A maze or requirement, bureaucracy, and interoperability with existing and TBD systems? Software is expensive to build. Reliable software all that much more.
If you consider an alternative, just make an app and stick phone on a rifle, sure, that will work for 90% of the stuff you want to do, but it would break and that's bad. A true "heads up display" that you can bet your life on, anywhere on earth, at any time, is just a truly massive undertaking.
I'm sorry but even taking into account the clusterf*** of government procurement this is a truly obscene price tag. Even by government standards, this is ridiculous.
It's half as much as the development of the entire flipping Space Shuttle. It's more than Apple's entire yearly R&D budget. It's more than the James Webb Space Telescope and the entire Hubble program (including operations and the repairs that were needed post-launch) combined. It's roughly the cost of 8 Mars rovers of the same type as Curiosity / Perseverance.
This is worse, even, than the Joint Strike Fighter program, which at least started out reasonably with only a pair of 1 billion dollar grants handed out to Boeing and Lockheed to develop two functional prototype fighter aircraft (never mind how the costs spiraled later).
Setting aside the question of how much it should or shouldn't cost to develop such a product, it's absolute insanity to do it with a single massive project. The DoD loves to claim in public they're trying to be more agile, and this is the exact opposite of that. This ought to have been done $100 million (or less) at a time with limited initial scope and incrementally expanding goals.
Don't make excuses for this. There is no possible justification.
> true "heads up display" that you can bet your life on, anywhere on earth, at any time, is just a truly massive undertaking.
At some point you have to make a cost-benefit analysis and look at the bigger picture. For example and in this particular case, yes, spending let’s say 10 billion instead of 22 billion for a rougher solution might increase the dead count on the battlefield in the near future, but if those 12 billion that you’ve now saved go to better free education at home (more engineers in the future to design better weapons) or/and to free healthcare (more fit soldiers in the future) maybe it will all even out at a higher threshold.
> If you consider an alternative, just make an app and stick phone on a rifle, sure, that will work for 90% of the stuff you want to do, but it would break and that's bad.
Given that soldiers are currently getting by with something that works 0% of the time, the assumption that 90% isn't good enough seems highly suspect. Exactly how many more soldiers will be saved by developing a true heads up display versus an off the shelf app running on a ruggedized phone?
This seems like an obvious case of a failure to actually define requirements and make real engineering decisions.
I don't think it's a question of "saving" soldiers, sadly, but rather, "how much more efficient will they be, especially on the attack.
I don't think it's a 0% solution right now: the infantry has a lot of technology: radios, drones, and is getting more. Integrated it is just the next step.
In your simplest web software, there's the first 80% and the second 80%. With projects like this, which are literally life and death, there's many more 80%s to be considered and executed.
Do you ask why space travel is expensive? It's arguably much simpler than this is.
If a pair of goggles fails, the soldier takes them off.
These are the same people who equipped soldiers in Vietnam with a rifle that jams due to mud. The idea that military hardware has to be many times more reliable than space hardware is absurd.
Sometimes the rocket fails but the astronaut makes it back (Apollo 13). Sometimes the goggles fail, and the soldier misjudges a drop and breaks his leg, or walks into a known blast radius and dies, or misidentifies and kills a civilian.
Either way, if this is worth doing -- and I agree with you that it's a big, big if -- it is worth doing right.
Astronauts surviving a failure is a once in a generation event that gets memorialized forever in movies and literature. Soldiers' equipment failing is a Tuesday.
Increased situational awareness has value, but it is a clear case of diminishing returns. Exactly what the cutoff ought to be is debatable, but that the cutoff exists is certain.
Agreed. We've been to space, understand the risks, and have a decent understanding that X dollars pays for Y in LEO. This is an almost entirely greenfield project, so who knows if the deliverables will even be useful.
We all have nuclear weapons, why do we need rifles and infantry? This narrative is total BS. Is the goal to waste money today in order to be able to waste even more money later on countries like Iraq and Afganistan? We've seen what those rifles are used for... These rifles would be more useful to society if politicians would just shove them up their ***!
If you consider an alternative, just make an app and stick phone on a rifle, sure, that will work for 90% of the stuff you want to do, but it would break and that's bad. A true "heads up display" that you can bet your life on, anywhere on earth, at any time, is just a truly massive undertaking.