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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

#191

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

benja123 wrote: post #101
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?

If the US army wants to supply one to every soldier then they will need much more than 500K units. Military equipment breaks all the time and it’s not because of poor build quality, it is constantly being put through the most extreme conditions possible. Conditions that are hard to imagine as a civilian.

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

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

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

#192

Post by remarkEon »

chrisseaton wrote: post #164
Enginerrrd wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 p…

> 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.

>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.

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

#193

Post by quickthrowman »

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…

> 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!

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

#194

Post by ahepp »

screye wrote: post #86

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.

>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

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

#195

Post by jedberg »

IG_Semmelweiss wrote: post #177

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 fo…

> 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.

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

#196

Post by munk-a »

remarkEon wrote: post #49
anon_tor_12345 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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.

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.

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

#197

Post by neatze »

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.

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.

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

#198

Post by chrisseaton »

remarkEon wrote: post #92
Enginerrrd wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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…

> What happens if you can't, because "authentication"?

Aren't your radios already using cryptographic fills? What do you think the difference is?

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

#199

Post by ahepp »

lifeisstillgood wrote: post #174
spaced-out wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

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.

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.

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

#200

Post by nickff »

wcarss wrote: post #123
nickff wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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 cl…

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.

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