Army Defends Its Choice of Body Armor
News report suggested body armor worn by troops in Iraq is sub-par.
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.
In a statement issued following the Army's briefing, NBC News stood by the results of its independent testing saying "Dragon Skin significantly outperformed the Army's current body armor, Interceptor."
NBC said that retired four-star Army Gen. Wayne Downing and Phil Coyle, former Assistant Secretary of Defense and chief weapons tester for the Pentagon, had observed the testing and "concluded that Dragon Skin sufficiently outperformed Interceptor in these limited tests to warrant full-scale independent testing. Both men have also been personally briefed by top Army officials about the Army's own testing, and still believe further independent testing is needed."
Army officials say they decided to go public with the detailed information at today's briefing to reassure soldiers and their families that they had the best body armor available.
It had previously refrained from going public with the information out of concerns it could be used by a " media-savvy enemy" as a means to target U.S. troops. "Everything that we put out into the public domain, we just must assume that they get. We don't like to discuss our vulnerabilities and our counters to those vulnerabilities in the open public," said Brown.
According to Brown, the Army's testing showed Dragon Skin suffered "catastrophic failures" in a variety of testing situations designed to replicate real-life conditions. This included exposing the vest to temperatures ranging from 60 degrees below zero Fahrenheit to 120 above, which the Army says is what troops face in the Arctic and in Iraq. The temperature shift weakened the adhesive holding the discs together making it vulnerable in the testing.
According to Brown, the Interceptor was able to pass its ballistics tests after experiencing the same temperature shift.
A source familiar with NBC's reporting said the Army's presentation of its test results had changed over time and asked the Army to release the raw data from its ballistics test to resolve whether there's a need for additional independent side-by-side testing of the two types of body armor.
In the wake of calls for congressional hearings resulting from the NBC report, Brown said that the Army would be providing briefings to key congressional members later this week.