It takes 31 pounds of body armor to protect a soldier’s entire body from enemy fire.
Too bad that much bulk renders soldiers immobile.
As a result, commanders have discretion to allow troops to wear only certain pieces of the armor ensemble. But even in its minimum configuration, a protective vest weighs about 21 pounds.
The Army is considering buying a lighter and comfier vest now used by U.S. Special Operations Command. That would lower the weight to about 16.5 pounds but would reduce the area of coverage from 885 to 231 square inches.
Such is the predicament the Army faces today: It needs to safeguard troops, but the weight of the armor is not coming down without reducing the protection. And soldiers must keep bearing the load.
As troops began to redeploy from Iraq to Afghanistan, many complained that the weight of the armor was not only uncomfortable and dangerous — because of the reduced mobility — but also was causing physical injuries such as stress fractures. Unlike Iraq, where soldiers mostly travel in humvees, troops in Afghanistan spend days on foot in rough terrain. Because there is no lighter alternative to the current hard armor plates — called ESAPI, or enhanced small arms protective insert — the only option available was to switch to a lighter vest such as the one SOCOM has been buying for years. The Army prefers its current “interceptor” Kevlar vest because it covers a larger area of the torso, but it agreed to test the SOCOM “modular” plate carrier vest and outfitted a battalion of soldiers in Afghanistan.
Up to a million of the $900 vests could be acquired over the next several years to outfit all units, says Brig. Gen. Peter N. Fuller, the Army’s program executive officer for soldier equipment.
“We are going to give units the ability to pick which body armor system they need,” he says in an interview.
The Army’s in-house laboratories for years have been trying to develop new, lighter materials to replace ESAPI plates, but no breakthroughs have occurred so far. Contractors say they have the technical wherewithal to create lighter plates but are waiting for the Army to fund the research.
Fuller acknowledges that the Army has not dedicated any sizable amount of money to the research and development of body armor. “The Army has been capitalizing on contractors’ investments,” he says. “The Army needs dedicated R&D and procurement budget lines” for body armor.
“We need to invest,” he says. “No new technology is sitting around the corner … We are just tweaking the current technology.”
Body armor still is fundamentally the equivalent of “wrapping your grandmother’s china in Kevlar,” says Fuller.
In recent years, the funding to procure body armor has come from emergency war budgets, which give the Defense Department the flexibility to allocate the money for whatever pressing equipment needs arise. After buying 2 million body armor plates over three years to provide for the entire force, the Defense Department shifted funds to pay for other gear, such as armored trucks.
The Defense Department would lose that flexibility if the Army had a dedicated R&D and procurement budget for body armor, says Fuller.
“OSD [the office of the secretary of defense] disapproved the Army’s request for dedicated funding,” he says. Congress, meanwhile, wants the Army to have a separate budget for body armor.
An industry consultant who works with body armor manufacturers says the problem resides in the Pentagon, where Army brass have been distracted by bigger headaches such as the cancellation of the Future Combat Systems, and have put off working on new requirements for lighter body armor.
The SOCOM soft vest the Army is testing may save a few pounds, but the majority of the weight of the armor is in the plates. Right now, he says, “Nothing is going on in the hard body armor industry” to develop lighter materials.
The industry is ready to come forward with ideas for how to make materials that would weigh 10 to 20 percent less than current ones, but it doesn’t want to spend its own money and later be stranded with R&D costs and no orders, the consultant says. “Until the Army comes up with requirements, industry is not willing to take that risk.”
Some manufacturers wrote a letter earlier this year to the Army’s Vice Chief of Staff Gen. Peter W. Chiarelli, complaining about the service’s lack of support for the armor industrial base.
Chiarelli’s July 6 reply letter, a copy of which was obtained by National Defense, says the Army “recognizes that new materials and manufacturing processes are required” to achieve lighter ballistic plate weight without compromising performance.
The Army also “acknowledges that an R&D effort is required to develop a lighter body armor solution,” Chiarelli wrote. “To this end, the Army is working with Congress to create an R&D budget line of $25 million per year, with dedicated base procurement funding in the fiscal 2010 budget.”
A spokeswoman for Chiarelli confirmed that the Army requested $22.1 million in fiscal 2010 for body armor research, in addition to $17.1 million for other areas that could “support” body armor.
Marc King, vice president of armor manufacturer Ceradyne, says the company makes lighter and thinner body armor plates for SOCOM. “The armor is lighter because it is ‘scalable’ — trading weight for mission and threat conditions,” King says. “It was offered to the Army but the Army has so far declined it.”
Besides the ESAPI plates, the Army is buying 120,000 of the more sophisticated XSAPI plates. It decided to only buy a small number as a “contingency stock for a potential emerging ballistic threat,” according to Chiarelli’s letter.
King says the reason the Army is buying a small supply of XSAPI is because it is 10 percent heavier than ESAPI. He says Ceradyne could lower the weight of XSAPI by .7 pounds if the plates were made to take a single shot instead of two shots. “The Army decided it did not want to take that risk,” King says.
The XSAPI versus ESAPI issue is rather controversial. The Army would not discuss the specific qualities of the XSAPI plate for security reasons. But open-source documents note that it would protect against M993 machine gun rounds that only are used by U.S. forces. That bullet would slice right through an ESAPI plate if it were accidentally fired on a U.S. soldier by a friendly force, experts note.