(click to enlarge)
DID has covered some past procurement issues with the U.S.A.'s Interceptor OTV body armor; overall, however, these vests are highly valued by soldiers in the field and by coalition partners like Poland et. al. as well (see Trent for the problems this sort of thing can create).
U.S. vests include special inserts as well as Kevlar, and the composition of those inserts has changed over time. In the 1991 Gulf War, lighter and stronger ceramic armor plate inserts were used only by Special Forces. Thanks to a major upgrade effort completed in early 2004, "SAPI" plate inserts are now standard issue. Enhanced SAPI plates are an additional improvement. Indeed, the ESAPI ceramic plates are part of a new, sweeping upgrade of U.S. military body armor to the tune of about $160 million. DefenseIndustryDaily.com has more....
Leave a comment
Here are some quick tips for adding simple Textile formatting to your comments, though you can also use proper HTML tags:
*This* puts text in bold.
_This_ puts text in italics.
bq. This "bq." at the beginning of a paragraph, flush with the left hand side and with a space after it, is the code to indent one paragraph of text as a block quote.
To add a live URL, "Text to display":http://windsofchange.net/ (no spaces between) will show up as Text to display. Always use this for links - otherwise you will screw up the columns on our main blog page.