Midnight linkage
- Study Blames Many Iraq Deaths on Body Armor – Forbes.com » "The study found that of 39 fatal torso wounds in which the bullet or shrapnel entered the Marine’s body outside of the ceramic armor plate that protects the chest and back, 31 were close to the plate’s edge."
One Comment
Dulin
The Army is right here; this is one of those delicate balances. Either you have too little body armor and everyone who gets hit goes down, or you have too much armor and it slows the soldiers down; thus giving the enemy more time to shoot at them.
Most of the body armor they are wearing will stop a small arms or AK-47 round, but it will still knock them down (so now they are spending extra time in the field of fire). Since they can not be protected everywhere, they will just get hit somewhere else. The question becomes, “how do we protect every part of a soldier during battle?†The answer of course is that we can’t.
A little extra edge on the armor can slow them down (it adds weight to an overloaded soldier), or get in the way of maneuvering their weapon. And when every second counts, anything that gets in the way can have the unintended consequence of increasing the casualty rate. And what happens when a study shows that a new, heavier and more cumbersome armor does not prevent enough injuries? Do we then make it bigger and more bulky? You see where I am going. Going back to what the army said… There is a delicate balance so we can’t just make it cover more area and be done.
Oh, and the use of the word “inadequate†by the NY Times to describe the best body armor the world has to offer is a bit misleading don’t you think? How many lives have been saved by the current body armor?