The U.S. Army didn’t bother to properly test five million body armor plates that were supposed to protect soldiers on the battlefield. In some cases, certain tests of the live-saving gear were ignored altogether.
That’s according to a
new report from the Defense Department Inspector General, which found that the Army office in charge of insuring the armor’s quality essentially fell asleep at the switch. Inserts were tested improperly and in some cases not at all. The testing flubs don’t prove that all five million plates are defective, but they deprive the Army of information about the reliability of a lot of equipment needed to protect troops in the field.
“The Army cannot be sure that the appropriate level of protection has been achieved,” the report says. Now, it’ll go back and retest the vests, some of which were bought as long as seven years ago.
The problem lies with seven contracts for $2.5 billion worth of
Interceptor Body Armor (IBA) inserts bought between 2004 and 2006. IBA consists of a vest that holds a series of inserted plates designed to stop bullets and other fast moving objects.
On two contracts, the Army’s Project Manager Soldier Equipment (PM SEQ) didn’t perform tests to find out the velocity at which a projectile would penetrate plates because they said they weren’t concerned about the design. On six out of seven contracts, PM SEQ simply didn’t do weather and altitude tests on the inserts or substituted less. Why the substitution? The PM SEQ Director of Technical Management told the IG that the more rigorous tests would take longer and the inserts needed to meet the “urgent wartime operational requirement” for body armor, according to the report.
Consistency was a problem, too. PM SEQ didn’t always test the right size insert plates on about 30 percent of tests. The IG also found that about half of the inserts tested for humidity and temperature weren’t tested in the right temperature range.
The most recent report is only the latest in a series of investigations carried out by the Defense Department’s Inspector General on body armor testing. In March 2008, the IG found
13 body armor contracts where proper testing wasn’t performed. Following a request from Rep. Louise Slaughter, the IG dug deeper into the 13 contracts and found a series of problems with quality assurance. A year later, the Army
recalled 16,000 of the ceramic plates.
Since the beginning of the war in Iraq, both the Army and Marines have had to fend off criticism over how they buy body armor. First,
critics charged, the military did not buy enough modern body armor with rifle plates for combat troops deploying to Iraq (one George Washington University Law Professor called it the “
bring your own bulletproof” war). Then, troops and their supporters began to raise questions about whether their
Interceptor vests were indeed top-of-the-line. The Marines, in fact,
recalled some sets of Interceptor body armor back in 2005. The military rushed to field new armor add-ons such as enhanced plates and side plates to protect against new threats in Iraq.
The controversy didn’t end there. Pinnacle Armor Inc., makers of an alternative body armor design called Dragon Skin,
accused Army officials of unfairly favoring Point Blank, which supplies that Inerceptor armor to the military. Congressional hearings followed after NBC News alleged that the Army’s
tests were rigged in favor of the incumbent. But it was Pinnacle that wound up in the hot seat, and the military never purchased Dragon Skin in big numbers.
Update:
Stars and Stripes got in touch with Army officials, who said that two lots of the improperly tested inserts were fielded and 58 percent of them were later returned. The officials said subsequent tests showed that all of the returned plates were up to the “maximum level of protection requirements.”
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