If I recall, it was the summer of 1986. I was at Ft Lewis, Washington, and we were doing a night field exercise. Now I had what I considered really good movement skills, even at night; a youth spent hunting squirrels, turkeys, and deer in the forests of Northeast Iowa had seen to that, teaching me to move quietly even in dry leaf litter. My night vision was pretty good, and in those days, we were out at night with the standard-issue Mark I Eyeball. 

I noticed one of the evaluation officers standing, his back against the tree, watching the woods. I slipped in behind him, made my way up to his tree, and for the last 10 yards or so, slipped out of my boots and went in on my stocking feet - another trick from my youth. I came up behind him, leaned in close, tapped his steel helmet with one finger, and whispered:

"You're dead. Sir." The guy about jumped out of his boots.

That's the kind of stuff soldiers do, and now, we see that the Army is looking to provide combat soldiers with some high-tech perception assistance.

The Army has awarded a total of more than $350 million in contracts to industry teams to rapidly prototype soldier-worn headsets equipped with augmented reality, night vision and AI capabilities, according to announcements from selected vendors.

Anduril announced Monday that it landed a $159 million deal for the Soldier Borne Mission Command (SBMC) program. A few days prior, Rivet announced that it executed a $195 million agreement for the project.

The initiative is “a new effort to develop a fused digital awareness system optimized to emerging modular sensor technologies while backwards compatible to the Android Tactical Assault Kit (ATAK) architecture. SBMC will be the Army’s future day/night situational awareness and mission command platform for Company level and below dismounted operations,” service officials wrote in a solicitation released in May.

So, an augmented reality headset, for soldiers in the field? I have some questions.

What's the battery life on one of these things? How will they be recharged in the field? Or will they use a standard battery, and if so, how many of those will the troops be expected to tote around?

Will the troops be doing any training (I hope so) without these things? The thing about technology is that it will fail, and it will do so at the most embarrassing possible moment. The troops had better be well-acquainted with the operation of the Mark I Eyeball.

Here's another concern:

The Army has suggested that its primary focus for SBMC, which was previously known as IVAS Next, is boosting troops’ operational capability on the battlefield. Enhancing training and readiness is expected to be an added bonus.

“It is a ‘fight first’ system with the benefit of rehearse and train capabilities,” officials wrote in a request for information released earlier this year.

An RFI inquired about vendors’ potential solutions with regard to heads-up display (HUD), body-worn compute, night vision capability, company-level communications network, and software supporting services or systems such as cloud or edge computing.

Doesn't that present the chance of information overload?

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Don't get me wrong, technology is awesome, and it has improved our lives in countless ways. But something like this makes me stop and wonder. Our tech has and still is changing, becoming faster, more powerful, capable of more amazing things every day. But our brains? That old wetware hasn't had a substantial upgrade for many thousands of years. This kind of thing makes me wonder if it won't load up the individual soldier with more info poured in more quickly than he can process.

I could be wrong. It may just be the old Cold War soldier in me talking. But this seems like it may present more problems than it solves.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going outside to yell at a cloud.

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