Who do you think owns the night, has the US Military gotten complacent and over confident? Browse the internet securely for only $2.08 for 3 years - bit.ly/3fqrVXB

If you arm everyone with a flamethrower you don't have to worry about night vision because it will never be dark.

Forget NVGs, insurgents in Afghanistan and Iraq used old school video camcorders with "night mode." Using a basic camcorder, they could see our IR lasers and strobes as we approached. That was circa 2010 - 2013.

I was part of an infantry squad that tested the future warrior system and it had a similar firing Capability with a camera on the rifle. Well not as complex as this new system it was quite easy to fire. What I liked about it was you can fire from almost any position you did not have to bring the rifle up to your shoulder. In my opinion the greatest capability was a laser that would give you a 10 digit grid of objects that you aimed at. You could then text message this 10 digit grid for fire support. However, the overall system was terrible. It was too heavy to bulky and broke down constantly. But this was 20 years ago and I’m sure technology has changed a lot.

I was a marine in the infantry, served from 2003 to 2007 active duty. I used the pec 4.... Things have come a long way, it's amazing to see how far technology has come. It's all about zeroing the lazer to the rifle with these lasers.

I think the solution is pretty obvious... You need to switch night fighting for mid-morning fighting, ideally sometime just after brunch.

The Marines look forward to receiving these NODs in 2075.

From the standpoint of someone who has used every generation of I2 out there, from PVS 7, PVS 14, PVS 31, PSQ 20, and now the new ENVG, there are some fundamental issues with the direction that NV is heading in the military. Starting from the PSQ generations when thermal capabilities were added, the weight, as you said, started to pile on. Moreover, the systems drain even the best of lithium batteries so quick, it is unrealistic to support long range operations. Threat detection (where thermal comes in) is not the same as identification (friend or foe). For the capability of long distance threat detection, the cost/equipment/maintenance/operational cost just isn’t where it needs to be yet. I’ll take a good set of PVS 31 any day.

A friend of mine in infantry was lucky enough to try one of these out. He says it's like aiming through a scope in a VR game and that it's scary how easy it is to shoot around corners while in cover. I'd like to know how well or if at all they've protected against EMPs.

The one thing these futuristic capabilities need to account for regarding near-peer adversaries is EMS signatures giving away friendly forces. Ukraine has shown us that the Russians have invested heavily in their EW capabilities to find and target opposing forces. But that fight is likely out of the infantrymen's hands, being the responsibility of fires, EW, air, and space to disrupt and assert dominance of who gets to use the latest and greatest connected technology on the future battlefield.

I get Battlefield vibes. Knowing target locations from the minimap and the little doritos over their heads. Soon this will be a reality. Insane.

I think one major problem for these new NVGS is the cyberspace part of it, The idea of being able to digitally mark something on your NVGS sounds like a great idea but requires so much work and comes with a lot of flaws. Another problem for me would be the cyber security of that cyberspace network and how easily is can be accessed by other forces or taken down.

We spent a week at Aberdeen Proving Ground testing different sights, both day and night. We had been using NVGs for years in the Border Patrol and found that when using a handgun the FOV of the NVGs was greatly improved by pressing the NVG’s against our eyes instead of being suspended an inch or so in front of our eyes as required by the Aberdeen’s Night Vision Lab. Also having having the NVGs pressed against the eyes also kept our eyes from showing up bright green from quite a distance. (This can be seen in the photos in this program.)

I’ve actually gotten to experience the ENVG’s in a course out on by PEO Soldier. It’s crazy the difference. It’s like cheating at warfare. With a PEQ box and the ENVG’s, first round hits on a 300 m target from standing from the hip. With an M249 and the TWS Optic, first round hits at 700 m. And being able to link the HUD to your optic? It’s insane. You forget that where your head points isn’t where the weapon points anymore so you wind up looking in a different direction while the gun hasn’t moved. With smoke and night, the ENVG’s make it barely noticeable. And being able to change between night, thermal, fusion, and line mode makes it so much more versatile. You can’t hide in the night anymore. Less so now

"The US military has never been one to share toys though." That didn't age well

My unit received the 1st Generation of NVGs in 1976 in Germany and learned how to use them in a blacked out class room. As our Instructor Pilot (IP) read the manual and said; "The focal length is from 9 inches to infinity." One of the 1st Army female pilots raised her hand to ask a question, them immediately lower her hand. The IP asked her to state her question encouraging her that she question she ask may be the question that someone else needs answered. Finally after some more encouragement, she said; "the manual reads that the focal length is between 9 inches to infinity right?" The IP acknowledged that. Then she said; "Well for years, you guys have been telling me that this is 9 inches." As she held up her index and thumb indicating a measurement of about 2 1/2 to 3 inches. Everyone of the pilots in the room just cracked up laughing.

One of the important training factors is to stress target ID. Ground and air vehicle crews have had a historical jump in false positive IDs when they were introduced to thermal capability. Every "dude" looks like a "bad dude" and every vehicle an enemy threat vehicle. In thermal all contacts look like valid targets. It took deliberate training to remind the users that it might just be a friendly, neutral, cat, dog, whatever and not something to obliterate.

The human vs. Covenant war looking way sooner than expected.

OF all the equipment left to the Taliban, the nightvision goggles concern me the most mainly because they're easiest to maintain and yet a game changer in the hands of those who wield them.

The US Army and DARPA has continued to work on the Future Warrior project. Everything from Exoskeleton to armor and everything in between. It has never really failed, however, with the ever changing battlefield and technology, they are in a continual foot race to keep up.

I love how every, single time someone says, "The US Military is falling behind!"... DARPA wakes up and says, "Hold my beer."

A step closer to ODST helmet systems, all we need is the drop pods. lol

Games become more realistic, while real life become more like game. Imagin on the battlefield, you pick up an enemy's helmet and you basically get wall hack + enemy minimap + enemy command and hud camouflage

The content in your videos has taken a solid step up in quality of information with videos as well as spoken information, so nice job Cappy 🙂

Nods have come a long way over the years, I worked at MMD on post at Bragg for many years as a gunsmith and night vision tech. I remember the TVS-5 PVS-4 and PVS-5 and I saw technology improved over the years making the Nods a lot smaller, when I retired the PVS-7D and 14s were the latest and greatest thing but we as techs knew it's only a matter of time before countries have this technology, it's like that with any military device, you always try to stay ahead of others, it's a constant thing.

"Troops may have difficulty learning to aim from this second-person view point" It's literally just a gun turned into a selfie-stick. If you can aim a selfie-stick around a corner, you can aim a selfie-gun around a corner. I'm confident that even the Marines could figure it out.

real life is becoming a mix of arma and battlefield and squad, you can literally mark enemy positions for your team mates, that's the most video game thing you could think of. whats next after 10 kills you get an airstrike?

I'm one of your friendly neighborhood military tech engineers (&Vet) and I work on a couple of your fielded 'favorite air-based best friends' . Hard to say which will be the better even in a CQB environment. The ENVG video-data-lag is going to be frustratingly aggravating until data rates improve on the system. Older NVG systems definitely have a huge advantage where speed matters... until we start to consider the ability of an integrated weapon platform that can shoot around corners without exposing the shooter. This is a massive win for the typical boot on the ground doing perilous urban clearing. The Tier-1 units are going to need that old-school speed or perhaps a combination of tech. However you can't argue the improved ENVG telemetry is a game changer for everyone in general. Bottom line, this is an excellent problem to have (deciding which asset to use) vs the other option...being on the other end of that capability.

Pretty cool stuff. My first NVG was an AN/PVS-4 as a rifleman in 89 Panama. It was heavy, bulky and almost worthless. It was better than nothing but not much more. After I went to mortars I used a pvs 5 but mostly it was just extra weight.

"the US military has never been one to share toys" *laughs in arabic*

The overlay is like the Predator/Yautja shoulder mounted weapon system.

Damn, when I was 11B and 11C in the 101st in the 80’s, the only night aide we had was the tritium on the M224 60 Mortar. Our M16’s were still iron sight (no tritium sights). If you were the CO you might have the only Nightvision device in the company (and they never parted with it for even a second). No red dots, no rifle scopes, no anything. Wonder how they plan to pay for all this gear?

My first thought as regards a civilian (that falls over alot) is "What impact will this have on SAR and HEMS operations and how soon? What cost will it be to my local Air Ambulance charities, some of which already fly at night and how much safer will it be for the crew? As you've alluded to in previous films, the military industrial complex benefits us civvies in ways that some seen unwilling to acknowledge.

The ability to ping and mark spots means you can have scenarios where one person marks someone in a building or in cover and have another person just shooting them through the wall. It'll be like Rainbow Six Siege lamo. I sure as hell wouldn't like to be on the receiving end of this. Pinging will allow Air to pinpoint strike a location without someone having to run in and chuck a smoke or hope Air know's what you want to blow up. Imagine thinking a helicopter hasn't seen you yet, only for the infantry to mark you and get a bunch of rockets to the face. Nasty stuff.

I’m honestly kinda scared cause if they’re making this public that means they’ve got even better shit that’s classified.

This was a really great video. Great production guys!

My concern with platoon wide ar, would be ensuring those networks aren't jammed or tapped etc. Especially in a day and age where we're facing near peer threats, and cyber warfare is becoming a very real thing, it seems like it wouldn't be too hard to mess with these systems in ways that would either impede, misdirect or expose troops

Yes, exactly, it's again the "future soldier" program, but this time probably the technology is ready, with an acceptable weight tradeoff. I say acceptable because i think that in modern warfare infantry has to accept that weight to survive a war dominated by drones, vehicles, elettronic warfare: that or being cannon fodder. P.s: you are really improving your presentation skills. Good work!

I like the "it's like driving a stick shift" comment. It is true if you started with an automatic, but if you start with the stick shift your not learning anything new just doing what you always have been doing. So if this does get adopted soldiers who start training with it immediately will probably not have the problems that say a 10+ year veteran may have.

Great job Chris!

The title didn't age all that well. To be fair, we ALL overestimated near-peer adversaries, but after seeing Russian operations in Ukraine go stagnant in the night time, it's pretty safe to say that the only serious night fighting capabilities that our near-peer adversaries have is very miniscule and probably narrowed down to only SOF.

There is another option for IR lasers. There are prototypes out there which use very short pulses -- in the millisecond range, even using different frequencies. The IR detector then uses a computer to identify the pulses and project a crosshair there for a second. Pulses are too fast for humans and normal IR detectors to see. You can also use different pulse lengths and frequency shifts to have each laser put a different shaped crosshair for each weapon, so you can easily see yours or those of teammates.

9:19 "At first I thought there must be a computer processor in there-" Oh there absolutely is, the headset is very clearly applying an edge-find algorithm to the infrared imagery, and then overlaying those edges on top of the low-light amplification feed. You can see this quite apparently if you watch a frame-by-frame of the howitzer firing. When the blast initially goes off, the visual light is intense enough to wash out all of the infrared, and so the entire image is just that pale teal-ish of the new night vision. In the frame that *immediately* follows you can see the characteristic plume of propellant that blasts out of a howitzer as it fires; during the day this usually looks like an opaque cloud of smoke coming out of either side of the muzzle brake. This propellant plume is obviously *dramatically* hotter than the background sky, and on traditional IR feeds it would likely be just as blindingly bright as the initial flash of visual light. Instead what we see is the cloud perfectly outlined, with some fainter lines tracing the inside and edges of the cloud, but otherwise it's just as black as the sky. Clearly what the headset is doing is taking the IR visual feed and looking for significant contrasts between a "hot" zone and a "cold" zone, and then drawing just the edge between the zones, making the edge itself brighter where there's more contrast, and doing this rather than just painting the whole hot zone in brightly. This works fine with for a visual feed because the underlying neuropsychology of visual recognition is heavily predicated toward edge-finding anyway. (We don't actually visually "see" the edges in our active vision space, but the way your brain interprets and makes sense of what you see is done mostly by interpreting lines of contrast, which is why line drawings of images that should have actually shading are still readily recognized.) Presumably the whole point of this is to allow for a much wider range of the electromagnetic spectrum to be presented through the headset at once without just washing everything out. Like with FLIR displays on aircraft there's often a toggle to display white as hot or white as cold, because depending on what you're looking at one way or the other will be washed out... this system does away with that problem by just showing you the edges, so it never gets washed out, and leaves enough dark space to overlay low-light amplification in the same image, without having to toggle any modes. But it's definitely not just a straight visual feed, it's evident that the headset is doing a lot image balancing in real time to try and give you something comprehensible, and that's gotta be done by some kind of CPU/GPU. (Plus with all the datalinked augmented reality fusion stuff going on it's obviously got an onboard computer... very much an "internet of infantry" vibe going on.)

Great video! Very informative! The lethality of a combat soldier is greatly increased, as well as his/her self preservation is greatly increased.

Unless the system is more complicated than it sounds, I don't think that detecting people in the dark using infrared lasers and infrared beacons even takes that sophisticated of a technology to do. You can easily see infrared with a standard digital camera, and you can pick it up very well with a digital camera that has had the infrared filter removed from in front of the sensor. Regular people sometimes modify cameras for regular photography for this purpose, both to do daytime infrared photography, which looks very interesting, and also for astrophotography. It doesn't even have to be a good digital camera. You probably couldn't do it with a flip phone or a smartphone, but you could do it with a cheapo point and shoot digital camera.

Us military - “they’ve stolen our technology “ Also us military . “ we’ve abandoned a trillion dollar air base and all our shit in Afghanistan “.

A 2nd person point of view would be from the perspective of the guy you’re shooting at.

The problem with the previous iteration of the "Future Warrior Program" is that fast prototyping tech wasn't quite adequate yet. Now it's possible to design, build, and test many generations of most products in a fraction of the time it took back in the early 2000's. Now it's possible for someone to take a good idea from idea to working prototype in as little as a few hours sometimes. Access to easy to learn micro-controller systems, (Arduino) and ultra compact computer platforms that greatly augment and even sometimes replace these modern micro-controller systems, (Raspberry Pi), enhances the ability for even the average Joe with a bit of creativity and a strong work ethic, to create some pretty amazing things across nearly all areas.

Totally blows my mind! All I know are PVS-14’s, 7’s and PEQ-15/2’s. Most of all a Standard M4 with Rails. Those were my days. Hope for the best for new equipment!

" Shooting from a '2nd person, picture in picture perspective' will be confusing for future soldiers." Literally anyone who has ever used VR: "Bet".

Nett Warrior system is probably capable to allow AR sharing among squad level, but infantry needs something like HMS to really make this work. L3Harries got the full rate production contract, and that may have a much bigger impact to war fighters.

Thanks for the great content. I hope the next-generation soldiers will be fully capable to do their jobs without these things too, not just with them. I'm a software engineer, I believe all sufficiently complicated software systems are extremely likely to have bugs. What you just demoed looks pretty complicated. Bugs are fixable but only over time after the new stuff is already used for real. It's impossible to test everything in an office or a lab. Another reason is logistics: the people need electricity, spare devices, ideally networking. A war zone can be a chaotic environment where stuff gets lost and broken, and supplying new stuff can get complicated.

Look at that haircut! Strack AF Cappy, better than your hippie look lol! Great vids as always man!

The us military: *starts looking more and more like a near future FPS* Me: “Just like the simulations” Real Ghost recon: Future Soldier vibes up in here

Surprisingly, I only used the PVS-14s once towards the end of my time in my unit. Which was this past year.. Most of the time we used the PVS-7s while the officers and CSM got to use the 14s. Only guys that got to use any of the newer NVGs were the Pilots of our unit. My unit was AH-64s

2:12 we are getting closer and closer to the Clone trooper SW helmet and other VR military scifi technologies. Can't wait for the integrated ammo counters.

When the typical loaded M4 or A3 weighs between 7 to 9, even kitted at 12 + lbs, I don't think the weight added, even if it is up to 12 or even 14 lbs will be an issue when compared to the lethality advantage. I know that ounces beget pounds begets pain on patrol or force marches etc. but again, when I think about how much this equipment adds to my or another Soldier/Marine in being able to reach out and touch someone, and I don't necessarily have to "Locate, Close with and Destroy the Enemy" I can have a larger distance when considering the Close With portion and adding a higher Destruction factor.

There's a tremendous amount of hardware in the U.S. Military that demands upgrading or at very least replacement. Despite the not insignificant amount of waste that Congress and the DoD floats every year, this looks like it's going to be money well spent.

I dont know why but this was the best video I ve watched in this channel

Super cool innovations, the ouline mode reminds me of VISR from Halo ODST

Marking targets and allies seems incredibly challenging to do reliably. There's a reason modern robotics tends to plaster what amounts to QR codes everywhere for spatial orientation.

Chris, Your quality and standard of research is sound and professional - time to be the Consultant you are. You nailed PTSD. You nailed NODs. Great soldiering.

I keep telling KZfaq not to recommend your channel, but they keep putting it in my feed.

augmentation seems really cool in concept and if able to be executed properly will be used, but it makes it so much more terrifying because, like your point about when we were the only ones with night vision, other people got that tech and now can use it against us

I think there is tech that will give us the night again. Through my career in the Army we went from PVS-5s, like a shoe box on your face, to 7s, way better, to 14s. Then the shift to SOF using aviation and IR goggles. The future will be owned by us.

Having a camera mounted to your gun is a fantastic advantage and is the wave of the future whether we like it or not. Imagine being able to hold your gun around the corner of a building or over the top of the sandbag and get a perfect bull's-eye shot of your enemy. That's firepower!!!!!!!!

Thanks! Now waiting for the Microsoft IVAS review!

You forgot 3d recreation, augmented drone data, photon return to see behind corners and through walls, volumetric imagery, etc. All the juicy stuff

Chris, you are incredibly knowledgeable on all things you have discussed in the videos of yours I've seen. You make some really great content. Keep it up!

Don’t look forward to playing against these in Tarkov. RIP my rat brothers.

@10:59 "They also had a 30-50% decrease in the amount of time it took them to identify and engage a target". A 50% decrease corresponds with 100% "faster engagement", not the 50% shown on screen.

Theoretically, one can roughly aim at the target using ir laser, then switch to second person reticle overlay for fine aiming. That should improve speed of aiming at any distances.

Each day we come closer to Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter. Wake me up when they come out with 3D hologram maps, HUD ammo counters, and the fated grenade indicators.

Stupid sexy Jester814 ;) This video goes over the same reasons why we don't do night ops against peer forces with NV/IR capability in our games/sims as well. There's no point, or at least much less of one, when everyone can see the same at night. That said, a lot of video games don't simulate the limited range of NV, and for ArmA specifically with mods that add limited range to night vision, they don't inflict the same limitations on the AI/bots we fight against, so we'd actually be at a DISADVANTAGE at night against peer forces.

11:30 - Future Warrior System? I remember an episode or two dedicated to that way back 2009 on the Discovery Channel series "Future Weapons" hosted by the late Richard Mackiowitz.

great video and using nvgs on night ops in afgan was hard as hell the humidity was awful trying to drive with them on was scary as hell as well future nvgs need to be snug the royal Marines are toying with new nvgs

Reminds me of the ancient days when the PVS-4 was the greatest thing ever. Many guys wouldn’t carry tracer rounds in the jungle. The reminder was ‘Tracers work both directions’

My unit recently got them. The image is so crisp and clean that I feel much more confident when running around at night. Being able to quickly change from 2 eye to 1 eye is a huge bonus too. Changing "filters" is also very advantageous. Overall they are versatile and perform amazing. I don't even notice the extra weight in the heat of the moment.

Lol this video did not age well. Russia refuses to fight at night because nearly no soldiers have it. China still has yet to make night vision standard.

For those of you wondering what the first game clip was the game is called squad, and the clip from karma to is one of the squad ops one life event games

While the idea of squad-wide updated target designation and crowd-sourced position updating is a great idea, it doesn't take a soldier to realize the obvious: that the superimposed waist or shoulder height ADS perspective layered on a person's normal perspective is bound to cause slip-ups and add a deadly hurdle that under moments of extreme pressure will lead to failure because the device LITERALLY warps a core sense which you need to get your bearing. This just seems like a ridiculous stopgap solution that outright ignores our biological predisposition to judge movement from head level. The F-35 helmet's superimposed HUD solution with an integrated helmet camera system is the obvious future because it is head-height, integrates the camera within the structure (lowering the probability of accidental damage), and saves the cost of additional specialized weapon optics. Maybe creating an adaptation that shrinks the F-35 helmet's price tag and makes it a more suitable tool for people in an infantry roll would be a more common sense approach to this multi-part, perspective-warping package.

I'm waiting for the day when everyone gets star wars helmets with thermal, night vision, and the weather forecast all in one

The outline is a sobel filter, if the heat value for this pixl is waay different to it's neighbor, make it bright. It's probably done in hardware rather than software, super easy to implement.

I never thought I would see the equivalent of an odst hud outline.... What a time to be alive

Just tell gamers they get to use fancy OP brand new night vision and they will be enlisting faster than they could break their monitor after getting killed in COD.

next up: 'how the enemy learned to use radio receivers to see where the EVNG users are' (you don't need to decode the transmission, just the fact that there's a signal tells you there's someone there)

I just noticed that the fellow behind you in that last scene is smiling. I would too if I was told to pose for a photo with the lens covers on! 😳

The fact that the edge detection is NOT an algorithm but a natural result of the two modes makes it _eminently_ useful. Edge detection itself might be a nice feature, but by highlighting only thermal differences it's like Robocop vision or something. I'm paying attention to the videos and it's quite, quite good. I would love that ability if I had to fight. This whole gun camera idea though, I don't know.

It won't be long before everyone has thermal too. I recently upgraded one of my hunting scopes from NV to thermal. It's getting more and more affordable.

When one of these is captured, the enemy will see everything that the US squads see. I'm sure there is cyber security stuff to prevent this, but it's an interesting new avenue.

This sounds like the learning curve in learning to game in vr. When my brain really got used to vr though it stopped trusting the visual info on where my arms and hands are in real life, it’s a weird feeling.

That AR headset gives multiple new possibilities to even cqb environment. Think 360 depth camera "grenades" linked to the HUD could give the soldiers an image of an room without exposing themselves to the threat and just engage through walls and such.

Younger soldier: The 14's are bulky and uncomfortable. Me: *laughs in PVS-7*

The PSQ was also capable of outline mode, but no one ever used it cause it looked really thick, terrible, made it impossible to see lower thermal contrasts, and just generally extremely ugly. You also had to constantly adjust this depth buffer to make the thermal overlay line up correctly with the NV base, so you basically needed a hand on your goggles at almost all times

In the 3rd? Ghost recon game your character had a NV camera on his XM8 and could fire around corners with high accuracy, 8:46 reminded me of that.

Squad. Nice. See you guys on the Battlefield!

Gives taliban night vision goggles. ->the us no longer own the night Everyone:surprised pikachu face

I don't think this weird 2 piece overlay is the solution we were waiting for. But it's getting there and shows what's possible. Let's hope we will see a lightweight binocular with thermal overlay for the helmet and just a reticle overlay to aim.

Were the images starting at 14:36 taken with this new system? Or are they for artistic purposes, taken with illumination? Because in the first case, this is truly night (and) becoming day.

Perhaps integrate the optic lenses into the helmet to balance weight and transmit images onto heads up visor with added tactical information feed? A battery pack can be carried on the vest to keep weight off head.