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The problem with technologies like this, is that for all the “enhanced capabilities” they bring, they end up really just making things worse.

In combat, your eyes and all your senses combine to allow you a critical edge in detecting the presence and location of the enemy. Putting a screen in front of your eyes causes part of your vision to be blocked and eliminates peripheral vision.

The army just can’t leave well enough alone, the vision screen will have more and more items you wouldn’t need. Higher headquarters will need to “see what you’re seeing”. So they will constantly pinging the soldiers with distracting requests and other messages - “Sitrep due” “send morning report” “need reenlistment pkg”, etc..

As some have mentioned, combat is messy: sweat, dust, mud, rain, snow and other muck will screw up the visor to make it useless. We always fight in crummy places, almost never in laboratories.

A unit depending on these will need a pack full of AA batteries just to make sure that the darn things stay lit through an operation.

I’m reminded about an experiment the army did about 20 years ago at Fort Irwin in the desert, where the soldiers were loaded with high technology situational awareness devices and conducted simulated attacks. The gear included TV cameras on the rifles and weighed a bunch in 110 degree heat. Almost immediately, the consoles went blank because the troops dumped the gear as soon as they started their attacks. The few TV images they got were of other soldier’s butts.

You are correct. But some of that kind of technology can be useful. I saw a video recently of US troops returning fire in a Taliban ambush using a turret mounted .50 cal gun with remote controls. It is much better in that situation to be operating the gun from the safety of an armored vehicle than standing in an open hatch, although the loss of situational awareness is the downside.

Realistically, a lot of this technology will be rendered less valuable as remote controlled drones, robots, and attack vehicles become more and more common. And while all those electronics can be helpful against a primitive adversary, their emissions might make the person wearing them a little white dot on a more sophisticated enemy's targeting display.

And for a very sophisticated enemy the little white dot might be annotated with information about the target derived from all the signal traffic. And in the worst case the communications would be hacked, and your friends doing close air support would think you were located elsewhere.

Bingo. During my years as a company grade officer, the Army underwent a fundamental transformation. As a new second lieutenant, a company's administrative needs were fully met by Skilcraft pens and typewriters. Not long after that, desktop computers (286s) started popping up like mushrooms and everything changed. In my pre-commissioning training and early years as an officer, the prevailing emphasis was on, "Leadership," and the concept of "management" was a sub-skill that fell under the umbrella of leadership: One needed some management skills to be an overall good leader, but being even a great, "manager," did not necessarily make one a good or even average leader. With the proliferation of PCs this relationship became inverted. Commanders and staff at higher echelons became more statistic oriented and an increasing emphasis was placed on management and leadership became a secondary skill set.

This invariably led, in my view, to an unprecedented degree of micro-management which in may ways subverted the chain of command and individual soldier and junior leader initiative. During this same time, we had Desert Storm where technology came to be seen as the end all be all solution, and the debacle in Somalia which led to even greater degrees of micromanagement. The drawdown of the military during the Clinton years led to a zero-tolerance approach where a military looking to get rid of people looked to any screw up as the means to bring careers to an end, killing initiative even further and fostering a culture of yes men.

IMHO, there is a double-edged sword with this type of tech. I'm not a luddite, and there is much to be said for tactical awareness and the rapid exchange of info on the battlefield. Technology is a tool that can be used for good or bad, and when accurate, timely information is fed to decision makers in a useable format, they will make better, timelier decisions. There is also a risk of information overload which could lead to indecision and hesitation, and as others on this thread have mentioned, I could easily see situations where a brigade or battalion commander or staff member could easily be tempted to try to direct individual soldiers on the battlefield completely subverting leaders at the company, platoon, squad and team level...not a good thing.