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Microsoft wins $21.9B contract with U.S. Army to supply AR headsets

reuters.com

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Re: Microsoft wins $21.9B contract with U.S. Army to supply AR headsets

#141

Post by dragonwriter »

moolcool wrote: post #122
intrepidhero wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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.

Re: Microsoft wins $21.9B contract with U.S. Army to supply AR headsets

#142

Post by verdverm »

wcarss wrote: post #51
fwip wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The army has a little under 500K active-duty soldiers. As a gross overestimation, if they were delivering one headset per soldier, napkin math shows: $22B / 500K = $44K per headset. Even if the tech were super useful and every single soldier got one, that price tag seems absolutely absurd. How can anyone be okay with this?

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

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

Re: Microsoft wins $21.9B contract with U.S. Army to supply AR headsets

#143

Post by remarkEon »

Diederich wrote: post #109
remarkEon wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> myriad of sensor tech we ended up carrying At that time, did you feel like that tech was useful?

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).

Re: Microsoft wins $21.9B contract with U.S. Army to supply AR headsets

#144

Post by missedthecue »

thanhhaimai wrote: post #84
bushbaba wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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…

Half of the US pays $0 in federal taxes.

Re: Microsoft wins $21.9B contract with U.S. Army to supply AR headsets

#145

Post by f154hfds »

mrkstu wrote: post #5

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.

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?

Re: Microsoft wins $21.9B contract with U.S. Army to supply AR headsets

#146

Post by optimiz3 »

blunte wrote: post #18

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 confl…

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.

Re: Microsoft wins $21.9B contract with U.S. Army to supply AR headsets

#147

Post by DubiousPusher »

chrisseaton wrote: post #71
blunte wrote: post #18

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 confl…

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.

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/

Re: Microsoft wins $21.9B contract with U.S. Army to supply AR headsets

#149

Post by break_the_bank »

wcarss wrote: post #135
hutzlibu wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So china does not have a big military budget, too?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_military_... 4x as many people, roughly 1/3rd of the budget.

Stuff is cheaper in China too.

Re: Microsoft wins $21.9B contract with U.S. Army to supply AR headsets

#150

Post by freeone3000 »

withinrafael wrote: post #57
numakerg wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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…

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.
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