The Army's Next Super-Weapon Is a Pair of Glasses

Picture an infantry soldier on a ridgeline.

He doesn’t reach for a radio or a tablet. He just tells his glasses what he wants.

Fly the drone over that hill. Check out the building on the left. Send me the video.

And a few seconds later, the feed appears right in front of his eyes.

That’s the future Dave Marra is building.

A Startup Teaching Soldiers to Talk to Robots

Marra is the co-founder and CEO of Rivet, a Washington, D.C. startup that makes militarized smart glasses for the U.S. Army.

Last week, he told Defense News his long-term goal is for soldiers to use the glasses to command AI agents that, in turn, control robots and drones.

He wants them to do it in “common language, not command language.”

In other words, the soldier talks. The machines figure out the rest.

Rivet has already delivered its first 70 prototypes to the Army. And it’s raised $55 million from investors to scale up.

It’s not alone, either.

The Army’s Second Shot at Super-Soldier Vision

The Army has been chasing this capability for years.

Its first attempt was the Integrated Visual Augmentation System, or IVAS, a combat headset built on Microsoft’s HoloLens.

The program had a potential value of up to $22 billion.

It didn’t survive contact with the troops. Soldiers complained of nausea, headaches, and a narrow field of view.

So last year, the Army started over with a new program called Soldier Borne Mission Command, or SBMC.

In September 2025, it awarded Rivet a $195 million prototyping contract. Days later, it handed $159 million to a team led by Anduril, with Meta supplying the displays and optics.

Anduril says it’s now moving into phase two. It plans to deliver 170 upgraded prototypes, with soldier testing slated to begin in late January or early February.

That version packs what Anduril calls “4K displays in the eye,” with a field of view about 70% wider than current night vision goggles.

Anduril has already built enough manufacturing capacity to churn out thousands of these systems.

A production decision could come in fiscal 2028.

It All Comes Down to the Display

Every one of these systems lives or dies on the same tiny component.

The screen sitting a fraction of an inch from the soldier’s eye.

It has to be bright enough to read in the noon desert sun, sharp enough to pick out a target, and small and efficient enough to run all day on a battery strapped to a helmet.

That’s a tall order.

IVAS showed what happens when the display falls short. Soldiers get sick. They take the headset off. The program dies.

This is hardly a new problem.

In 1968, computer scientist Ivan Sutherland, who had recently run a computing research office at the Pentagon’s ARPA, built the first head-mounted display.

It was so heavy it had to hang from the ceiling. It earned the nickname the “Sword of Damocles.”

It took more than half a century for the technology to shrink from a ceiling rig to something you’d wear on a combat patrol.

The last few millimeters are the hardest.

The Retinal Matrix Goes to War

There’s a small American company that has been building microdisplays for the military for decades.

This summer, it hit a milestone in an Army-backed program to develop full-color microLED displays for soldier-worn systems.

Its displays topped 150,000 nits of brightness. That’s well beyond the threshold the program set and more than enough to cut through direct sunlight.

Management has said the technology could support Army programs including SBMC.

The timeline lines up almost perfectly.

The company expects to begin manufacturing in mid-2027, with the Army’s main production slated for 2028.

That’s the same window the Army has set for its SBMC production decision.

The business is already turning the corner, too.

Second-quarter revenue jumped 51% from a year earlier. It’s booked more than $45 million in orders so far this year. And management expects to reach GAAP profitability in the fourth quarter.

Yet the stock still trades like a forgotten small cap.

I call this technology the Retinal Matrix, the merging of the physical world and the digital one, right in front of your eyes.

It’s coming to the battlefield first. Your living room won’t be far behind.

And I’ve put everything I know about the company leading the charge into my latest report.