A Soldier from 3rd Platoon, Blackhorse Company, 2-3 Infantry Regiment, 1-2 Stryker Brigade Combat Team wears upgraded Integrated Visual Augmentation System goggles while pulling security during a movement-to-contact urban raid exercise on Joint Base Lewis-McChord, Washington, August 24, 2022.
The Army’s Integrated Visual Augmentation System (IVAS) is undoubtedly impressive. It promises to give dismounted Soldiers the ultimate situational awareness, ease communications, and revolutionize small-unit tactics. However, it is said that tactics win battles, while logistics wins wars. Silicon Valley technologists have entered the defense space, promising to revolutionize combat through tools like IVAS. There is a risk that they misunderstand how the military works and thus overlook IVAS’s greatest value as a transformative tool for sustainment, training, and logistics. As the military continues to modernize, maintenance and sustainment costs are becoming untenable, with one report estimating $100 billion per year for maintenance, repairs, and overhauls over the next 10 years. In constrained budgetary environments, we must curtail those costs, and in the right hands, IVAS could do just that.
In 2009, when my infantry platoon returned from a patrol in the Konar River Valley in Afghanistan, Soldiers fired up the Xbox from the safety of a forward operating base and played Call of Duty. In many instances, this behavior seemed like an odd continuation of the firefights we had just experienced. The soundtrack was the same, and the missions mirrored one another. But in video games, there is no refueling, no refit, no maintenance. Combat is romanticized, and even a realistic portrayal of battle is a misunderstanding of warfare. There is a focus on lethality without survivability or sustainment in support. I think those Soldiers were coping by disassociating from the violence they had just carried out. There is another major difference between our patrols and their game: there is no respawning in the real world.
For many years, IVAS has been a $22 billion solution in search of a problem. The contract was first awarded to Microsoft, maker of the HoloLens. Earlier this year, that contract was transferred to Anduril, founded by Palmer Luckey, the creator of the Oculus. Now, Meta, with the Quest line of products, is entering into a partnership on IVAS.
Each new partnership may bring technical sophistication but risks treating a military program like building an immersive entertainment system. I fear this is now a program run by people whose understanding of battle comes from video games. Therefore, they may overlook the daily realities of a force struggling to inventory gear, train junior maintainers, and keep aging equipment operational. Applying the Silicon Valley mindset to national security has been incredibly disruptive, and in a world where disruption is a positive, it is incredibly lucrative. But these changes are evolutionary, not revolutionary.
As the saying goes, the military runs on the creativity of privates and the signatures of colonels. The infantry is only 10% stumbling around in the woods looking for land navigation points but 90% inspections and layouts. The augmented reality capability of IVAS has the potential to make equipment inventories faster and more effective. It might also upskill individuals with relatively little experience or training. This means cutting weeks off specialized schools for maintenance crews, allowing junior enlisted to do the work of professional warrant officers. It also means less time spent in the depot for maintenance work that line units do not have the expertise to perform.
Companies like Gridraster are already performing similar tasks on the notoriously complicated wiring harnesses of the V-22 Osprey. This capability can increase the accuracy of maintenance and repairs while decreasing the time needed for those repairs. Just last year, the Government Accountability Office found that 44 out of 45 aircraft in our military are facing maintenance challenges; 32 of those are delays in depot maintenance, while 27 platforms are experiencing a shortage of trained personnel. The Air Force alone has reported a fleet-wide mission-capable rate of 62%. With numbers like these, we must use this capability. IVAS has the potential to transform how we inventory gear, train maintainers, and shorten repair timelines. If we dismiss it as a Silicon Valley gimmick, we will miss what it could really be: a tool to restore readiness across the force.
IVAS is not a program in a vacuum. It is a test of whether Silicon Valley can learn to serve the military it is trying to equip. The greatest military breakthroughs of the next decade will not come from better sensors but from smarter logistics. If we want IVAS to succeed, we must stop chasing the flashy and start solving the real problem: readiness.
IVAS is not just a futuristic headset; it is a logistical force multiplier. If we treat it as a gimmick or a gamified novelty, we will miss its most valuable application: enabling the sustainment enterprise to be leaner, quicker, and more effective. A focus on lethality must not be an abandonment of sustainment and survivability. In an era where trained personnel are scarce; maintenance backlogs are growing; and defense dollars are constrained, the real power of IVAS is not in how it changes the firefight but how it changes everything that happens before and after. The Army does not need another gadget. It needs solutions that solve real, trillion-dollar problems. IVAS could be such a solution if we let it.
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Graham Markiewicz is currently the executive director of the Security and Democracy Forum. He is an attorney and national security policy professional who has served as a defense policy advisor in both the U.S. House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate. He previously served as an Infantry officer in the Army, deploying twice to Afghanistan with the 10th Mountain Division and completing Airborne, Air Assault, and Ranger schools. Most recently, he worked at the U.S. Agency for International Development, where he advised on oversight and congressional investigations. He holds a Bachelor of Science degree from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point and a Juris Doctor from Boston College Law School.
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This article was published in the winter 2026 issue of Army Sustainment.
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