Something told me this would happen.
Saw a great report last night from Fox News reporter Jennifer Griffin who’s been traveling with Marine Commandant Gen. James Conway in Iraq.
She knew news when she saw it and reports that Marines are complaining mightily about their new body armor vest, the Modular Tactical Vest or MTV.
The Pentagon and Marine Corps authorized the purchase of 84,000 bulletproof vests in 2006 that not only are too heavy but are so impractical that some U.S. Marines are asking for their old vests back so they can remain agile enough to fight.
Marine Commandant Gen. James Conway wants to know who authorized the costly purchase of the nearly 30-pound flak jackets and has ordered the Marine procurement officers at the Quantico base in Virginia to halt the rest of an unfilled order, FOX News has learned.
Now, the MTV is the replacement for the Point Blank-manufactured Interceptor and was billed as a more comfortable, better fitting, more protective vest than the Interceptor. The Marine Corps was looking at two other designs during evaluations in 2006. I know one of them was a variation of the Crye Precision-built “Armor Chassis” and I still don’t know what the third one was, though I suspect it was a Point Blank design.
I have a source who was at one of the trials at Quantico and he said people were raving about one, and thought the other two were dogs. When I saw the design the Marine Corps picked, I was pretty sure which one the leathernecks in the field were NOTraving about: the MTV.
Too many bells and whistles. Too complicated to put on and adjust. Heavier than the Interceptor. Ugh…
But…and this is a big but…The company that makes the MTV, Protective Products, has two former Marine Corps body armor program officials at its top ranks. The body armor community is a small one, so that’s not surprising at all. But it sure doesn’t look good on the surface…especially since Conway told Griffin: “Im not quite sure how we got to where we are, but what I do know is it is not a winner.
I think it is foolish to buy more.”
Man, there’s no worse endorsement than that.
– Christian
if your sayin its fine cause he wore it?.…
well somethin that weights 30pounds is fine for sittin in a vehicle all day but when your on patrol and expect to be able to take cover fast enough.…also add the other equipment. looks like we find another lighter armor,think about gene enginering the troops, or we must have mecha!!!
no seriously good job listening to the troops for a change though Fox is better than CNN and other MSM on that …
and whats this i hear about obama canceling the missile defense program, cutting FCS, and his retarded nuke free world thing? plus he says he wants to end fissionable materials.…doesnt that also include the fuel for nuke reactors? Say the vid on Black 5 site? why is he even a candidate if he wants to neuter the US.…then whos gonna do the UN’s dirty work?
When I see this, I wonder why I even bother driving myself insane trying to figure out how to make armor? really? i hold 3 patents on armor, and none of them are like this PB/AH/BAE hunk of junk… Im not surprised.
I hold Marines in very high esteem (as well as others in the Mil.) I just gotta smile when the Cmndt. of the USMC starts yellin’ < yikes!
Well, I don’t quit because i am not working for a dod contract, im working for the guys who gotta wear armor. one day.….….. good one Christian.
DW
this stuff really annoys me. what does all this gear cost? how much for a little ol cell phone? what would it cost to put a fricken cell phone camera up on a pole, on every damn corner of any town? no need for body armor at all, if you can SEE whats’ going down, and avoid fire in the first place.
stupid, stupid, stupid
campbell,.…..so your solution is to put camera phones to poles.…thank god your not in charge of anything.
as for the topic, in the pic…that thing looks way to big and combersome. I dont know why they think they need to bid it out, why dont they do some research from a large number of cops and swat guys, and eventually you can narrow it down to pick the best one.
I heard from a very reliable source that they don’t like the MTV armor because it doesn’t play videos anymore, just crappy reality tv shows.
campbell, your stupid, stupid, stupid.
Well.. I still think the MTV is better then the brits osprey armor. I do not understand though why the Marines did not do something like the army did, where they cut weight and added protection, instead of adding both. My humble opinion is that the Marines should have just adopted the IOTV like the Army, got it in “fox brown” color, (Good choice btw on the Marines… it goes good with Desert and woodlands MARPAT), and renamed it the MOTV or MTV.. whatever.
I was with the first battalion in the Corps to adopt these vests — we had to go to classes to learn how to assemble them and wear them (not kidding). The company rep for the armor told us that these things were based on the buddy system, he didn’t seem to see whats wrong with the fact that its impossible to don by yourself, its slow to put on, and restricts your mobility. I sure am glad my contract ended before I had to wear that stupid thing in combat.
Max,
I agree with you 100 percent. I used an armor system designed by Blackhawk for my recent embed in Iraq — with, by the way, ultralight Level III plates designed by Protective Products. I’ll have a full review to come, but I’ll say this: the Army IOTV is the best allround vest I’ve seen in the zone…one that balances protection, weight, fit and feel. I wish I had gotten one of those instead (but I’m not sure I could’ve because so many are on order for the Army)…
Hey! Cuirassiers!
At this point, we might as well put them in Maximillian Full Plate.
(sublety not a strong suit around here) okay, try this.…you’re going to enter a ring for a fistfight.…..you can have all the body armor you want, but you gotta be blindfolded if you choose it.
any takers?
in this day, when we have the tech available to monitor every street corner in america to see if someone is paying a toll, running a light.…..we can do so somewhere else. anything less than doing so.…is stupid. Mucho macho perhaps.…but stupid for certain.
Just give it to guys riding shotgun on Hummers etc.
At least that way we wont lose the money spent.
I wonder if light Inf units who do a lot of street patrols prefer this over the Interceptor. I know it is 3lbs heaver, but it distributes the weight better.
Campbell: Your theory is beyond stupid. Other than getting great video footage of being shot, you’re idea has few merits. How the @#$% do you think a camera is better than armor?
Granted, extra surveilance would be nice, but, to say it would be better than providing armor is about the dumbest thing I have read here(hell, I’ve written some doozies). What happens when the enemy figures out the cameras(I don’t know, maybe looking up and seeing that thing that looks like a camera) and disables it?
My two cents on topic even: I wish we could convince the beancounters that even if you dump thousands upon thousands into armor protection, it would pay for itself by the reduction in deaths and injuries. I think I’m seeing two many this or that choices being made in armor design. Why can’t Dragonskin type armor be combined with plate and maybe that newer flexible design? Why can’t we design a better modular system that can readily be changed from something you’d wear hanging out of a vehicle turret or going on a patrol? That MTV design looks really unwieldly.
Steve,
Really, despite what you might think, materials science is only so advanced. Making better armor isn’t simply a matter of throwing money at the problem and having it suddenly appear.
The poster “Campbell” wrote: “how much for a little ol cell phone? what would it cost to put a fricken cell phone camera up on a pole, on every damn corner of any town? no need for body armor at all, if you can SEE whats’ going down, and avoid fire in the first place.“
The principle is sound, maybe it needs a bit of adaptation to reality (by choosing any better adapted surveillance technologies for that), but my question to you is: You ALREADY HAVE such a situation in Police State “Great Britain”, prison camp London, where millions of C.C.T.V, cameras watch over EVERY SINGLE street corner for 24 / 7 / 365,25, yet they were still unable to guarantee public safety and to predict and thwart the 7 / 7 / 2005 bus and subway bombings. Why? Because — and that’s the Achilles heel of your system — it is humanely impossible to observe all those millions of monitors in REAL TIME !
As Napol
I didn’t mean it that way. I just think they weigh the costs a bit too much. No armor is going to protect you from everything, but, you can better the odds.My point was more along the lines of, even if an armor system cost a lot more than the current ones, if the protection was better it would actually save limb, lives and money in the long run.
Aaggh! The world is at an end. I agree with freefallingbomb. At some point, there will be a failure of surveillance and something will slip through.
I would be all for spending lots of extra money on body armor if it meant we’d have significantly better protection. However, I think that without some major advance, we’re at the point where trade-offs are the only thing we can do. It’s the same with rifles. We can make a rifle shoot farther, but that increases barrel length and makes it unweildy at closer ranges. We can make them hit harder, but that means bigger bullets and fewer rounds. We can make body armor that protects more, but that means its heavier and more bulky.
There’s going to have to be some sort of advance made, some new material developed, before we can really move on to a set of armor that is measurably superior to what we have today.
I can imagine how hard that thing would be to put on over your head when it has 50 more pounds of gear strapped to it, like ammo and whatnot. Weight is the obvious problem, and this weighs around 30lbs while the Dragon skin weighs around 45 to 50lbs. So if this is the major problem, how can anyone argue that the military needs the Dragon skin? Crazy.
IOTV ~ 27lb
MTV ~ 31lb
DS ~ 45lb
I called Pinnacle and asked the customer service/sales rep how much a large full torso wrap level IV, I did say out of curiosity because I didn’t lie and say I was buying for a military purpose, and weight they quoted me wasn’t 45 lbs. I wish someone who can buy level IV armor would ask and see if they are false advertising or not. But how crappy you can’t put on your own armor? and how crappy that marines don’t like it. How hard is it to ask some troops?
This kinda thing drives me batsh!t. How is it possible that the marines didn’t do a field trial of, say, 300 units before ordering 84,000 of them?!
And no one will lose their job or be demoted because, hey, who cares? There’s always more tax dollars we can fleece from the public, it’s a bottomless pit.
Hm, kinda funny. Before that article the Army got bashed because they were “too slow” for fielding IOTV, while the Marines already fielded MTV, thus it was 5 pounds heavier…
But honestly the MTV is not that bad.
If we put the common solder on a mid-sized ATV, they could wear as much armor as they want and have great mobility.
Obviously they would have to stay off the main roads, to avoid the IED’s. But for a bunch of guys on mid-sized ATV’s this is not a problem.
These vehicles would also allow for ease of helicopter/Osprey/Parachute/truck transport.
Hell, it is a better idea than the “Growler”.
Leave it to the military though. As soon as they start buying ATV’s they design them to be HEAVIER than a standard ATV.
Since when is Heavy “high performance”? The reviews I have read suggest that the extra weight make them rollover-ready. How much crap does one ATV have to carry for a solder? The regular ATV’s can carry 75 pounds in the front and 150 pounds on the back. These specs are for a mid sixed ATV, not one of the real big ones.
Unfortunately, it seems more and more the Top level officers have no idea what good technology is. Either they are ignorant, or being lied to by people who are lining up their retirement job.….or both.
It reminds me that Marine General Krulac went out with “his Marines” for a training expedition . After dealing with the crap equipment and waking up feeling like shit from the sleeping materials, he decided that things were going to change.
Where is that type of leadership now?
I have heard it referred to as “Management by walking around”.
@dennis
Sorry to say, but that sounds like a retarded idea. In a firefight, you either want to be on foot, or in a tank. The last thing I would want to be in is a ATV driving around roads, much less patrolling in one! Since we need to get from place to place in Iraq, we opt for HMMWV to provide protection for convoys and to do long distant patrols. The only use an I could see for an ATV would maybe be in a place like Afghanistan with limited trials (no roads really) and a necessity to carry more equipment, but donkeys have been found to be more effective. For long distance in Afghanistan, you have the chopper, for short, and for fighting, you have your feet, or something with armor, not an ATV. I personally believe your idea sounds very ridicules.
Thanks for being open minded Mike:)
It is hard for me to argue since I am not a solder, just a guy who studies technology.
However, I would like to say that when someone is firing at you, you would get off of the ATV. At least some guys would, others would stay on and ride around to the backside of whoever is shooting at you, encircling them in a hurry.
Helicopters are very vulnerable. The farther away from the action they drop you the better.
Also Helicopters alert everyone that you are coming, losing the element of surprise. (See Mogadishu)
With ATV’s you could patrol an area without roads or get to a target with a little more surprise, from a helicopter/Osprey/truck.
This is not new thinking. In WW2 lots of units used Jeeps to patrol open areas and to be exactly where the enemy did not want you to be, when they least expected it.
It only worked for open areas for Jeeps, whereas an ATV is much more flexible. (Horses and Donkeys are the ultimate flexible-see Jeb Stuart-. But they cannot go twenty MPH for two hours, and tend to freak out when shot.)
I am not saying this concept would be good for convoy duty.
But it would be great for sneaking around the main roads (not on them) and finding guys planting bombs. A squad of these could patrol a very large area, quickly.
Catching people coming over the Syrian and Iraq boarder would also be a great application for this concept.
Plus, you could wear more armor with these. As long as the firefights were relatively quick, the extra effort and heat of carrying it around would keep you alive. (See Greek armor)
I just look at our forces over there getting heavier and heavier. Which is good due to the IED’s.
It would just be nice to see some more mobility for the average Solder/Marine.
And maybe a little more protection when he is not in an MRAP.
Plus Mike,
What would you rather be on; an ATV or the Growler? The thing fell over going around a turtle.
Not exacly an off-road superstar.…
I’ve always been puzzled at the fact that we use so much armor plating on our vehicles when we could be using more kevlar 15 layers if necessary for our vehicles. Isn’t Kevlar 5 times stronger than steel?
I just talked to my son who is Corpsman with marines. Says his MYV weighs 65 lbs with plates. He can hardly move in it. Marines says it restricts their movements. Pain to put on etc.
Kevlar for the same weight, is several times stronger than steel. Kevlar is soft armor and work differently than hard armor. Kevlar catches the round, and is really ineffective against rifle rounds. Rifle rounds are defeated by hard ceramics, but the problems with hard materials is that they are britle. The premise is to defeat rifle rounds with hard materials and control the cracking of the brittle ceramics when they are impacted.
Um, I’d have to actually put on one of those vests, but from watching that guy throw on that new vest it looked a hell of a lot easier than putting on my old IBA. Your arms always got stuck in the damn thing, especially when they made you wear the FLICk with it. Why you’d wear that flick at all makes no sense to me since an IBA has MOLLE straps on it, but thats the Army. And why would it be heavier? Is it heavier or are people just talking out of there asses? LOL, an IBA with side daps, shoulder protectors, throat protector and the sapi plates, PLUS your basic load ammo and whatever else you had, NODs…etc. etc. you were pretty weighed down to begin with. I brought my full battle rattle home, IBA and Mich…minus my M4 of course, lol, and my friends and family where all like, holy shyt thats heavy. Thats what civilians say, but that was my gear and what else are you going to wear when you’re waltzing down some street in Iraq waiting for some dink to set off an IED or take a pot shot at you? I felt safe at least, if not completely fricking miserable. I want them to come out with some body armor that doesn’t over heat you. I loved my IBA in the winter, and I thought I was going to die in the summer wearing it.
Hey Christian,
It’s a been a while and a long time coming, but we just hit a mile stone with our flexible rifle armor.
At 7.5 Lbs/Sq. Ft. our New B4C flexible rifle armor was able to defeat one of the worst rounds fired out of a military rifle, the Swiss 7.62mm x 51mm HCAP factory ammunittion.
The lab report shows 33mm Trauma on this 196 gr. Tungsten carbide round. This was hit on a seam as well. We are very excited about this because it was a very convincing stop. We see the above weight as extremely overdesigned.
This round as compared to the M993, the noted XSAPI threat is vastly superior. This round will will penetrate level 4 and 4+ plus plate
and the typical OTV soft armor system at 250m and 200M repsectively. This is a very tough round to stop. And it was easy at a weight range that is very acceptable according to the Army experts. It is available for ordering by qualified personnel, but be prepared it’s also VERY expensive.
Al
http://s566.photobucket.com/albums/ss106/ctaggart3/?action=view&current=LevelIIIX-SAPITestCombatBodyArmo-7.flv
LS Armor coming soon in Level IV 7.62x54R protection at 28lbs and flexible!
http://s566.photobucket.com/albums/ss106/ctaggart3/?action=view&current=LevelIIIX-SAPITestCombatBodyArmo-7.flv
Body armor is always a balance between comfort, mobility and protection. It seems that the MTV has a lot of the latter but no comfort or mobility