Pinnacle Claims Forgery in Fight

There's a behind the scenes battle going on between Pinnacle Armor, the Air Force, the National Institutes for Justice and the Army.

You'll remember that a year ago the Air Force debarred Pinnacle after it found that the company had pumped up the ballistic capabilities of its SOV 2000 armor claiming it was Level III compliant when it wasn't. This ban of Pinnacle products came on the heels of the Army's very public outing of Dragon Skin test results conducted by Army ballistics experts and witnessed by Pinnacle president Murray Neal himself.

But after the dust cleared, the tenacious Neal waged his own battle against the debarment, filing suit and compiling evidence that he claims shows Army testers forging test result documents and intentionally painting Dragon Skin in a bad light to the Air Force.

I spoke with Neal about this at length, and while I'm skeptical that the Army is resorting to lying and forging documents, there are some things that definitely look fishy about this case.

Neal provided me with an example of a document that purportedly shows forged test results and failures of the armor that didn't happen during tests conducted for the Air Force by H.P. White Labs. A lot of Pinnacle proponents point to a recent article by the hysterical bloggers at Soldiers for the Truth as explanation for the suspected forgeries and other skull duggery and I'll let DT readers make their own judgment on that.

But Neal claims that when the actual shooters at HP White were cross examined during depositions, they claimed that over two days of testing they did NOT see the failures tabulated on the result summary table. I asked Neal to forward me some copies of the deposition transcripts to prove that. What he sent me didn't seem to correlate with what he was claiming (they are too large to upload so email me if you want to see them)...prompting still more questions about what is actually going on here.

Seems to me Neal at least has some cause here for fighting the debarment. Rumor has it the Air Force/NIJ is willing to settle and reverse the ban. I've had difficulty with Pinnacle's claims and chafed it the company's absolutist claims and hyperbolic publicity stunts, but there's a limited number of armor makers in the world and there's no sense in keeping anyone out of the fold unless their product is totally bogus -- which Dragon Skin is not.

Army Questioned Another 8,000 Armor Plates (UPDATED)

Here is a preview of a story we will be running tomorrow morning at Military.com:

Army Pulled 8,000 Armor Plates from Field
By Christian Lowe

The Army recalled more than 8,000 bullet-resistant plates late last year for fear that they might not be able to stop the rifle rounds they were designed to defeat.

According to the top enlisted advisor for the Army's Program Executive Office Soldier - the service's top gear-buying office - officials were worried that a production lot of 8,018 enhanced small arms protective plate inserts, or ESAPIs, might have manufacturing flaws that were not up to specifications.

So in December, the service pulled the plates from the front lines and sent them to ballistics labs for testing to see if they were up to snuff.

"We opted to pull those 8,000 plates just to see -- just as, again, part of our surveillance program" to monitor quality, said Sgt. Maj. Tom Coleman, PEO Soldier sergeant major, in a Feb. 6 interview with military bloggers.

Army officials had failed production lots of plates that were manufactured before and after the recalled plates, so engineers decided to pull the 8,018 to make doubly sure they should have been fielded.

"When the Army looked at the lot acceptance test back then for the big string of plates that were shot, they saw that there were a couple failed lot tests out there. Those plates were never accepted. They were scrapped," Coleman told Military.com. "In between them there were a couple lots that passed, but we said, hey, you know what? Let's pull those plates anyways."

News of further armor recalls comes on the heels of a Pentagon Inspector General report that recommended the Army pull more than 16,000 ESAPI plates made by ArmorWorks from the field due to flawed test procedures on the initial designs.

Though the Army disagreed with the IG's finding, the service's top civilian, Pete Geren, ordered the plates recalled anyway "out of an abundance of caution" and to allay fears among Joes in the war zone that their gear might be sub-par.

The IG report mentioned the 8,018 plate recall deep within its findings, but the Army never made the news public.

"Those lots passed," Coleman said of the 8,000 plates. "Everything was good with them. Some lots in front of and behind them had failed and were not accepted."

Though results were not available, Coleman said the recalled plates are still being tested at ballistics labs, but so far none have shown signs of failure.

Coleman reiterated the Army's position that all ESAPI plates sent to combat had passed quality assurance tests and so-called "first article" tests to confirm the design's ability to withstand armor-piercing rounds and claimed no plates have ever failed.

"We have no reports of deaths from the body armor failing to stop the threat it was designed to stop, none," Coleman said.

The Army is still trying to track down the 16,000 plates tabbed by the IG's office and Coleman said the service has been able to collect some of the plates, but there's still a long way to go.

The Army emphatically claims its testing methodology was sound and that, despite the IG's determination that engineers substituted plates during tests, fudged numbers and failed to set standards in evaluating new designs, no plate was ever accepted in error.

"The plates met the standard to stop the threat round that they're designed to stop," Coleman said. "The issue in question is some of the scoring that is involved, in the way that they score the plates that are shot."

The service claims its ESAPI can stop the most deadly rounds on the battlefield, but after nearly two years the service has developed the "XSAPI" -- a plate that can stop an even more powerful round. Military.com knows the threat round the Army has been working to thwart but will not reveal it for security concerns.

Army officials indicated Feb. 5 they would not field the XSAPI due to its excessive weight, but would warehouse the eventual 120,000 plates in Kuwait in case commanders feel they need the added protection.

Coleman said he hasn't gotten any feedback from the field that the current plates don't stop what they're intended to, but he's ready to take the protection up a notch if needed.

"We haven't seen where the plates that we're using right now are being defeated by anything," Coleman said. "But we do know that there are emerging technologies that in the future could. And that's where XSAPI is going."

New Armor Plates in the Works

According to the story in the Richmond (VA) Times Dispatch, the three students -- one of whom is an Army National Guardsman -- are testing new plates that can absorb up to 32 shots from armor piercing rounds. The University of Virginia students' contention is that the new design will contain spall and reduce backface deformation.
But the students aren't being specific...

For proprietary reasons, the students don't want to get into the specifics of how the armor works, though the invention in part is a new configuration of ceramic plates. The students also don't want photographs taken of the armor.

O'Dell said the problem with current armor worn by Soldiers is that one shot from an armor-piercing bullet will create cracks in the ceramic material that makes up the vest. That leaves the Soldier vulnerable to the next shot.

The UVA.-designed vest should withstand possibly as many as 32 rounds of armor-piercing bullets per plate, said O'Dell, who at 29 is much older than his teammates. Armor vests usually have four plates -- one each for the front, back and sides.

"We're trying to contain those cracks," O'Dell said.

The new armor also will "deflect" less when struck by the steel-core bullets used to penetrate armor. That's important because too much deflection -- where the ceramic material is actually deformed inward by the force of the bullet -- can also kill a Soldier.

From what I can tell this isn't much of a breakthrough. Seems the students are still using ceramic in their armor material. They claim they're building a lighter plate that contains spall and reduces backface deformation. Sounds to me like a thinner ceramic core wrapped around a ton of Spectra or Dyneema. This is far from Earth shattering and there are armor manufacturers out there that are doing the same thing. Dyneema and Spectra have a hard time stopping the AP rounds, though, so maybe they have a new "configuration" that reduces the weight of the ceramic (which means they cut down on the amount) but preserves the kind of strength needed to stop AP rounds.

Until inventors start being able to forge armor from new materials, I don't see much promise in increased ballistic resistance with reduced weight. Carbon nano-tubes anyone?