The Army's Squad X project is a useless boondoggle. Here's how to fix it.

The U.S. Army wants to turn every soldier into a cyber soldier. It's like science-fiction warfare.

It's all very high-tech, and right now it's still a concept, called Squad X. But the basic idea is to give every soldier a heads-up display or helmet and enough computing and communications gear so they can have all the data about their surroundings in front of them in real time. Through the display, every soldier would know exactly where his mates are, where his enemies are, and would be able to seamlessly navigate the battlefield. As is, a foot soldier typically only knows what he can see directly in front of him with his own eyes.

This idea might sound familiar. That's because the Army has been talking about something like this for about, oh, 25 years.

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As the military writer David Axe points out, like so, so many whiz-bang Army tech projects, the whole thing ran for way too long, ran way over budget, and ended up producing something useless. Land Warrior, the predecessor to Squad X, was way too heavy to be usable, and still used '90s-era tech even though prototypes were only produced in the smartphone era. And it was buggy. And did I mention expensive? It ended up costing more than $85,000 per soldier for something more low-tech than an iPhone.

Done well, these cyber-soldier rigs are like something out of a comic book or an action movie. They sound super cool. But do we need them?

For the foreseeable future, the U.S. will be involved in only two kinds of war: super high-tech wars against China or Russia, which will involve practically no foot soldiers, and super low-tech counterinsurgencies where these things aren't what's crucial. A counterinsurgency war isn't about winning firefights, it's about — say it along with me — winning the hearts and minds of the population.

And here's the thing. There's a much better way.

If the Pentagon had spent a fraction of its whiz-bang toys budget on cultural sensitivity, language, history, and law enforcement training for its foot soldiers, the war in Iraq might have turned out differently. The U.S. didn't lose in Iraq or Afghanistan because Land Warrior didn't work. They lost because the strategy was poor and because once the U.S. decided it was in a counterinsurgency, it didn't train most of its soldiers to do it properly.

Still, I concede, while these cyber-soldier get-ups should hardly be a priority, they are a worthy enough idea. After all, having constant situational awareness of your mates might, if nothing else, reduce incidents of friendly fire.

Here's how to do it right: Give a number of units already deployed in the Middle East and Afghanistan a budget for buying situational awareness equipment. Incentivize teams from 20 universities to build the equipment, only from off-the-shelf components. Let the soldiers beta-test it, let the teams build them quickly and cheaply, and let them iterate.

Samsung sells VR sets, so heads-up displays can be hacked together. An iPhone definitely has the capacity to do most of what Squad X calls for. You don't need five years in a lab. You need smart hackers from MIT and corporals willing to beta-test some equipment, and constant dialogue between those two.

This would almost certainly be cheaper than the status quo, because it would start outside the military-industrial complex. Military R&D often means too many people spending too much time and money in a lab making a prototype that doesn't end up matching the realities on the ground.

Most first versions of technology are terrible. What makes them turn into good technology is constant dialogue between the makers of technology and their customers. The fact that teams would be competing, and that teams on the ground would decide to buy this or that technology, would create the analogue of a marketplace, which produces superior outcomes not so much because of competition but because of constant feedback between consumer and producer.

Get the Pentagon brass out of it. Let the soldiers on the ground make the decisions about whose gear they like best.

Trust me, after two years, you will have something cheap, rugged, useful, and reliable, which will do 90 percent of what Squad X wants to do for less than 10 percent of the cost. You're welcome.