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Where's the Shining Armor?

Aug- 5-2004 » Filed Under: General Military

Scientific American published the following article regarding advances in military armor. The Stryker vehicle is mentioned throughout.

[Link to Full Article]
By Frank Vizard

Americans may view their soldiers as knights in shining armor, but in Iraq, soldiers are often short on protection, particularly while riding their mechanized steeds. As casualties rise, the Pentagon is rushing to equip its soldiers and vehicles with new and better armor. In the short term, soldiers will get body armor upgrades that better guard previously vulnerable areas like the groin and sides of the body. Some vehicles, meanwhile, will be getting special reactive armor designed to thwart rocket attacks. In the long term, however, a soldier's best protection may come from new technologies being developed by military laboratories such as the Office of Naval Research and the Army Research Laboratory. [...]

Meanwhile, the army's vaunted new wheeled Stryker vehicles, though armored, may not be able to withstand the impact of a rocket-propelled grenade (RPG), a favorite insurgent weapon, and now sports an unwieldy add-on metal cage for extra protection. [...]

Indeed, the army lists both body armor and wheeled vehicle protection among its top 10 capability gaps. Helping to bridge that gap is a new type of add-on reactive armor jointly developed by Rafael Armament Development Authority in Israel and the General Dynamics' Armament and Technical Products unit in Burlington,Vt. [...]

Humvees and Stryker vehicles, however, cannot support the added weight of reactive armor. Just adding steel plating to Humvees places added strain on suspension and drivetrain systems not designed with armor in mind, putting those vehicles out of service more frequently than expected. The solution may be spray-on polymer armor now being developed by the U.S. Navy's Office of Naval Research (ONR). The spray-on armor is similar to a polymer commonly used as a spray-on truck bed liner. It's made from either polyurethane, polyurea or a mixture of the two. When applied to steel, the polymer spreads out the shock of an explosion and helps prevent impacted material from shattering. In tests, a 500-pound bomb detonated near two trailers obliterated the unarmored trailer but only buckled the walls of the trailer whose walls were coated with the rubbery polymer.

The article is worth reading in full.

(via Winds of Change)


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