The incorporation of Silicon Valley into the Military Industrial Complex has been now been going on long enough or even the New York Times to have noticed. As usual, the presumption that the geniuses of the tech world will bring lethal benefit to our national security system went without challenge in The Militarization of Silicon Valley, which led with four multi-millionaire executives sporting baggy fatigues being sworn in as lieutenant colonels in an army “technical innovation” unit along with a quote from Army Secretary Daniel Driscoll (himself a former tech executive) hailing their talent and readiness to take “this risk” to work with the Pentagon
However it is becoming rapidly clear that there is little real innovation, or risk to anyone’s bottom line, in the Tech-MIC embrace. Despite bombast about “disruption” and “move fast and break things” while a growing pile of taxpayer dollars moves westward, business is very much as usual, complete with the same old revolving door spinning executives and officials in perpetual orbit between government, industry, congress, and K Street, all to produce limited numbers of over-priced and often ineffective weapons. Unwittingly, the NYT article mentioned above furnished a telling example of the process at work, a photograph of a soldier sporting “virtual reality” headgear, developed, the article implied, to train soldiers.
In fact, the headgear was supposed to do a lot more than “train soldiers.” Speaking to a credulous CNN interviewer in 2018, Palmer Luckey, founder of the defense-tech Anduril Corporation, described his vision of an “AI-powered sensor fusion platform” that would “build a perfect 3D model of everything that’s going on in a large area” so that “soldiers of the future” would be “superheroes’’ with “the power of perfect omniscience over their area of operations, where they know where every single enemy is, where every friend is, where every asset is.” Army leadership nurtured the same fantasy. In 2021 the Army awarded a contract potentially worth over $21 billion to Microsoft to develop and produce an Integrated Augmentation System (IVAS) based on the firm’s HoloLens virtual reality headset (which had proved a bust in the commercial market.)
Clearly, to anyone in the know the contract smelled bad from the beginning. In 2022 the Pentagon’s Inspector General probed the deal and concluded that “IVAS program officials did not define minimum user acceptance levels to determine whether IVAS would meet user needs,” which in translation means no one cared whether the thing was any use or not. “Procuring IVAS without attaining user acceptance,” the report concluded, “could result in wasting up to $21.88 billion in taxpayer funds to field a system that soldiers may not want to use or use as intended,” A 2023 report from the Pentagon’s Director of Operational Test and Evaluation released spelled out further ugly details of the system’s failings. The majority of soldiers testing the system, which they dubbed “magic goggles,” “reported at least one symptom of physical impairment to include disorientation, dizziness, eyestrain, headaches, motion sickness and nausea, neck strain and tunnel vision.” They also complained of the system’s
poor low-light performance, display quality, cumbersomeness, poor reliability, inability to distinguish friend from foe, difficulty shooting, physical impairments and limited peripheral vision.
Congress consequently withheld most of the procurement funding, but the Army promptly handed Microsoft another $125 million to tweak the system, with the price tag climbing to just under $23 billion.
Originally slated to enter service in 2021, the projected date had by now slipped to 2025.
Roll forward to February this year, when it was announced that Palmer Luckey’s Anduril would take over management of the program, assuming “oversight of production, future development of hardware and software, and delivery timelines," according to a press release. But seven months after Anduril’s takeover of IVAS the project, which ate up $1.36 billion of our money in the course of its short life, seems to be dead. Instead, we now have another magic goggle program: SBMC, or Soldier-Born Mission Command. Microsoft has disappeared from the picture; Anduril is now partnered with Meta in a $159 million contract to develop a prototype, promising to deliver an operational system by 2027. Luckey’s enthusiasm appears undiminished, telling an interviewer that his new headset will provide soldiers “the ability to see where all of the bad guys that somebody has located are..see where all the good guys are.. doing augmented reality blue force tracking to make sure you’re not shooting at your own people… Doing navigation, waypoint display, showing where the safe zones are, where the unsafe zones are,” while also controlling drones.
Luckey faces a rival in the form of Rivet Industries, which has garnered a $195 million deal to develop its own prototype. Rivet is a small DC start-up with little apparent track record that is headed by Dave Marra. This being a small world, until January 2023, Marra was Program Director for IVAS at Microsoft, and until early this year he was “strategic advisor for artificial intelligence and mixed reality” at Palantir, which, like Anduril, was spawned by entrepreneur Peter Thiel, who is currently about to embark on a sold-out four-part lecture series at San Francisco’s Commonwealth Club addressing his pet topic: The Antichrist.
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