TIP OF THE SPEAR

Oh, Yes, Powered Armor and Warbots are Coming

Photo of IVAS and cover of No Fail

The Army’s IVAS program is the stepping stone to the leej bucket. There’s much more in development to bring our favorite sci-fi hardware into reality. Behind it all is a young armaments genius, and thank goodness he’s American.

BY DOC SPEARS

If you don’t know who Palmer Luckey is, you should. Grok or wiki his name or find one of his interviews on YouTube. He built Oculus in his parent’s garage as a teenager—the first good home VR system—and sold it to Facebook for a few billion dollars.

I have a close friend who met Luckey during this stage of his career while he was consulting on the IVAS program at Natick Labs, which as you can see by the picture above, gives the soldier a HUD with which to manage the battlefield.

My buddy was very, very impressed by this young inventor who, though not a school-trained engineer, was following in the finest tradition of great American inventors; succeeding wildly while completely unimpeded by the lack of any form of degree.

Since Meta has an ethos more suitable to a North Korean dictatorship, they screwed Luckey over in short order. You can make your own decision, but hearing the story told by Luckey, I hate Meta even more.

(BTW, this is the same Meta that shadow-banned yours truly, along with every GE and Wargate author and product, just for being who we are.)

Unable to defend his reputation, Luckey ditched the dunderheads at Meta.

Perhaps, fortunately so, because the very same day he left Meta, he founded the defense tech company Anduril Industries. For those of us who want Starship Troopers and Legionnaire for realsies, that was the event that catapulted science-fiction toward military fact in our lifetimes; the catalyst being the commie-scum at Meta.

Fortuitously for us, Luckey and Anduril now produce a variety of weapons systems being fielded as we speak by the US Department of Defense. A lot of them are what I imagined for use by Legion Dark Ops.

Anduril produces UAS and counter-UAS systems; large and small systems for intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance, (maybe not nano-drones just yet, but maybe it’s too classified still. I wouldn’t be surprised) and systems like the Anvil, a small kinetic interceptor drone.

Remember the AI drone system Bigg and Team Three use to bring down the bridge spanning the river of the Divided City in Dark Operator No Fail? Yeah, Anduril already makes it.

The Legionnaire bucket? The Integrated Visual Augmentation System (IVAS) was originally a Microsoft project—foundering like Windows and with little chance of becoming fieldable—and as of February 2025, is solidly an Anduril project. Meaning, we’re close to getting buckets, leejes.

Luckey is tinkering with powered exo-skeletons and already runs an eight-minute mile in the rig. Not a land speed record, but he’s letting the exo-skeleton do all the work. The idea being, how fast could a fit special operator in full combat equipment run in the rig, only to arrive on the objective without fatigue? He says he’s messing with the cooling system, but it’s a solvable problem. Pretty cool.

Robots? Luckey sees them not as being able to replace what a Dark Operator can do, but analogizes them to doing what a 70-year-old-man can do; flip switches and pull levers. Right now they can operate human-operated weapon systems like air defense artillery batteries—without the costly need to redesign them—freeing soldiers to do tasks that require higher levels of decision making capability, like kill bad guys and not civilians. Not to mention, saving soldier lives in the process. A Chinese fighter manages to send a SAM at one of our Patriot batteries? Sucks, but they were manned by robots. Now, our human warfighters get to retaliate, while we pull more robots out of the CONEX.

And, of course, robots can carry my rucksack and a ton more explodey-stuff with which me and my SF A-Team can do our thing.

If you subscribe to the view of technologic historian James Burke in his series Connections, that developments happen over time by really smart guys who make their radical leaps by connecting many often disparate technologies, then that’s what Luckey is doing right now.

I’m old enough to remember Star Trek TOS during its broadcast. My dad was not a believer in 1960s sci-fi, particularly scoffing at the idea of a “communicator.” I used the AI on my phone three times today, talked to friends in the UK and California, and read all the day’s news worth getting—all on my pocket-sized communicator.

Yes, we’re about to get powered armor and warbots. Starship Troopers is coming sooner than even I would’ve thought. I’m hoping there are no bugs, though. Gimmee Koobs and Wobanki instead.