DoD agency warns $22 billion Army/Microsoft HoloLens deal could be waste of taxpayer money:
[...] Microsoft's deal to supply the US Army with 121,500 Integrated Visual Augmentation Systems (IVAS) augmented reality glasses based on its HoloLens technology could be a $22 billion waste of taxpayer money, according to a Department of Defense oversight agency.
Back in 2018, Microsoft began prototyping the IVAS glasses and was awarded a $480 million contract by the Army for 100,000 units. In April last year, Microsoft won the contract to build the final version for soldiers in a deal worth $22 billion over ten years.
The system combines high-resolution night, thermal, and soldier-borne sensors into a heads-up display. It also leverages augmented reality and machine learning to enable a life-like mixed reality training environment, the military branch wrote.
Signs that the project could be running into trouble arrived a few months later when the AR goggles' rollout was pushed back from fiscal year 2021 to September 2022, but the Army said it remained fully committed to the deal.
Yet it seems the US Department of Defense's Office of the Inspector General (OIG) doesn't share the Army's enthusiasm, nothing [sic] that many soldiers are having issues with the devices. "Procuring IVAS without attaining user acceptance 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," it wrote in an audit report (via The Reg).
This sounds like the usual story for defence procurement - time and cost over-runs, and failure to meet the original specification are the norm, aren't they?
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 28 2022, @01:35PM (12 children)
"Wouldn't it be great if our schools were fully funded, and the Navy had to hold bake sales to build new submarines?"
(Score: 2) by NateMich on Thursday April 28 2022, @03:48PM (10 children)
What is truly amazing to me, is that incredibly expensive things like aircraft carriers and SLS are such a small part of the budget. So much money is going to support so many bureaucrats that it isn't funny.
(Score: 5, Informative) by Thexalon on Thursday April 28 2022, @04:38PM (9 children)
No it isn't. The US federal government has about 1.9 million employees (source [opm.gov]). If we figure that each of those 1.9 million of so federal employees costs somewhere around $100K a year in salary, benefits, and supplies (bear in mind most government employees make less than private-sector jobs doing similar work), that's $190 billion or so in personnel costs. Which sounds like a lot of money, but really isn't more than about $500 of your average American's total annual tax bill. Or another way of looking at it is that all personnel make up less than 5% of the US federal budget of $4800 billion.
And you also have to remember that most of those 1.9 million federal employees aren't sitting at a desk pushing useless paper around. That number includes, for instance, all federal law enforcement officers, every federal safety inspector, and everyone who manages a federal government website.
Also worth mentioning here, from that same source, is that there are more retirees than there are current employees, so that strongly suggests that there are significantly fewer federal employees around today than there were even 20 years ago.
If you want to know where your tax money is going, the big line items are:
1. Medicare payouts.
2. Medicaid payouts.
3. Social Security benefits.
4. Profits for government contracting companies, especially the defense contracting industry.
5. Interest payments on US Treasury bonds.
Of those, I consider line item #4 the most objectionable, because it does nothing but prop up the stock prices of specific businesses. I think it's also worth mentioning that by a lot of available measurements, having a publicly run US health care system that looked more like the British or Canadian health services would lower Medicare and Medicaid costs significantly.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 28 2022, @04:47PM
Ah but how do you really know where the money is going where there really isn't any actual "accounting" for it?
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/pentagon-35-trillion-accounting-black-231154593.html [yahoo.com]
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-audit-army-idUSKCN10U1IG [reuters.com]
Can't really call that accounting when it's not much different from making up the numbers.
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Thursday April 28 2022, @08:08PM (1 child)
Hell, if those are the biggest line items in a country as rich as the USA, having such a health care system run as a non-profit would probably cut costs and provide good care. Kaiser Permanente is the biggest US example I know of this.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 28 2022, @10:18PM
They wouldn't treat anything unless it could be treated by buying a cheap pill or tube of ointment at the company pharmacy on the bottom floor. Refusal to treat, lack of doctor access (wait list), and subpar doctors was my Kaiser experience. Never again to "managed" care.
(Score: 2) by Captival on Thursday April 28 2022, @09:56PM (1 child)
>bear in mind most government employees make less than private-sector jobs doing similar work
Watch your bears.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Thexalon on Thursday April 28 2022, @10:59PM
(emphasis mine)
Both of these statements can be true simultaneously:
1. The average US federal government employee makes more than the average private sector employee.
2. The average pay for, say, civil engineers, is higher if they work for private companies rather than governments.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 28 2022, @11:34PM (2 children)
It does more than that. See: Ukraine.
There is an argument to be made that the US is spending too much on military. However, those who say that the military should be completely defunded (which, to be clear, you did NOT propose) need to realize the realpolitik that flower power will only stop an attacking force if that force is sympathetic of you... and sometimes not even that. Again, see Ukraine (and/or all the native Americans who relied on the good word of a fledgling United States).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 30 2022, @03:41AM (1 child)
It's a result of the US military trying to look for more ways to justify their big budgets.
The USA is like a pyromaniac fireman that goes around the world starting fires and pretending to be a hero fighting them. And the victim when they get burned.
If their budget was cut so they stayed mostly at home, they'd cause a lot less damage. It's not defense when you're bombing wedding parties and funerals thousands of miles away. And that actually makes things more dangerous for US citizens, not safer.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 30 2022, @05:28AM
Russian troll, go fuck yourself.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 30 2022, @05:33AM
Canada's public system costs about half per person to run while also covering the entire population, and the level of care is also about the same, so nationalizing healthcare would be a huge savings.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 28 2022, @10:13PM
And the worst performing schools are typically the ones that spend the most per pupil.
Kids need a bake sale to take a special field trip? Big deal. It always comes through.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 28 2022, @01:58PM (1 child)
Most of what the government does IS a waste of money. We have so many three letter agencies that we eventually ran out of three letter acronyms, not it's four letter agencies. and this huge monster keeps growing and growing and growing ... you stab it with your steely knives, but you just can't kill the beast!!! (no matter how much you feed it it's still hungry for more and more?).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 28 2022, @02:02PM
Now it's four letter acronyms *
This doesn't include all the government contractors even.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 28 2022, @02:16PM
hahaha, lol, micro$oft and "reality" is like seeing a ghost of bin.laden overlayed over the latest popular potus whilst pointing a gun, yes?
note: serious.
(Score: 2) by Mojibake Tengu on Thursday April 28 2022, @02:23PM
Classic.
The edge of 太玄 cannot be defined, for it is beyond every aspect of design
(Score: 3, Interesting) by bzipitidoo on Thursday April 28 2022, @03:46PM (5 children)
Yes, the military wastes a lot of money, for a variety of reasons. It's more complicated than plain old graft. It's a spectrum, ranging from outright fraud with no intention of delivering anything of value, to stupidly demanding things they should have known were impossible or improbable and stubbornly pouring money into efforts to do it despite warnings that it's a fool's quest, like the SDI, aka "Star Wars", to tangling very much doable and practical projects in red tape so that what should have succeeded instead ends in failure. And of course, many of the projects actually succeed and are useful, don't let the cynicism mislead you about that.
Some other factors are paranoia and that it's also a jobs program. War is their job, and they of course want to be the ones who win if there is war. To that end, they want every advantage, and money is no object. Does the US really need a military bigger than the next dozen largest militaries combined in the world? No, but it's a nice advantage to have. As to the jobs program aspect, it's a real shame that the US hasn't put more effort into finding or creating more worthy work for all the young people in small farming communities who have little in the way of career options, automation and scaling having relentlessly reduced the need for human labor on the farm. Also the pay is simply not enough to meet the costs of living in the US, another factor responsible for much of the remaining farm work going to migrants.
Now, actually, the officers are keenly aware of the military's bad reputation for waste, and will mercilessly grill defense contractors on whether their proposals and projects are reasonably thrifty. All the more so if they get suspicious that a contractor is blowing smoke up their behinds. Doesn't take much to rouse their suspicions about that.
(Score: 4, Touché) by JoeMerchant on Thursday April 28 2022, @04:38PM
So long as the money is going to US owned companies employing US workers in MY district, that money is NEVER wasted.
- Every US Congressman and Senator, ever.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Thursday April 28 2022, @04:40PM
You left out political support for the company making the bid/prototype.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 3, Informative) by krishnoid on Thursday April 28 2022, @08:14PM
Check out The Pentagon Wars with Cary Elwes and Kelsey Grammar. A fun and educational watch, but YouTube has a chunk [youtu.be] of the most relevant parts.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 28 2022, @08:19PM (1 child)
The Pentagon puts out RFPs (Request for Proposals--essentially a spec for bids on a contract), and contractors reply with their bid. Don't act like the govt isn't the one asking for this pie in the sky stuff.
(Score: 2, Informative) by khallow on Friday April 29 2022, @10:12AM
Keep in mind that you can bribe someone to ask for the pie in the sky stuff - either directly or by appointing the right person.
For example, someone mentioned SLS (Space Launch System), a NASA endeavor as an example of this sort of waste. The previous version of SLS, the Constellation program was developed starting in 2005 under former NASA administrator Michael Griffin who just so happened to be a big rocket advocate and a keen defender of the Space Shuttle supply chain. NASA researched several options under the Exploration Systems Architecture Study [wikipedia.org] (ESAS) which purported to investigate several different designs, particularly several Shuttle-derived systems and the Atlas V Heavy.
Four years later a FOIA request obtained a hidden appendix (allegedly due to NDAs which are a legally valid reason for denying FOIA requests when they're true - I believe a court ruled otherwise) to the ESAS which revealed a variety of flaws [selenianboondocks.com] in the study. It turns out that the eventual design of the Ares 1 and 5 was heavily biased in the study, mostly by loosening the requirements to accommodate the increased risks of the system. So many of the eventual problems were known from the start and ignored. In the above link, only two such are mentioned - allowing higher "Max Q" pressure (the maximum front facing pressure from atmosphere during the launch) for systems with solid rocket motors (they have a higher acceleration profile and reach faster speeds while in atmosphere), and fixed size LES (Launch Escape Systems) ignoring that solid motor rockets are more dangerous both due to the fuel and to the higher max Q, and thus require a heavier LES.
Similar ignoring of reality went on concerning other notorious problems of that vehicle such as thrust oscillation (a coupling between natural vibration modes of the rocket structure and oscillation from the rocket motor) or the fact that you can't load the fuel at the launch pad when it's in a solid motor (needs to be integrated earlier creating premature ignition risks and requiring a more capable vehicle mover system).
Needless to say, the same problems cropped up with SLS as well (though it handles thrust oscillation better due to a Space Shuttle-borrowed approach that connects payload sections to the rest of the vehicle in a way that strongly dampens the thrust oscillation vibrations).
All it took was a hardcore booster to start the process with a heavily biased study, and NASA ended up paying for this flawed group of designs for 17 and counting years (as Ares and now as SLS). This has been a huge gift to these contractors.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 28 2022, @07:51PM
“Pack it all up and ship it to the Ukraine!”