The US Army's troubled attempt at outfitting soldiers with mixed-reality headsets is getting a $354 million boost and a new pair of lead contractors as part of a second attempt to make the kit stick without making troops sick.

The feds have awarded Palmer Luckey's Anduril $159 million for prototyping a new combination night vision/augmented reality/AI-enabled headset for the Army's renamed Soldier Borne Mission Command (SBMC) program. Rivet Industries, a defense tech startup founded in 2024 by a group of former Palantir executives, was awarded $195 million to test, iterate, and help field whatever headset turns out to work best for Army soldiers.

According to the original solicitation for the SBMC program published by the US Army in April, it wants helmet-mounted headsets able to provide

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