and they need no USB charging.
| [deleted]
| doodlebugging wrote:
| I'm American and I don't consider myself to be brainwashed nor
| do I find anything horrifying about this technology being
| deployed by our military or by anyone else's military. I think
| that once you have developed tech like this it is inevitable
| that someone down the line will attempt to fit it into their
| own use case.
|
| For heads-up goggles that incorporate real-time information and
| allow a user to understand more about their local environment
| than they could with their natural senses I think it is
| inevitable that a military use case would be high on the list.
| Once something like this is deployed by one nation, others find
| themselves needing to develop similar tools to maintain parity
| and they will focus their attention on meeting that goal or
| they will attempt to purchase or steal this tech from those
| that already have it.
|
| Will that lead to more destruction, more control of the globe
| by America? Is the rest of the world shivering in their boots
| at the thought that American troops may eventually deploy with
| these cool goggles? I doubt it.
|
| I don't know where you are from and I'm not in the habit of
| scouring other people's post histories in an attempt to find a
| reason to disagree with them or to criticize them. I just think
| you may be being a bit hyperbolic here and that you are failing
| to consider that the US military will not be the only military
| actively utilizing this tech.
|
| I think we should all, regardless of where we are from and
| where we call home, be mindful that a lot of the technology
| being developed in Silicon Valley and other tech hubs will have
| a potential military use case and that some of it will be
| actively financed and supported by governments to that end,
| knowing that there will also be civilian use cases that can be
| explored and commercialized.
|
| There is an active tech trend of improving tools that can be
| used for active surveillance of civilian populations; improving
| methods of identifying individuals who buy and use common
| products so that you can either slam them with ads for your
| product or use more discreet tools to suggest that they should
| switch products; developing technology that has the effect of
| throwing all of us into the pool of potential suspects, etc.
|
| Those things worry me more than any goggles will.
|
| A lot of people here on HN work writing the code that robs us
| all of our privacy rights, our individuality, our ability to
| live what used to be normal lives in relative obscurity. Those
| are the things that I consider more subversive since the people
| know in advance how their tool will be used and they actively
| work to optimize the functionality that in some cases actively
| destroys society and any sense of community that we formerly
| enjoyed.
|
| Perhaps a trip to the mirror is in order? You can answer that
| for yourself better than I can.
| Shadonototra wrote:
| why title omits "Microsoft", don't want to hurt that company
| stock market?
| deeviant wrote:
| An actual news worthy event would be something like, "The Army's
| $XXB project two months ahead of schedule, and 5 billion under
| budget".
| h2odragon wrote:
| That headline would be buried under reports of flying pigs,
| various people rising from graves, Hell freezing over, etc etc.
| But i might get my pink unicorn at long last.
| josefresco wrote:
| While reading about this over at The War Zone* I found a video of
| "enhanced night vision" which looked very cool:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Poi0bOi91X8
|
| *https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/42739/army-halts-widel...
| buescher wrote:
| Two things have kept "good enough" versions of these kinds of
| systems from being widely deployed:
|
| 1) Batteries are inherently dismal, and getting enough of a sci-
| fi aesthetic and feature set to wow the military brass will
| always demand enough power to be at the edge of battery logistics
| hell
|
| 2) Infantrymen will destroy any cable you come up with in five
| minutes
| sonthonax wrote:
| In all fairness, trying to keep cables intact that are plugged
| into an overpacked rucksack and are attached to your head is
| pretty hard for anyone.
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