Personal Armor Restriction
I touched on this subject on my first post, how the Army has restricted soldiers from wearing armor superior to the ceramic weights we currently haul around.
"We're very concerned that people are spending their hard-earned money on something that doesn't provide the level of protection that the Army requires people to wear. So they're, frankly, wasting their money on substandard stuff," said Col. Thomas Spoehr, director of materiel for the Army.
This is exactly what happens when you let an ultra bureaucratic committee of blowhards decide the fate of soldiers who actually do, gasp!, dangerous things with the terrible equipment they've been given. I am willing to bet anything that this colonel doesn't leave his air conditioned office at the Pentagon, where his most intense moments are posing for photo ops and keeping his uniform neat. I can say with all confidence, Colonel Spoehr, that I could look online for five minutes and find plates that will better protect me from rifle rounds and shrapnel than the Army issue plates. I'd even say that they'd be lighter than the roughly 15 pound ceramics we lug around. Embarassment of the Army's shortcomings in the armor sector apparently is worth more than blood and lives.
Our issue vests come in three pieces, thin kevlar inserts that protect from nothing more than a 9mm round, the ceramic plates and the outer shell that holds them together. The outcome is as follows: