If the ser­vice thought they’d buried the issue of armor test­ing, they for­got to ask their new Secretary.

ArmySec John McHugh announced today he had enlisted the ser­vices of the National Research Council to exam­ine the service’s armor test­ing pro­ce­dures and com­pli­ance pro­to­cols in light of a recent GAO report call­ing into ques­tion the Army’s adher­ence to QA standards.

Secretary of the Army John McHugh announced today that the National Research Council (NRC) will per­form an inde­pen­dent assess­ment of the Army’s body armor test­ing, fol­low­ing last month’s rec­om­men­da­tion by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) for an inde­pen­dent review. The NRC func­tions under the aus­pices of the National Academies, a pri­vate, non­profit insti­tu­tion that pro­vides sci­ence, tech­nol­ogy, and health pol­icy advice to the fed­eral gov­ern­ment and the pub­lic on crit­i­cal national issues.

Under an agree­ment between the National Academies and the direc­tor of oper­a­tional test and eval­u­a­tion (DOT&E), the Department of Defense’s final inde­pen­dent author­ity on sur­viv­abil­ity test­ing of body armor, the NRC will per­form an inde­pen­dent assess­ment of ongo­ing body armor testing. The pur­pose of the NRC assess­ment is to ensure that the Army main­tains the high­est stan­dards for test­ing processes and pro­to­cols, thus address­ing con­cerns raised by the GAO about cur­rent test­ing procedures.

On the face of it, this is a good thing. As bal­lis­tics experts will tell you, there’s still some voodoo in the bal­lis­tic test­ing sci­ence and one more set of eye­balls on the prob­lem wouldn’t hurt. Maybe at the end of this saga the Pentagon can adopt one stan­dard test­ing pro­to­col for all mil­i­tary body armor and the notional threats to it so there’ll be a bit more con­fi­dence in the results and less objectivity.

Walkoff ques­tion: Will they open the flex­i­ble armor test­ing stan­dards and pro­ce­dures can of worms?

– Christian

Not really…but got you to look, right?

My col­league Bryant Jordan ran across this photo and passed it along to Defense Tech just to show how very far we’ve come with bal­lis­tic protection.

According to a cap­tion from the archival sec­tion at Corbis, these gar­cons are French sol­diers of the Army Ordnance Department show­ing off the test arti­cles of their WW I-​​era body armor.

I can’t even see what this is made of, but it sure looks like cold rolled steel and leather. I’m dig­ging the groin pro­tec­tor and the jaunty dude on the right with a 45 hole right in his junk.

Also, what gives on the 1984-​​esque eye shades built into the helmet?

I went on The Google for this one and came up empty. But I did run across a FAS entry that ref­er­ences the US Army’s exper­i­men­ta­tion with body armor. It was called the Brewster Body Shield (sure beats “Interceptor”) and looked more like a bad 1950s B movie robot cos­tume than a com­bat ready bal­lis­tic outfit.

But it could stop bullets…

The Brewster Body Shield, was made of chrome nickel steel, weighed 40 pounds, and con­sisted of a breast­plate and a head­piece. This armor would with­stand Lewis machine­gun bul­lets at 2,700 f.p.s. but was unduly clumsy and heavy.

I’ll say. Makes Dragon Skin look pos­i­tively feath­er­weight by com­par­i­son (I’m just pulling your leg Murray).

It’s inter­est­ing to see how body armor tech­nol­ogy has evolved, and no doubt we still have a long way to go. But pic­tures like this offer a glimpse of what was state of the are nearly 100 years ago.

– Christian

I just got back from an hour and a half brief­ing with PEO Soldier Gen. Pete Fuller and top PMs for the service’s pri­mary gear buy­ing office.

I’ll be spi­ral­ing out tid­bits through­out the day, but one thing I wanted to throw out there was to close the loop on the flex­i­ble small arms pro­tec­tive insert and vest test­ing issue and the Army’s rejec­tion of the sys­tem as por­trayed in the GAO report.

It turns out that only one ven­dor sub­mit­ted a design to ful­fill the Army’s require­ment for a flex­i­ble armor sys­tem and you guessed it, it was Pinnacle, maker of Dragon Skin.

According to offi­cials in the room, the vest suf­fered “cat­a­strophic fail­ures” dur­ing pre­lim­i­nary design review tests at Aberdeen a year ago.

“The flex­i­ble ven­dor had a direct pen­e­tra­tion,” Fuller said flatly. Because of feed­back from the Hill, the Army opened up the con­tract to any ven­dor — not just hard plate mak­ers — to pro­vide X and E SAP capability.

“We have shown that flex­i­ble is not work­ing the way every­body thought,” Fuller added.

But the Army hasn’t given up on a flex­i­ble armor system…

“Fort Benning has asked me pretty reg­u­larly ‘is there any­thing out there that would work in a weight we’d like?’” said the pro­gram man­ager for Army armor, Col, Bill Cole. “We’re still look­ing. We haven’t ruled it out com­pletely but we haven’t seized on any­thing that meets our requirements.”

– Christian

Well, there’s more to the GAO report on Army ESAPI plate test­ing than meets the eye.

With only a cou­ple ref­er­ences thrown in early on, it’s easy to miss it. But a sharp eyed researcher at the Project on Government Oversight who called me today to ask a few ques­tions did my job bet­ter than I and raised an issue I should have pounced on.

It turns out, the Army did its ESAPI tests at Aberdeen instead of HP White not because DOT&E requested it, but because “one man­u­fac­turer of flex­i­ble small arms pro­tec­tive vests, which had failed pre­vi­ous test­ing con­ducted for the Program Executive Office (PEO) Soldier at an NIJ-​​certified facil­ity, made alle­ga­tions that the PEO Soldier and the facil­ity had wrongly failed its designs.”

Okay folks, who do you think that is?

So it turns out our report­ing in October of ’08 was spot on that the Army deemed the tech­nol­ogy too imma­ture to field deploy­able Flexible-​​SAP sys­tems. The GAO fills in some blanks, say­ing (not sure how many) ven­dors sent in sam­ples of a Flexible Small Arms Protective Vest-​​Enhanced and FSAPV-​​X and shot them at Aberdeen between February and June of ’08.

In October 2008, on the basis of the Preliminary Design Model test­ing results, the Army awarded four 5-​​year indef­i­nite delivery/​indefinite quan­tity con­tracts at a total of over $8 bil­lion for the pro­duc­tion of the ESAPI and the XSAPItwo cat­e­gories of ceramic plates. No FSAPV-​​E or FSAPV-​​X solu­tions passed the test­ing.

Now this gets back to our boy Allan Bain’s con­tention that flex­i­ble sys­tems need a whole new test method­ol­ogy dif­fer­ent from the Army’s cur­rent one (that failed the FSAPs in ’08)…but that’s a debate for another post.

(Gouge: MS)

– Christian

In another case of damned-if-you-do-damned-if-you-don’t, the Army’s get­ting zinged by the GAO on its armor test­ing pro­ce­dure.

We reported on the inves­ti­ga­tion that prompted this GAO look ear­lier this year, but the long and the short of it is that gov­ern­ment audi­tors found flaws in how the Army was test­ing the first pro­to­types of its more pow­er­ful AP-​​round-​​stopping X-​​SAPI.

The GAO rec­om­mended a host of inde­pen­dent audits, test pro­ce­dure mod­i­fi­ca­tions and other “over­sight” as it nor­mally does. And the Army, in a state­ment, largely agreed with the idea that more over­sight is better:

The Department of the Army announced today that it has estab­lished addi­tional qual­ity con­trol mea­sures to fur­ther ensure that body armor test­ing doc­u­men­ta­tion and pro­cure­ment processes are rig­or­ous, con­sis­tent, and use avail­able best prac­tices. To this end, the Army has added sev­eral qual­ity con­trol posi­tions to include a Senior Executive Service posi­tion as the qual­ity assur­ance direc­tor of per­sonal pro­tec­tive equip­ment. This new senior-​​level posi­tion will report directly to the Army Acquisition Executive. These changes address issues raised in a GAO report…

In the inter­est of full dis­clo­sure, I was invited to attend an Army press brief­ing on their response to the GAO report on Friday but got tied up and couldn’t make it.

The bot­tom line remains what I indi­cated last year when the IG found test flaws: armor test­ing is as much art as it is sci­ence. The GAO wants over­sight inde­pen­dent of the gov­ern­ment, while oth­ers level sharp crit­i­cism over the Army’s con­tin­ued use of HP White Labs in Street, MD, for its armor test­ing — believ­ing doing so would make their results more unbi­ased since Aberdeen is essen­tially an Army command.

Now the GAO says Aberdeen is jacked up…ugh…

The armor test­ing com­mu­nity is a small one, I can think of only three labs in the US with test­ing expe­ri­ence for per­sonal body armor with gov­ern­ment con­tracts. With the sci­ence of armor mate­ri­als and designs clash­ing con­stantly with threat modal­i­ties the abil­ity to ver­ify prod­uct effec­tive­ness is con­stantly chang­ing. I think the testers’ heads are in the right place, but clearly there needs to be one stan­dard and some over the shoul­der checking.

As duplic­i­tous as the Army can be with its armor claims (“The Best Body Armor in the World Bar None”), I tend to believe that since the micro­scope on armor and test­ing has swung so squarely on the ser­vice, they’re loath to bob and weave to save their own skin on this one. But we’ll see…

– Christian

You all might remem­ber we reported a new kind of flex­i­ble body armor being devel­oped by pre-​​Dragon Skin designer Allan Bain back in October.

At the time, Bain had tested his armor against some pretty mean armor-​​piercing rounds (a Swiss-​​made armor pierc­ing round that is more pow­er­ful than the one spec­i­fied by the Army) shat­ter­ing the tiles but slow­ing down the round enough to keep it from pen­e­trat­ing the Dyneema backing.

Bain told me the other day he had just sub­jected a redesigned ver­sion of the discs to shots from a “sur­ro­gate” M993 AP round with 160 grains each at 3,014 and 3,061 feet per sec­ond and the discs held up. That’s about 20 per­cent more kinetic energy than the threat the Army is build­ing the X-​​SAPI to defeat, Bain told me.

He’s been invited to test the new “Skaalar Exoskin Gen 4+” at H.P. White labs by the Army’s top body armor guru in July, in which “the Army will see the first flex­i­ble sys­tem that has no weight penalty as com­pared to the XSAPI plate that is in pro­duc­tion now.”

As you might remem­ber, the Army has walked back its urgent request for for plates that are stronger than the cur­rent E-​​SAPI and has said it would stock­pile a lim­ited run of plates in Kuwait in case the more deadly threat emerges in greater numbers.

But clearly, if you’ve worn body armor at all, a flex­i­ble sys­tem is the way to go, and Army offi­cials have admit­ted it to me on sev­eral occa­sions. It’s just that weight and dura­bil­ity have been a con­stant problem.

We’ll keep you updated on how the tests go, but DT wishes Bain luck on his upcom­ing tests.

– Christian

Note to insur­gents: hit the tread­mill. The Marines are about to get a few steps quicker. 

Reacting to injuries caused by over weighted body armor and secu­rity improve­ments in some com­bat zones, the Marine Corps is adjust­ing the way it equips Leathernecks in the field with per­sonal pro­tec­tive equipment. 

The ser­vice is shift­ing the deci­sion mak­ing down the chain of com­mand and insti­tut­ing a grad­u­ated armor scale in the com­ing weeks for the promise of a lighter load to reduce injuries and hope­fully quicken the feet of Marines in the field. 

The first move, effec­tive imme­di­ately, will push con­trol to lieu­tenant colonels in decid­ing what amount of per­sonal pro­tec­tive equip­ment Marines will wear for a given mission. 

“Recognizing that body armor is mod­u­lar and scal­able, [we’ll] try and lever­age that by empow­er­ing our com­man­ders to make the appro­pri­ate deci­sion with regards to what com­po­si­tion of body armor their Marines will wear,” said Maj. Tom Wood, infantry advo­cate for the plans, poli­cies and oper­a­tions branch of Marine Corps head­quar­ters in Washington. 

Previously, the deci­sion for the body armor com­po­si­tion Marines wore into the field rested in the hands of colonels. The Corps hopes devolved deci­sion mak­ing to the equiv­a­lent of bat­tal­ion com­man­ders will trans­late to a more flex­i­ble policy. 

“Our bat­tal­ion and squadron com­man­ders are really the right indi­vid­u­als to make the deci­sion with regards to bal­anc­ing weight ver­sus pro­tec­tion in a given oper­at­ing envi­ron­ment,” Wood told Military​.com in an exclu­sive interview. 

Wood trum­peted “increased tac­ti­cal mobil­ity” as a key jus­ti­fi­ca­tion for the new move. 

“What you are going to see, undoubt­edly, is the abil­ity of the aver­age Marine to move quicker and enhance his tac­ti­cal mobil­ity and thereby the unit can move from point to point quicker,” Wood said. 

Combatant com­man­ders will still have the author­ity to issue the­ater– or region-​​wide guid­ance on the level of per­sonal pro­tec­tive equip­ment, but Wood hopes that “the reduced level of vio­lence of this new author­ity may help stir some dis­cus­sion between Marine force com­man­ders in Iraq and their joint force com­man­der supervisors.“ 

In January of last year, Corps com­man­ders in Iraq were push­ing to shed the body armor load of their grunts by mak­ing neck guards, groin pro­tec­tors, side plates and even hel­mets optional in some areas of Iraq. But they were shut down by higher-​​level Army com­man­ders who were uncon­vinced the threat had dimin­ished enough to jus­tify the new armor edict. 

As more Leathernecks deployed to Afghanistan, with its high alti­tude bat­tle­fields and rural geog­ra­phy, the Corps qui­etly began let­ting grunts wear light-​​weight plate car­ri­ers instead of the bulky Modular Tactical Vest, exchang­ing pro­tec­tion for pounds as the strate­gic envi­ron­ment dictated. 

Potentially an even more dras­tic change is a forth­com­ing move by the Corps to cre­ate a grad­u­ated sys­tem of per­sonal pro­tec­tive equip­ment that will allow Marines in the field to quickly move between dif­fer­ent body armor configurations.

(more…)

Crye Precision has evi­dently revamped its “armor chas­sis” con­cept with the new CAGE (Crye Assault GEar) armor vest.

[Photo: Military Morons]

I’ve been a big fan of Crye’s inno­va­tion over the years (though I was a bit put off by their lack of pub­lic rela­tions savvy at the SHOT Show) and always believed their orig­i­nal armor chas­sis was spot on in terms of how armor should be designed, but lacked a real­is­tic ergonom­ics to make it appeal­ing to the main­stream of operators.

Now they’ve clearly taken the best of the orig­i­nal chas­sis and made it a bit more user friendly with the new CAGE.

CAGE (Crye Assault GEar) Armor Chassis: Unlike any other armor vest, the CAGE Armor Chassis is the result of years of design and engi­neer­ing. Made by an entirely new pro­duc­tion process, the artic­u­lated Chassis pro­vides the most com­fort­able and sta­ble armor/​load-​​carriage plat­form to date. The design pro­vides pas­sive cool­ing via large air chan­nels that run under the armor. Designed for use with our armored BLAST Belt, the CAGE Armor Chassis is fully mod­u­lar and highly adjustable. Designed to be worn snug to the body like sports equip­ment. Features include: dual emer­gency doff, accepts 6X6 side plates and shoul­der strap plates, front open­ing access, unin­ter­rupted side cov­er­age (no side seam), meets or exceeds IBA & USASOC frag and hand­gun requirements. 

It’s my pet peeve that con­ven­tional armor mak­ers design these lum­ber­ing boxes of Kevlar and ceramic that feel like you’re wear­ing a bar­rel over your chest. Crye’s got it right with the “designed to be worn snug to the body like sports equip­ment” idea. Take a good look at the photo pre­sen­ta­tion on the armor. I’m sure we’ll see them enter­ing new armor com­pe­ti­tions pretty soon.

Here’s a good write up on it from Military Morons.

– Christian

We posted a story this morn­ing about a team of engi­neer­ing stu­dents at my alma mater who are design­ing new body armor inserts.

According to the story in the Richmond (VA) Times Dispatch, the three stu­dents — one of whom is an Army National Guardsman — are test­ing new plates that can absorb up to 32 shots from armor pierc­ing rounds. The University of Virginia stu­dents’ con­tention is that the new design will con­tain spall and reduce back­face deformation.

But the stu­dents aren’t being specific…

For pro­pri­etary rea­sons, the stu­dents don’t want to get into the specifics of how the armor works, though the inven­tion in part is a new con­fig­u­ra­tion of ceramic plates. The stu­dents also don’t want pho­tographs taken of the armor.

O’Dell said the prob­lem with cur­rent armor worn by Soldiers is that one shot from an armor-​​piercing bul­let will cre­ate cracks in the ceramic mate­r­ial that makes up the vest. That leaves the Soldier vul­ner­a­ble to the next shot.

The UVA.-designed vest should with­stand pos­si­bly as many as 32 rounds of armor-​​piercing bul­lets per plate, said O’Dell, who at 29 is much older than his team­mates. Armor vests usu­ally have four plates — one each for the front, back and sides.

“We’re try­ing to con­tain those cracks,” O’Dell said.

The new armor also will “deflect” less when struck by the steel-​​core bul­lets used to pen­e­trate armor. That’s impor­tant because too much deflec­tion — where the ceramic mate­r­ial is actu­ally deformed inward by the force of the bul­let — can also kill a Soldier. 

From what I can tell this isn’t much of a break­through. Seems the stu­dents are still using ceramic in their armor mate­r­ial. They claim they’re build­ing a lighter plate that con­tains spall and reduces back­face defor­ma­tion. Sounds to me like a thin­ner ceramic core wrapped around a ton of Spectra or Dyneema. This is far from Earth shat­ter­ing and there are armor man­u­fac­tur­ers out there that are doing the same thing. Dyneema and Spectra have a hard time stop­ping the AP rounds, though, so maybe they have a new “con­fig­u­ra­tion” that reduces the weight of the ceramic (which means they cut down on the amount) but pre­serves the kind of strength needed to stop AP rounds.

Until inven­tors start being able to forge armor from new mate­ri­als, I don’t see much promise in increased bal­lis­tic resis­tance with reduced weight. Carbon nano-​​tubes anyone?

– Christian

Here is a pre­view of a story we will be run­ning tomor­row morn­ing at Military​.com:

Army Pulled 8,000 Armor Plates from Field
By Christian Lowe

The Army recalled more than 8,000 bullet-​​resistant plates late last year for fear that they might not be able to stop the rifle rounds they were designed to defeat.

According to the top enlisted advi­sor for the Army’s Program Executive Office Soldier — the service’s top gear-​​buying office — offi­cials were wor­ried that a pro­duc­tion lot of 8,018 enhanced small arms pro­tec­tive plate inserts, or ESAPIs, might have man­u­fac­tur­ing flaws that were not up to specifications.

So in December, the ser­vice pulled the plates from the front lines and sent them to bal­lis­tics labs for test­ing to see if they were up to snuff.

“We opted to pull those 8,000 plates just to see — just as, again, part of our sur­veil­lance pro­gram” to mon­i­tor qual­ity, said Sgt. Maj. Tom Coleman, PEO Soldier sergeant major, in a Feb. 6 inter­view with mil­i­tary bloggers.

Army offi­cials had failed pro­duc­tion lots of plates that were man­u­fac­tured before and after the recalled plates, so engi­neers decided to pull the 8,018 to make dou­bly sure they should have been fielded.

“When the Army looked at the lot accep­tance test back then for the big string of plates that were shot, they saw that there were a cou­ple failed lot tests out there. Those plates were never accepted. They were scrapped,” Coleman told Military​.com. “In between them there were a cou­ple lots that passed, but we said, hey, you know what? Let’s pull those plates anyways.”

News of fur­ther armor recalls comes on the heels of a Pentagon Inspector General report that rec­om­mended the Army pull more than 16,000 ESAPI plates made by ArmorWorks from the field due to flawed test pro­ce­dures on the ini­tial designs.

Though the Army dis­agreed with the IG’s find­ing, the service’s top civil­ian, Pete Geren, ordered the plates recalled any­way “out of an abun­dance of cau­tion” and to allay fears among Joes in the war zone that their gear might be sub-​​par.

The IG report men­tioned the 8,018 plate recall deep within its find­ings, but the Army never made the news public.

“Those lots passed,” Coleman said of the 8,000 plates. “Everything was good with them. Some lots in front of and behind them had failed and were not accepted.”

Though results were not avail­able, Coleman said the recalled plates are still being tested at bal­lis­tics labs, but so far none have shown signs of failure.

Coleman reit­er­ated the Army’s posi­tion that all ESAPI plates sent to com­bat had passed qual­ity assur­ance tests and so-​​called “first arti­cle” tests to con­firm the design’s abil­ity to with­stand armor-​​piercing rounds and claimed no plates have ever failed.

“We have no reports of deaths from the body armor fail­ing to stop the threat it was designed to stop, none,” Coleman said.

The Army is still try­ing to track down the 16,000 plates tabbed by the IG’s office and Coleman said the ser­vice has been able to col­lect some of the plates, but there’s still a long way to go.

The Army emphat­i­cally claims its test­ing method­ol­ogy was sound and that, despite the IG’s deter­mi­na­tion that engi­neers sub­sti­tuted plates dur­ing tests, fudged num­bers and failed to set stan­dards in eval­u­at­ing new designs, no plate was ever accepted in error.

“The plates met the stan­dard to stop the threat round that they’re designed to stop,” Coleman said. “The issue in ques­tion is some of the scor­ing that is involved, in the way that they score the plates that are shot.”

The ser­vice claims its ESAPI can stop the most deadly rounds on the bat­tle­field, but after nearly two years the ser­vice has devel­oped the “XSAPI” — a plate that can stop an even more pow­er­ful round. Military​.com knows the threat round the Army has been work­ing to thwart but will not reveal it for secu­rity concerns.

Army offi­cials indi­cated Feb. 5 they would not field the XSAPI due to its exces­sive weight, but would ware­house the even­tual 120,000 plates in Kuwait in case com­man­ders feel they need the added protection.

Coleman said he hasn’t got­ten any feed­back from the field that the cur­rent plates don’t stop what they’re intended to, but he’s ready to take the pro­tec­tion up a notch if needed.

“We haven’t seen where the plates that we’re using right now are being defeated by any­thing,” Coleman said. “But we do know that there are emerg­ing tech­nolo­gies that in the future could. And that’s where XSAPI is going.”

– Christian