Army Defends Its Choice of Body Armor

May 21, 2007 — -- The Army held an unusual briefing Monday to aggressively challenge an NBC News report that questioned the effectiveness of the Interceptor body armor currently worn by U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. Top Army officials presented results from their own ballistics testing a year ago that revealed Dragon Skin body armor -- shown in the NBC report as having outperformed the Interceptor -- had failed 13 of 48 ballistics tests.

"Our soldiers and Marines today have the best body armor in the world, bar none. It is live-fire tested, and it is proven in combat," said Army Brig. Gen. Mark Brown, who heads the Army's Program Executive Office Soldier Program that equips soldiers with their gear.

He added that the Interceptor "passed this live-fire test protocol with zero failures. Zero failures is the correct answer: One failure is sudden death and you lose the game."

In its reporting, NBC claimed that Dragon Skin, manufactured by a company called Pinnacle, performed better than the Interceptor during independent testing conducted by the network. Pinnacle says the body armor's interconnected ceramic discs afford it greater protection and more flexibility than the Interceptor body armor.

As part of its presentation the Army showed the results and video of testing conducted in May 2006. Before and after X-Ray slides showed how bullets had penetrated the vest's ceramic discs. Pieces of ragged Dragon Skin were displayed on the floor in the Pentagon Briefing Room to show where bullets had penetrated the armor. A set of Dragon Skin armor and Interceptor armor were each propped on weight balances to demonstrate the 20 lb disparity between the heavier DragonSkin and the 28 lb Interceptor.

Holding an armor-piercing bullet in one hand and a Dragon Skin Ceramic disc in the other, Brown said "At the end of the day, this one disc has to stop this round. It didn't. Thirteen times."

Brown said the same information provided at today's briefing was presented to NBC in preparation for their report.