The Quest for Better Body Armor

Michael Yon's Dragon Skin armor.

Kathryn Jean Lopez posted this extract of an e-mail from mil-blogger Michael Yon:

This is what I think of Dragon Skin. I don't want to see American soldiers wearing this body armor. It's inferior to and heavier than alternatives. I spent about $4,000 for mine and just put it on Ebay starting bid: $1. I'll be happy to get $2 back from it. When I go back to Iraq in a couple weeks, I will not be wearing Dragon Skin.

The controversy over body armor is largely manufactured and is impeding the fielding of better body armor.

Yon has a point about the "manufactured controversy"--the existing Interceptor Body Armor provides excellent protection at a reasonable price, and it is now universally available to all U.S. military personnel in a combat area (not merely to combat troops, as was the case at the beginning of the war in Iraq). And there has been no "conspiracy" to keep allegedly better armor (such as Dragon Skin) out of the hands of U.S. soldiers and Marines.

But for all its virtues, Interceptor is not perfect. No military system of any sort ever is, since all require tradeoffs and compromises among competing and in some cases antithetical requirements. Body armor is no different, so the real issue is whether there is room for improvement, what the costs of those improvements would be, and whether the benefits outweigh the costs. For example, we could devise body armor that provides absolute protection for the entire body against the entire range of (reasonable) threats, but it would be so massive and heavy as to prevent the soldier from moving freely. We could design armor that provides total freedom of movement, but it would not protect the soldier against the full range of threats.

To understand the body armor issue, you have to know a bit about the threat, the technology, and the tactical requirements of the infantry soldier. I spent about four years reviewing body armor technology and the body armor market as part of a litigation against a major defense contractor.

Basically, all current body armor (with the notable exception of Dragon Skin) works the same way: there is an outer tactical vest (OTV) consisting of Kevlar or a similar material such as Dyneema or SpectraShield, which stops low-velocity bullets and fragments through the bending and breaking of multiple plies of the fabric in the OTV. These are good against pistol rounds and grenade and artillery fragments, but they have trouble stopping more powerful rounds fired from assault rifles, high-power rifles, and machine guns. Thus, the vests have pockets into which are inserted ceramic "small arms protective inserts" (SAPIs).

A SAPI is nothing more than an over-engineered dinner plate made from a high-tech ceramic (silicon carbide or boron carbide) backed by several layers of compressed Spectra or Dyneema fabric (which is polyethelene, and looks like plastic). When a bullet passes through the OTV and hits the plate, the force of impact shatters the plate and absorbs the energy of the bullet; the bullet and any residue of the plate is stopped in the backing material. Because the breaking of the plate destroys its structural integrity, the ability of the SAPI to stop a second hit is considerably less than for the first hit, the third hit is less than for the second hit, etc. The current standard in the U.S. military, applied to the Enhanced SAPI (E-SAPI) is two rounds required, three rounds desired. This is not a tactical requirement, it is one based on what industry could deliver.