Really interesting how they plan to make this work given we can’t manufacture most of the parts needed here.

The Quest is made in China and Vietnam. China could easily put pressure on their neighbor to not export dual use goods.

I guess they could setup a separate North American only supply chain. Should only take 30 years

Nothing about the quest has ever worked well, I suspect if this were ever deployed it would actually save lives by getting in the way of actual warfare.

Sounds awfully pie in the sky. My own experience matches Jonathan Wong's. An individual ground Soldier is carrying a lot of gear already and the helmet as-is is quite heavy. Regular night vision and ballistic glasses are not comfortable. Ruggedized laptops are already bulky and adding in the ability to run a local LLM is only going to make them bulkier. Computing and electronics in general are unreliable in the field, easy to lose, difficult to keep charged, and nobody likes carrying them. It needs to add quite a bit of value to be worth it, and calling in airstrikes or indirect fire is not all that difficult as it stands.

Projects like these always feel like people whose experience of combat is video games imagining how cool it would be to have better tech, and I can't help but wonder what the guys at the top buying this shit are thinking. They too were once at the platoon and company level, even if it was decades ago. Cynically, they might just hope to end up like this Quay Barnett guy. Buy shit you don't need and will never field from a vendor today, then get a 7-figure job from the same vendor when you retire.

CTRL + F for “weight” returns one instance. Unfortunate, because that is the other thing that actually keeps these things from being truly viable in dismounted operations. You could solve all of the other problems with getting an augmented reality system to work in a combat environment, but if it’s too heavy no one cares. The VP mentioned in the article is a SOF bro so presumably he’s thinking about this, but I really wish it got more air time. Weight is such an important planning aspect that it’s difficult to overstate how impactful it is when deciding what you actually end up carrying.

I get a paywall, is this also for others?