[duff equipment] the bane of the poor soldier

Pinnacle Dragon Skin

To bring us up to speed on this body-armour business, BAE has paid out to the U.S. over zylon, a defective component of body-armour which degrades over time. What made me smile was:

Gregory Katsas, the assistant attorney general for the Civil Division, said: "The Justice department will not tolerate its first responders wearing defective bullet-proof vests."

Hmmm. You might like to read this and this, by James Cleverley, which refer to substandard equipment and shortages for UK troops. It includes a video which should make your heart run cold. [Update - it would if they hadn't taken it down.]

I cobbled together an article a long time back on the vests themselves - here. This was linked to a site called Defense Tech, which runs a few articles on the issue. This article castigated the U.S., not the UK for a piece of nicely-awarded defence contracting which did not take into account the ultimate safety of troops, in this specific case, body armour again.

Essentially, Defense Tech asked:

Why the negative statements about Pinnacle Armor to Margaret Warner on News Hour with Jim Lehrer Armor for U.S. Troops In Iraq (Jan. 11, 2006) and why Major General Jeffrey A. Sorenson's, Col. John Norwood's, Col. Thomas Spoehr's negative statements about Dragon Skin in their recent news briefings?

These denials either show ignorance of the facts, a lack of knowledge of the available ballistic data, outright lies or are deliberately deceptive.Well, this is due to the fact that the military has (for years) outsourced these types of positions at Natick and PEO to [certain] civilians, instead of maintaining them within the military.

Unlike military personnel these civilians do not have the same level of oversight or controls on them to maintain the typical checks and balances necessary to ensure true and unbiased evaluation of performance-based products (like SOV/Dragon Skin, for instance) for the protection of the America's soldiers.

So you see, it is really rich for the U.S. to single out the UK for approbation, bad though the UK provision is.