Microsoft wins $21.9B contract with U.S. Army to supply AR headsets
reuters.comAnyone 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.
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.
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.
FTFY: Corrected off-by-one error in the AR ammo counter to correctly match actual rounds in small arm.
;)
New bug: Counter follows strict definition of small arm, only displays count of rounds in the chamber while ignoring the magazine/belt.
Note: Counter underflows with weapons exceeding programmed capacity. Firing negative rounds may have unpredictable behavior.
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"?
> What happens if you can't, because "authentication"?
Aren't your radios already using cryptographic fills? What do you think the difference is?
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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?
Well let's get it into troops' hands and give it a go and find out!
I take your point, but I think you're unreasonably optimistic. It's worth a try, but $22 billion?
On the other hand, maybe you're right. We're both British. What do we care if the US government spunks all this money up the wall? The only downside is if they sell it to the MOD before it's working.
> 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).
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.
Do you mean F-35?
Yes, oops.
HL2 uses eye tracking for authentication so that one should be partially solved
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).
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.
Regrettably, the joke doesn't work since ammunition is kept in magazines or belts, not clips.
(Is there even a firearm commonly used by a modern military today that still uses clips?)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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/a25644619...
> King estimates that the average soldier goes into action with a hefty 20 lbs of batteries.
> 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.
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
> 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!
> 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...
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".
I work on AR/VR in the pharma field. It's not super close to downrange applications, but I may be able to handle some questions.
To your concerns, I think they are very valid. Weight, as always, is a primary concern for the infantry. The Hololens2 is not a light system to just wear, let alone with a helmet. Additional issues like battery, signal, and other unforeseens are likely large concerns too.
That said, I think that the ability to quickly and seamlessly integrate all the data that is coming in may have some advantages. Giving warfighters a way to view all the data in real-time is a goal worth spending some money on. The recent Nagorno-Karabakh war has shown that the digital/cyber aspect of war has a likelihood of being a vital factor in future conflicts.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_Nagorno-Karabakh_conflict
Integrate data for who? I feel the common footsoldier is not the aim here, this is just more metrics for the comms to use and if that.
My scepticism lies in the fact that bulletproof vests, widely used across different countries, was not an invention of the overfunded military-industrial complex, but an ex marine who hacked it together in the back of his garage with a rusty fork.
That's not true. Modern body armor was available in Vietnam [1], and was the result of an ARPA research program. It was expensive and rarely issued though until later, but the technology (boron-carbide plates) is similar to what is used today. You're thinking of Richard Davis, the inventor of the police-issued Kevlar vest. He invented it in the mid 1970s, after getting in a gunfight while working as a pizza delivery driver.
[1] https://docs.google.com/document/d/1iw3_4RGaDlSDXmeYkSYu-rQu...
Former Infantry here also but still serving part time.
I think the immediate use is for training. The Army is big on simulators for all MOS's because it saves resources, reduces training complexity, and reduces risk. Sims such as VBS3, EST, VCOT, UGT are mostly required these days for various purposes. This could even possibly function as a better MILES or replace the fleet of OPFOR vehicle analogues at NTC. So, potentially there is money to be saved while creating more realistic training.
Maybe in a few decades the software stack will be solid enough and the hardware miniaturized enough to use in combat. The similar success story might be the FA's venerable AFATDS, which has been around for decades and very reliably brings rounds on target.
Worst case, it ends up as extra weight for graded positions to carry in RS. ;)
Opinion. The goal is to make certain people a lot of money. See F22 for example.
If actually works that’s a bonus.
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.
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.
Not really possible with HoloLens. This is AR not VR or a HUD.
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 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.
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.
A video feed has areas of lighter stuff along with areas of darker stuff. (Most) AR systems work by projecting lasers on to a glass plane in front of you, adding light to your FOV. How do you project darkness on a transparent background? The video feed won't look that great in AR.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
HL2 consumer version weighs less than 1lb and will likely be built directly into your helmet. Might get to 1lb for extended battery life
1lb is still a lot on your head considering everything else you have to hang off of it.
Training - simulations.
Eventually, a Danger Room anywhere.
they're running Windows 7 because Candy Crush isn't preinstalled
Is used for me in 10 years when it all trickles down. I can’t wait.
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.
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.
There's a very obvious analogy here that proves you wrong: nvgs
> 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.
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.
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)
for anyone else who was confused and about to google it: Night Vision Goggles[1].
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.
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.
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.
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.
Another example is optical zooming.
Companies like Mojo Vision have already built a contact lens prototype that could power “superhuman” traits like this.
> 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.
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 realistic? haha
You're on point, these will save the military more money than they are spending. There are two very key areas off the battlefield, planning and maintenance, where this will save big time on people hours / salary
So say that they're for planning and maintenance, and we only need 50 thousand headsets. That's $450,000 per headset/person. You'd have to have some pretty amazing efficiency upgrades to save money on salary.
Given you’d only be making 500k units, and you’re making them to milspec, sounds like a pretty good deal to me.
If the US army wants to supply one to every soldier then they will need much more than 500K units.
Military equipment breaks all the time and it’s not because of poor build quality, it is constantly being put through the most extreme conditions possible. Conditions that are hard to imagine as a civilian.
OK, they'll need much more than 1 per soldier. But a Hololens 2 Industrial Edition costs $5k. This works out to $44k per soldier, and obviously not every soldier in the Army will get or need one.
Let's get real, this is just outrageous, typical boondoggle military spending.
While I don't necessarily disagree with the sentiment, a good chunk of the contract must be for R&D. The US Army isn't buying a ready made, commercial off-the-shelf product.
Commercial AR/VR products also have the cost of R&D factored into the price tag.
Commercial AR/VR products are not designed to military specifications, nor have only one possible customer.
The article already mentions that it will be "backed by Azure cloud computing services", and you know there will be hefty consulting services added on.
contract award doesn't mean all 22B was spent, that often means the contract ceiling where money can be obligated to it as we buy
It's $22b over 10 years and I doubt they'd be keeping a 2021 model around until 2031.
It's nothing more than welfare and stimulus that republicans can get behind.
US air superiority fighters already include AR in their helmets.
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).
Please point me to an example of this. Short of prepo supply, I never once saw an example of this.
good for R&D I suppose
Private, patented R&D which benefits a single trillion-dollar corporation funded by public dollars. Too common in this country sadly.
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
I own MSFT shares, why don’t you?
>corporation
Public corporation, buy shares and enjoy the loot.
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 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.
>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
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 .
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.
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...
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.
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).
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.
If infantry are more safe, they are more likely to be deployed. This merely prolongs the greater problem.
I want everyone to be safe, but rather than providing various safeguards and defenses, I suggest we avoid the conflict entirely.
Workplace accidents are still quite common, and that's a place that could benefit from heads-up AR type aids.
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
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.
Blue screen of death can have whole new meaning.
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.
“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
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?
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.
> 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?
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.
And what if instead of paying those people to d̶e̶v̶e̶l̶o̶p̶ ̶w̶e̶a̶p̶o̶n̶s̶ be in the military, we paid them to develop tech and infrastructure that would provide utility to every day people?
Because it's not like your average 19 year old in Parris Island was plucked from the deans list at MIT
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.
not a single economist worth his salt would say this
Life is one big war. Just because you live in a pleasant neighbourhood, doesn't mean there are no malevolent people in the world...
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.
" 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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> (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.
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.
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.
"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.)
> 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
> 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?
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.
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?
"their basic needs met plus a little bit of cushion to enjoy life"
Who's responsibility is it to meet these needs?
Irrelevant of the answer, it helps in general if your efforts & hard work towards a better life aren't bombed into oblivion
This is half true, today religion is the primary driver of conflict.
tribalism is the primary driver of conflict and has always been
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.
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.
>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?
> 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/gijt81/oc_...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_federal_budget#/...
People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf. - commonly attributed to Orwell
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.
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.
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.
Well, yeah, Trump did an amazing job of lowering the bar.
...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.
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?
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
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.
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.
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.
Pretty sure the rationale for Korea/Vietnam was exactly "because there were malevolent people in the world who posed a direct threat to the nation", just targeted towards the USSR/communism
and what about latin america.
there’s no end to the abuses of the US military around the world, and MS is helping these killers in exchange of money.
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.
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?
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.
Give people something to lose and they'll stop fighting.
Or give people something to do and they will stop fighting. (something that brings some meaning to their lives).
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.
You can't handle the truth!!!
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.
> 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"
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 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-...
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.
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
> 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).
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.
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.
https://www.pgpf.org/chart-archive/0053_defense-comparison
Yes but spending as much as the next 10 countries combined is not needed.
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.
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.
Debatable. R&D funding, job creation (including at overseas bases and embassies), massive economic benefits from being the world reserve currency, etc.
This ^
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.
60 years isn't the best sample size for "forever".
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.
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.
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.
“... what if we waged peace as fiercely as we are prepared to wage war?” Bill McDonough (2002) < https://mcdonough.com/writings/waging-peace-intelligent-desi...>
If the US spent a fraction of what it spends literally lighting money on fire with missiles and bombs, I’d bet we’d see a big decline in non-geostrategic hostilities or non-rogue actors (i.e., except for China, Russia, or the Saddam Hussein’s of the world). Terrorist movements arguably win support because of the lack of good government and economic opportunities of the populations they purport to rule.
The worry then becomes how the money is spent, which companies win the contracts (e.g., Buy American provisions), and perceptions of vassal states, but historically, it has been a successful strategy and is similar to what China is doing with its Belt and Road Initiative.
If armed insurgency means the loss of a decent percentage of GDP thru wealth transfer, then it’d lessen some of the incentives and reasons for armed conflicts. It’d also be important to make sure funds are distributed equitably with a country and not under the World Bank model.
> 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!
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.
> 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
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
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.
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?
This is quiet a false dichotomy you're running with here. You write as if the only choice is between funding global military efforts at their current levels or caving to the Nazis.
Of course declaring war on Germany upon their invasion of Poland was the right thing to do. But it doesn't make declaring war before that the even righter thing to do. And it has little bearing on our choices today, that was another time. You can't use Hitler to justify WWI or the Crimean war or the Punic Wars. What makes him a better justification for building the war machines in Iraq or Aghanistan?
There are many choices. We could spend the same money we do now on the military but only focus on defensive weapons. We could educe our spending on military by half and still be funding our military far above the level of most other countries. We could significantly draw down our military as we did after nearly every war in our history. Those are all choices. But we choose to spend incredible sums on forces which can project power around the entire world. We do that for a reason. It isn't entirely sinister but it isn't entirely altruistic either. In the end, we do it because it gives us power. For the exact reason the Athenians grew their "alliance" sometimes at the point of a sword. It gave them power.
Putting that all aside, the best case you make for war is that it might reduce suffering and prevent tyranny. Well that is precisely the best case for publicly funded scientific, medical, safety and poverty efforts. Which is exactly the OP's point.
> This is quiet a false dichotomy you're running with here.
Hang on no I’m arguing against the false dichotomy someone else presented, subscribing totally to ‘love not war’. I don’t think it’s either-or, that’s what they said.
You realize that when most people use that cliche they aren't saying, "no war ever". They just generally mean you should avoid war if possible and invest more in constructive activities and less in destructive. As with most cliches the language is totalizing in a way the sentiment is not.
Personally I am very nearly a pacifist. But I still support a strong defense (but an actual focus on defense which is far from what we have now). So I may employ this cliche from time to time but meaning we should lean away from our first strike and global capabilities. Not that we should abandon having any military altogether. There are some who feel that we should but they are very few and far between.
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)
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.
> 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.
> it was a war situation for the US anyway
Right.... so we needed a strong military, right? No point relying on 'love' alone?
Right, I agree with your premise.
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".
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.
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 multiple magnitudes more jobs/opportunities for the economy than this.
Half of the US pays $0 in federal taxes.
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 $285. The math looks even worse.
The idea that some unjustified spending is OK just because it's "cheap" per capital is an absurd idea.
First infants are hardly paying 73$, 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.
nahh just give me $73
“To be prepared for war is one of the most effective means of preserving peace.”
George Washington
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.
"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?
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.
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.
"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.
Yes! AND strategies for innovation and trade that are well underway.
Compared to the US? No, not at all.
> 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.
if you want peace, prepare for war.
Ask any history teacher that question if you find opportunity.
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.
> 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.
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.
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?
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.
Note that I didn’t state an opinion on the correctness or otherwise of the company’s or employee’s stances, just reminding people that a corporation, at it’s heart, is a mechanism for making money.
This makes me happy as we don’t lose out to technologically leapfrogging China and their military.
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.
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.
And this is why people like me will take their place.
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.
Google has also had several high profile cases of abandoning pursuit of extremely lucrative military/government contracts due to backlash from employees.
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.
LOL Microsoft has few forums to even voice your concern. You can't even share your salaries within Microsoft. It's such a joke to tout it as more employee friendly than Google. For starters it pays lesser across the board. Google has also backed out of many contracts when dissent was raised.
The voices aren't suppressed at Microsoft, because there're no avenues to raise them anyway.
Yet people do voice and raise their concerns through those avenues. Just because it's underutilized, it certainly counts. Does Google have more than I am not aware about? You can't share your salaries internally at many places through official means, but it's not uncommon for people to create giant anonymous spreadsheets on salaries and share them among colleagues. Microsoft isn't THAT secretive on salaries and salary levels. I'm not exactly sure what point you're refuting?
Lol just 94 people protested this contract at msft. I don't want to debate if it's the people at Microsoft or the suppressed voice by upper management. Either way Microsoft gets away with a lot of contentious business decisions as employees are more inclined to keep their head down.
Also about salaries, try creating a spreadsheet for salaries at Microsoft. I guarantee you, you will be fired within the week.
On salaries, I'm really confused - I'm telling you it exists. Heck, it even got media coverage: https://onezero.medium.com/leaked-salary-spreadsheet-reveals.... Do you know anybody getting fired for starting one?
When I was there, I can't even recall someone getting fired for any reason - lots of employees have been there for decades and not at all 1) keeping their head down or 2) worried about job security. I have no idea where the stigma comes from of Microsoft employees keeping their heads down, or why they would have any reason to? And especially, I really cannot recall Microsoft firing anybody for voicing ethical concerns - so why in the world would employees feel like they would be putting their job on the line?
'By the last day of August 2020, 310 employees had added their data to the spreadsheet. Microsoft employs more than 150,000 employees around the world.'
You don't say.
150,000 employees are not all L5x-L7x leveled or engineers. Not everything in the world gets leaked, so we're only addressing one leaked spreadsheet - of many.
Your original claim was that people get fired for this within the week. I refuted that I don't recall any sort of event. There weren't announcements for mass firings of 310 employees. If you have more details on this, please share. You seemed very convinced of your initial claims on how Microsoft reacts to contentious acts by employees against the company, so I imagined it must be evidence based. I really would like to know.
The point I'm refuting is that there are far less avenues in Microsoft for employees to collectively complain or share information together or dissent against the top brass.
Without examples of your claim, how would I know?
Tell me one avenue where employees have complained ? Satyas QnA ? And like you said no one does anything there. You really believe 150k people are all aligned with military contracts ? At Google there are at least 4 company level avenues to raise your voice. You can Google them. And Google has walked back on contracts after backlash on employees. So clearly there is more proactive action here. At Microsoft there is both employees are too meek or don't care and employees can't even voice their concerns. Cycle keeps going on and on.
Again, the vast majority of the 150,000 are not R&D and don't really have anything to do with product development to even matter.
Yammer, Satyas QnA - which I'm glad you mentioned because organized groups send a representative every time to talk about government contracts - quarterly all hands, etc. Not to mention the Surface/Hololens org, the org responsible for the tech, holds all hands for their teams very frequently. Sometimes, your org head could be sharing your floor, they don't have special offices.
No one's voice is suppressed and no one is being meek, I don't even know how leadership would be able to control that anyway. The simple facts are - 1) there's a small coalition of employees who feel one way about it, 2) not all concerns raised are valid ones and has a need to be addressed - because frankly, it's really a good thing leadership can stand their ground and not sway on the voices of a few employees, no? The proactive action being taken here is the ability to stick with a common sense perspective, not proactively fire your employees for saying mean things about their employer.
Yes and at Google each individual employee can raise concerns. Not some "org head" who may ask softball questions because his promotion is directly controlled by the CEO. I can't believe you're comparing this cherry picked gathering to a setting where literally anyone can go up and ask a question.
And then you justify leadership standing their ground. Ha. So Microsoft leadership is all benevelant, never wrong. There's a reason 99/100 make the move from Microsoft to G.
Sure thing mate. I'm not contesting on what available avenues are available for Googlers, perhaps you know more than I do. Just stating the factual observations, repeated cases of an individual employees getting fired for raising concerns. You briefly describe your anecdote, I'm describing my anecdote. I'm neutral on Google for most things, I use their products and I don't really care about their privacy issues.
No need to cherry pick my previous reply, I'll restate since some parts must have flew by :). Higher ups are very accessible to each individual employee because you really can just go up to them. Back then, the CVP always swung by our office to say hi pretty frequently. The message boards exist. And people group up for QnA because it's effective. Employees pranked their bosses without retaliation.
I don't even have a reason to justify leadership anymore. Just stating the clear facts, that the majority trust them to the right thing. Beats me why C-level is popular internally. They respond to employee concerns when it mattered, and stood their ground when it didn't. No need to make assumptions here about people being meek, lets use facts.
I think we're going in circles. I"ll let it rest. I appreciate that you engaged in a civil way. Are you still at Microsoft ? Is Azure the alpha org now ?
Yeah, Google would never shut down internal dissent:
https://www.wired.com/story/google-shakes-up-its-tgif-and-en...
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/11/27/googles-thanksgiving-four-pr...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/12/23/google-...
At least Googlers can dissent and protest. Not one big company comes close to the amount of times Googlers can and have affected change. No company is perfect. Look inside yours before always finding flaws in one.
What does the many firings say about their ability to dissent and protest? I'm don't think your now unemployed colleagues would agree with that assessment. What is incredible about Google is not how much better they are than every other company but how good they are at selling employees their internal propaganda.[0]
>No company is perfect. Look inside yours before always finding flaws in one.
I don't owe Google and any trillion dollar company anything, especially not the benefit of the doubt. All these companies are evil but only Googlers seems insistent on convincing themselves about how good and moral they are.
Have fun at your perfect company.
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.
Reading through these comments, it sounds like most people assume these will be used as some sort of enemy targeting overlay for soldiers on the frontline. Is there any reporting to back this?
My understanding was that HoloLens had found usefulness in enterprise settings for applications like machine/vehicle maintenance, quality assurance, repairs, etc. Why would that not be the case here?
I would expect the plan is to do it all.
Logistics guy wearing a set checking in the latest supply run or flight, looking at a crate brings up the manifest of contents.
Mechanic looking over an engine, overlay brings up blownup diagrams, teardown instructions.
Squad leader can pipe in drone overflight feeds, target air strikes and support fires, etc.
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.
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.
Similar to this great short "Uncanny Valley": https://vimeo.com/147365861
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.
> 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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
... 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.
The soldiers definitely want them.
This will likely save the army money in the long run, not to mention lives.
It's a scam obviously. Microsoft is using its connections to scam US tax payers.
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-...
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.
Considering that there are around 150 million taxpayers in the US, this is around $150 a taxpayer. That's CRAZY.
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
over 10 years, so like one fast food meal a year per person.
$15 is pretty pricey for fast food.
I would agree, but that's where it's getting to. Certainly less than one decent whisky drink at a bar
Microvision's stock shot up ~50% because of this. Their technology powers the Hololens 2 apparently.
Microsoft's stock didn't budge. Is this contract going to go directly to Microvision?
> (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
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?
It’s a 10 year contract, up to $21.9B. The consensus forecast for 2021 revenue by MSFT is 164B, 2.19B is 1.25% of that.
The army probably misunderstood what they meant by telemetry.
My understanding of how Microsoft won this bid is they had a special team of Hololens developers work overtime to setup a special demo for the US Armed forces, where they rented out a warehouse and setup a maze. Then the armed forces decision makers could run around and "shoot terrorists" that were overlaid on their hololens.
It is amazing a demo this stupid resulted in a 21 billion windfall for Microsoft. I'm only posting this because this is such a terrible use of taxpayer dollars.
They hope to train the soldiers with it, so they can be more ready in the real world? is that their thinking?
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.
"Could be worth up to".
Not quite the same as actually worth.
What’s left for Microsoft to do? Open a Walmart-like?
The funny thing is they actually closed (or are closing) all of their physical stores this past year.
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.
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.
> 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 nationwide network, 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?
BSOD on your face.