"DJ Krypplephite" is a 19-year-old Marine enlistee from Chicago who ships off to boot camp next month. In an open forum on pwnzOr.net, he posted this a week-and-a-half ago:
What should I ask for for christmas?
Since clothes, video games, and computer stuff is entirely useless to me for a long time, I can't really think of anything I need that I'd be able to use. Body armor is far too expensive, but then again I get issued some. Still want to buy some dragon skin, but whatever.
"Dragon skin"? What’s "dragon skin"? And why would a soon-to-be Marine grunt put it on his Christmas list, anyway? I mean, what’s wrong with the body armor he’ll be issued by the government?
Unfortunately for DJ Krypplephite and all the rest of our soldiers in combat zones in Iraq and Afghanistan, even if they’ve been good boys and girls, they won’t be finding any Dragon Skin under their Christmas trees.
(Also available at My Left Wing)
If I had a Christmas wish for our soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan, it would be to bring them home. Obviously, some people have different ideas about what would make the holiday season joyous for 40,000 of our servicepeople and their families.
So, since our troops will not be coming home and instead will continue to be in harm's way, perhaps in even greater numbers, there's another way we - and, in particular, our new Congressional committee leaders - can show good will toward men (and women) in uniform.
My Christmas wish is very simple. Here's what I wish for:
A side-by-side live-fire test of the Army's current standard-issue Interceptor Body Armor put up next to Dragon Skin body armor - which the Pentagon has forbidden soldiers to wear in combat, and the testing of which the Army has refused to complete - in front of Congressional investigators and the news media.
What's more, I wish for all of those responsible for not allowing Dragon Skin to be fully tested, to be subpoenaed by Congress and compelled to testify under oath about exactly why that has happened.
I am not an expert on the matter, but there is much anecdotal evidence in the public domain that strongly suggests that Dragon Skin body armor is lighter, tougher, cooler and more flexible than the Interceptor Body Armor that our soldiers (now, finally) are being issued. But until the Army conducts side-by-side, open, verifiable, objective testing, there is no way to know that. Until the Pentagon has accountability for the testing and procurement process for Individual Body Armor, there is no way to be certain that our soldiers are getting the best available protection.
First, a little background. This is my fourth diary on the subject of body armor, dating back to January, when soldiers first reported that they were being ordered not to wear non-regulation body armor, and in some cases being threatened with loss of death benefits if they did not comply. If you'd like to learn more, you can check out this and this, and especially this.
However, what you should do, in any event, is to set aside a few minutes to watch the videos linked below. As you watch them, bear in mind the following about Interceptor:
. . . the ceramic plate used in Interceptor, one of the complaints from the troops in the field was that too often after one round impact, then you had a bunch of gravel basically inside the pouch.
It basically just kind of disintegrated and lost [its] rigidity and crumbled upon impact.
Charges have been made that
The so-called SAPI (Small Arms Protective Inserts) used in the Interceptor system are too fragile and incur about a 60% loss/replacement rate in the field because the design is inherently brittle and fractures when dropped or slammed into solid objects such as the ground.
Interceptor Body Armor comes in crates prominently labeled "FRAGILE." Now, please watch these videos (WARNING: The first two videos cited are LARGE FILES):
- Dragon Skin taking twenty-one (21) rounds of AK-47 7.62-mm (7.62x39mm military ball) ammo at 20 feet, followed by one hundred twenty (120) rounds of 9-mm submachine gun (9x19mm military ball) ammo at 10 feet: YouTube or Download
- Dragon Skin taking forty (40) rounds of AK-47 7.62-mm (7.62x39mm military ball) ammo at 20 feet, followed by one hundred fifty (150) rounds of 9-mm submachine gun (9x19mm military ball) ammo at 10 feet: YouTube or Download
- A two-part report that ran last month on Fresno, California's NBC affiliate, KSEE: Part 1, from November 14; and Part 2, from November 16
- A segment on The History Channel's "Test Lab," from September 27, 2006
What you see being done to the Dragon Skin vests in each of these videos is what needs to be done to Interceptor Body Armor under the same circumstances.
What has actually happened has been far from that. Here's an excerpt from my July diary:
Pinnacle Armor has long been requesting that its Dragon Skin be tested by the Army. The Army finally agreed to a test, which took place in mid-May. The testing, though, was not held at one of the Army's own facilities, but at a private facility. And the testing was conducted, not by an impartial third party, but by the chief engineer of the Interceptor design team; in other words, the person whose system would be replaced by Dragon Skin if it were deemed to be superior to Interceptor.
So, umm, there remains some question as to whether these were "scientific" tests.
What's worse, the "testing" was never actually finished. It was stopped about 30% of the way through by the testers. But that's not what an anonymous "senior defense official" "leaked" to the media:
The Army's struggle to find a new, more flexible body armor was dealt a setback Friday when high-tech vests called Dragon Skin failed to pass military testing, a senior defense official said.
After three days of testing this week, the Army determined the body armor does not meet military specifications, said the official, who would not specify which tests the armor failed. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because the results have not yet been released.
That was May 19. Retired Marine Lt. Col. Roger Charles, writing for Soldiers for the Truth, put out a quick release a few days after the testing was halted:
No official source says "failure." So far, anonymous sources are the only ones cited. (Remember recent "official" claims that Dragon Skin failed ballistic and other tests conducted on behalf of USAF Office of Special Investigations. These claims were proven false when Defense Watch obtained a copy of the actual test report and noted that the test report said the exact opposite - Dragon Skin passed OSI standards!)
The Army still has not released results of the "testing." Pinnacle had no immediate comment at the time, but a few weeks later, on June 30, issued a release that said, in part:
The testing was stopped by the Army at 12:37 pm on the 19th, Karl Masters and James Zheng had just shot one of our Medium sized vest with 12 rounds of APM2 (level 4) with complete stops on all rounds with a back face trauma average of 22.5mm for this vest and 23mm for all the vests tested, which is a 50% reduction in trauma over the current system. Imagine how many more lives could have been saved if the Dragon Skin¨ body armor system was available to our troops today. When was the last time the Army dared to shot 12 rounds of M2AP (level 4) into any Interceptor IBA [individual body armor] with ESAPI [enhanced small-arms protective insert; i.e., rigid ceramic] plates? The reason Karl Masters, Col. John Norwood (being forced to retire early) and James Zheng gave for stopping the testing early on the 19th was as quoted by Karl Masters: "I'm completely baffled by this flexible technology and I'm not going to send another round down range until I can understand how a flexible system works"!
A few weeks before that release, in one of several threads in various online military blogs, Karl Masters, head of the design team for Interceptor Body Armor and the person responsible for testing Dragon Skin for the Army, and David Crane of defensereview.com, an oustpoken advocate for Dragon Skin, engaged in an exchange that culminated in Masters posting this smirky response to Crane's challenges:
The sun is about to shine on the Army's rationale for issuing the body armor Safety of Use Message. Get your suncreen [sic] ready.
I'll be watching to see if you set the record straight, or if I will have to do it for you.
It has now been six-and-a-half months since Masters declared that "the sun is about to shine" on what happened in the May testing. No sun has been forthcoming from Mr. Masters or the Pentagon.
In the interim, Lt. Col. (Ret.) USMC Roger Charles of Soldiers For The Truth has not let up in his pursuit of the truth regarding Dragon Skin. He wrote an e-mail on October 28, 2006, to Col. D'Arcy E. Grisier, II, USMC (Ret.), who was at the time serving as as Military Legislative Assistant for the then-Chairman of the Senate Subcommittee on Readiness and Management Support, Sen. John Ensign (R-Nev.). The e-mail challenged Grisier's assertions regarding the results from the aborted Dragon Skin tests in May. Charles laid out Grisier's assertions as items 2 through 7 of the e-mail, then posed questions challenging the assertions. The e-mail read, in part:
1. You were briefed by Army representatives regarding the May 2006 testing of Pinnacle Armor's SOV 3000 Level IV Body Armor Vest (Dragon Skin), and these representatives provided the information in Items 2 through 7 [underlining here added; information in items 2 through 7 is shown in italics] to you.
Who specifically briefed you, and when and where did this briefing take place?
2. PM (Project Manager) for Army's Program Executive Office-Soldier (PEO-Soldier) tested Pinnacle Armor's SOV 3000 Level IV Body Armor Vest (Dragon Skin) 16-19 May 2006 at H.P. White Test Laboratory, Inc., an NIJ-certified, commercial test facility.
Has a written report of this test been provided?
Were you aware that the test was halted before all the protocols had been completed? Have you requested, or been provided by the Army any written description of the tests that were conducted.
[snip]
4. Pinnacle Armor SOV 3000 Level IV Dragon Skin vests had 13 first-or second-shot complete penetrations, & failed 4 of 8 initial sub-tests with ESAPI threat baseline 7.62x63mm APM2 Armor Piercing (AP) rounds.
Are you aware that x-ray photographs showing "clear penetrations" into the clay backing of the SOV 3000 vests were of shots fired by the test facility shooters into the soft, Kevlar part of the Dragon Skin vest, and not penetrations of the ballistic protective area of the Dragon Skin vest?
Are you aware that other penetrations were within the "test protocols," and fell within two categories? (In one category, the velocity of a specific shot exceeded the limit specified by the test protocol. In the second category, a specific round impacted too near the edge of a protective disk. Remember, the ESAPI protocol was being followed, and it disallows rounds that impact within specified distance of the edge of a protective plate. This is a clear example of the inappropriateness of trying to test flexible body armor with it's overlaid disks under the protocols developed for the IBA rigid-plates.)
Are you aware that it is at the "discretion of the test director," as to which shots count for test reporting, and which can be thrown out? (This discretion is required in order for the hard ballistic plates that are the core of the Interceptor system to pass any test requiring multiple shots. The test director has the discretion to discard any vest/plate as a "test" vest/plate if it fails multiple shots, and to keep discarding vests/plates until the required number of vests/plates pass the test.)
Are you aware that during the entire (but abbreviated) test, H.P. White testers fired 85 rounds at the SOV 3000 vests, and that there were no failures of the Dragon Skin SOV 3000 to defeat the ballistic tests of its ceramic laminate disks according to the ESAPI, FAT and Quality Assurance test protocols and procedures!
[snip]
7. The weight of the Pinnacle SOV 3000 upper body vest is 47.5 pounds. The weight of the IBA currently used is 28 pounds.
Were you aware that the more credible figure for IBA weight is the 31.1 pounds, based on data presented at an Army Industry Day briefing on 7 March 2006, and based on similar data from Marine Corps Systems Command provided to Pinnacle Armor.
Are you aware that if you compare a Dragon Skin, size Medium SOV 3000, weighing 34.2 pounds, the weight advantage is to Interceptor Body Armor by 3.1 pounds, but that at this cited weight Dragon Skin SOV 3000 provides 182 square inches of additional ballistic protection against Level IV rounds?
When the Army gave you the figure 47.5 pounds for Dragon Skin, did you ask for the sizes and the configurations of the vests being compared?
[snip]
Charles has received no answer to his questions.
The plot thickens?
Now - here' s where things might be getting really interesting. As reported somewhat exhaustively in my earlier diaries, Interceptor Body Armor is supplied to the military by Armor Holdings (stock symbol: AH). Armor Holdings is a Very Good Friend To The Republican Party. In its various guises, Armor Holdings contributed more than $128,000 to Republican candidates in the 2006 campaign cycle; its Armor Holdings PAC contributed more than $36,000 to Republicans (although some of that is included in the $128,000); contributions to Dems in 2006 totaled $28,150, including $16,600 to Florida Senator Bill Nelson and $7,550 to Hillary Clinton.
Up until some time early last summer, the largest holder of Armor Holdings stock was the Friess Associates fund, headed by bigtime Republican donor Foster Friess. Friess and his family contributed more than $157,000 to Republicans during the 2006 midterm election cycle.
As of June 30, 2006, Friess Associates LLC owned 2,077,100 shares of Armor Holdings, valued at nearly $114 million. Sometime between that date and the end of the next reporting period, September 30, 2006, they divested themselves of the stock. (Friess's Brandywine Fund, Inc., held 525,000 shares as of June 30, 2006, valued at $28 million; they have not filed with the SEC since then.) In other words, shortly after the aborted mid-May testing of Dragon Skin, while results of the test were withheld, Friess Associates, at the time the largest single holder of Armor Holdings stock, sold every last one of their 2 million shares. Coincidence? I don't know. But that's certainly a question the Armed Services Committee could ask.
But don't shed any tears for a huge Republican donor like Armor Holdings. Since the Dragon Skin tests were halted in mid-May, Armor Holdings has received Pentagon contracts or orders worth more than $2 billion, including $290 million for body armor.
Meanwhile, back with us little folks . . .
It’s good enough for President Bush’s Secret Service bodyguards, but not good enough for our soldiers. In spite of the fact that the Pentagon has outlawed it for use by its soldiers, the buzz about Dragon Skin has not abated. "DJ Krypplephite"’s Christmas wish list that led off this diary is not the only example.
In the October 31 issue of Stars and Stripes, Staff Sgt. David Anderson wrote from Al-Asad Air Base in Iraq:
What I am talking about is stubbornness on either the military's or politicians' part to provide soldiers with the best body armor available. Specifically, I am talking about Pinnacle Armor's Dragon Skin body armor. Although this armor is far more expensive than the currently issued body armor, the multiple-hit ability and overall protective abilities of this armor make the "interceptor" body armor look like flattened soda cans by comparison. A full vest of the Dragon Skin armor was priced by me before coming to Iraq at $4,200.00. However, the government would actually save money using this armor because fewer soldiers would get killed.
It is the responsibility of your publication to tell the real story: Why are troops being issued inferior body armor and then being placed in harm's way with it when superior body armor has existed for years?
All U.S. soldiers deserve the best, and what we are being issued is a far cry from what they deserve. Soldiers need to stop being scared or threatened at mobilization stations if they purchase their own armor; after all, it's their butt on the line!
If the government wants to send us in harm's way, that's what the military is for (among many other reasons), but the government owes its soldiers the best protection available, not the cheapest.
In a DailyKos diary on October 27, Jan Brown, wife of then-California congressional candidate Charlie Brown, wrote this about her son Jeff, a captain in the Air Force who was about to be redeployed to Iraq for the fourth time:
Charlie and I asked Jeff about body armor. We had researched body armor pretty thoroughly when he was first deployed in 2004. Jeff said he was thinking about getting the new "Dragonskin" protective stuff because it was lighter and more effective. The military has threatened the soldiers that if they do wear this and are harmed, their military insurance may be voided but everyone agrees that the "Dragonskin" is the best.
Then there was this post, by "IRAQVET," at Drudge Retort, from December 8:
The body armor we have is NOT the best, the SAPI plates are heavy and bulky and definitely don't breathe. Dragon Skin is much better, flexible and tested but it apparently isn't made by someone who has bribed the right politicians.
And, finally, no less a military icon than R. Lee Ermey will take on the issue in a February airing of his popular History Channel show, Mail Call:
History Channel's TV show Mail Call features Dragon Skin® body armor
Fresno, CA (April 30, 2006) -- On the TV show Mail Call, The History Channel will feature Dragon Skin® flexible body armor. The segment will highlight the Dragon Skin(r) flexible body armor defeating over 20 AK-47 rounds along with over 150 9mm rounds from a sub-machine gun. The show will air on Friday, February 16, 2007 at 9:00 PM on The History Channel.
Since the Army’s test of Dragon Skin body armor was abruptly halted without explanation on May 19, 2006, 505 American soldiers have been killed in Iraq (as of this writing). Since March 17, 2006, when the Pentagon issued its Safety of Use Message (SOUM) specifically forbidding the use of Dragon Skin, 639 American soldiers have been killed in Iraq. Since January 15, 2006, when word first got out about the military's order not to wear non-regulation body armor, 739 American soldiers have been killed in Iraq. Would better body armor have saved any of them? I don't know - but I do know that the fact that the question can even be reasonably asked is unconscionable.
It is altogether fitting that beginning today, on this winter solstice, the days will start to get longer and longer. More and more sunshine will bathe this great land of ours, sunshine that the Army’s Karl Masters promised more than half a year ago – more than 500 dead Americans ago. That sunshine will flood into every corner, every cranny, every stagnant, fetid hollow of the military testing and procurement process, and hasten its cleansing. The cleansing starts in January.
I know this is a crazy busy time of year for many people. What I would like to ask every Kossack is whether, along with the last-minute cards you're mailing, perhaps you could find time to send a quick note to your Congressperson about this issue? Or, even better, how about contacting some or all of the Armed Services Committee members listed below, and telling them of your concern about our soldiers possibly being denied the best available body armor?
Your note or e-mail could mean the difference between life and death - and could make next Christmas so much more special for the family of some service member you'll never even meet.
Thanks for taking the time to read this.
Peace.
Here are the most recent Democratic members of the House Armed Services Committee:
Chairman: Ike Skelton (MO-04)
E-mail
John Spratt (SC-05)
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Solomon Ortiz (TX-27)
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Lane Evans (IL-17)
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Gene Taylor (MS-04)
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Neil Abercrombie(HI-01)
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Marty Meehan (MA-05)
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Silvestre Reyes (TX-16)
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Vic Snyder (AR-02)
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Adam Smith (WA-09)
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Loretta Sanchez (CA-47)
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Mike McIntyre (NC-07)
E-mail
Ellen Tauscher (CA-10)
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Robert Brady (PA-01)
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Robert Andrews (NJ-01)
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Susan Davis (CA-53)
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James Langevin (RI-02)
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Steve Israel (NY-02)
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Rick Larsen (WA-02)
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Jim Cooper (TN-05)
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Jim Marshall (GA-03)
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Kendrick Meek (FL-17)
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Tim Ryan (OH-17)
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Mark Udall (CO-02)
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G.K. Butterfield (NC-01)
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Cytnhia McKinney (GA-04)
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Dan Boren (OK-02)
E-mail
Here are the most recent Democratic members of the Senate Armed Services Committee:
Chairman:Carl Levin (MI)
E-mail
Edward Kennedy (MA)
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Robert Byrd(WV)
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Jack Reed (RI)
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Daniel Akaka (HI)
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Bill Nelson (FL)
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Ben Nelson (NE)
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Mark Dayton (MN)
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Evan Bayh (IN)
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Hillary Rodham Clinton (NY)
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Mark Pryor (AR)
E-mail
Thanks to edgery in the comments, a link to the complete, updated list of committee members:
Senate Armed Services Committee;
House Armed Services Committee
H/T to bumblebums for the updates to the list! H/T also to edgery for the links to the new committee membership; very handy!