The New York Times today is back accusing the Bush administration of not properly armoring the best armored soldiers in the world.
Confederate Yankee (via Jeff Goldstein) should have been called beforehand for information that the New York Times reporter obviously did not understand. Yankee reports:
Lets look at some facts, shall we?
Interceptor armor is relatively new, first being deployed in 1999 as a two-part system, made up of a flexible tactical vest and armor plate inserts. The vest itself is a tactical weave that will stop much shrapnel and pistol bullets up to 9mm on its own, but it will not stop any rifle bullet, nor some shrapnel. The second component of the Interceptor system is a hard 10″x12″ ceramic armor plate known as Small Arms Protective Inserts (SAPIs) that can withstand multiple strikes from most, but no all rifle cartridges encountered on the modern battlefield.
The Interceptor system used by the Marines (details here) is a marked improvement over the previous PASGT vest, and is available in five sizes. The upgraded version of the Interceptor, which started being deployed in March of 2005, increased the protection with the addition of some side and upper arm protection and can be viewed here (PDF).
But the careful construction of the report defies logic and objectivity.
By design, the Times article shows an inaccurate picture of the Interceptor system provided to the Marines, based upon a false premise. This study only looked at fatalities, those Marines killed by upper body wounds while wearing vests. It excluded all the times where Interceptor vests worked as designed and the Marine survived.This is akin to judging automobile safety by looking at only wrecks resulting in fatalities, as oppose to those wrecks where fatalities were prevented by good automotive design.
Reporters and clueless critics will not doubt be outraged decades from now when body armor of the day yields similar results against plasma rifles or other military technologies of that time.
There has always been and will always be an arms race between those developing armor and those designing weapons to defeat that armor. It has been that way for tens of thousands of years. It will be this way for the foreseeable future.
It would be smart for these “experts” to pull their heads out of their crawlspaces long enough to glance at a history book before they make fools of themselves yet again.
Don’t worry, the “hawk” John Murtha will be use this in his next CSPAN talk on how we need to fight Islamic Terrorism from the global terrorist hotbed of Okinawa.
California Conservative notes that democrats ae beginning to sound like this terrorist tape.
I argued that they sound a lot like the hairy man from the spider hole.