thedrifter
05-10-05, 12:27 PM
May 16, 2005
Flawed body armor
Corps recalls more than 5,000 vests that experts rejected — but some remain in the field
By Christian Lowe
Times staff writer
The Marine Corps issued to nearly 10,000 troops body armor that government experts urged the Corps to reject after tests revealed critical, life-threatening flaws in the vests.
In all, the Marine Corps accepted about 19,000 Interceptor outer tactical vests from Point Blank Body Armor Inc. that failed government tests due to “multiple complete penetrations” of 9mm pistol rounds, failing scores on other ballistic or quality-assurance tests, or a combination of the two.
“Since these are lifesaving pieces of equipment and are being used in support of the Iraq war, I urge immediate action since this technical office has little confidence in the performance of the items to provide the contracted levels of protection as defined in the performance specification,” wrote ballistics expert James MacKiewicz in a memorandum rejecting two lots of vests on July 19, 2004.
MacKiewicz is responsible for verifying that each production lot of Marine vests meets protective requirements and other quality standards. He works at the Army Soldier Systems Center in Natick, Mass., and has 18 years of experience with ballistics and armor systems.
A second government agency, the Defense Contract Management Agency, backed Natick’s conclusion and also recommended against the waivers.
“Anything less than full compliance for a safety item such as the [Interceptor body armor] is unacceptable,” DCMA wrote in a 2004 memo recommending that the Corps reject the vests.
But according to documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act and interviews with officials at Natick, the Marine Corps and Point Blank, the service rejected that advice. Instead, the Marine program manager responsible for fielding the vests, Lt. Col. Gabriel Patricio, and Point Blank’s chief operating officer, Sandra Hatfield, signed waivers that allowed the Corps to buy and distribute vests that failed to meet the Corps’ minimum standards and specifications.
Faced with the imminent publication of this story, the result of an eight-month investigation by Marine Corps Times, the Marine Corps on May 4 issued a Corpswide message recalling 5,277 Interceptor vests from 11 lots that failed government ballistic performance tests — slightly more than half the total vests issued to Marines from questionable lots.
The Corps has not said what it intends to do with the more than 4,000 other vests the testers urged to be rejected that are now being worn by Marines. Nor has it said what it will do with the remaining 10,000 that it accepted over the objections of the test labs but which haven’t been fielded.
Despite signed waivers acknowledging that the vests were substandard, the Marine Corps questioned the accuracy of the government test results all along. The Corps pulled samples from some of the challenged lots and had them tested at a private, commercial lab.
Patricio and other officials with Marine Corps Systems Command at Quantico, Va., said the second tests show that the vests meet safety standards and do not put Marines at increased risk of injury.
“I did not ignore warnings or advice from my staff. I simply looked at all the factors involved as the program manager and made the decision that I needed to make based on all the information that I had,” Patricio said in a May 3 telephone interview. “The decision was mine and within my immediate authority as program manager” to waiver and accept the rejected vests. Patricio recently retired from the Corps and now works as an independent acquisitions consultant.
While each vest has a unique serial number on it, Point Blank would not provide a list of serial numbers from the lots Natick said should be rejected. Point Blank said that information was “proprietary.”
Corps officials initially would not provide lot or serial number data to Marine Corps Times; when Patricio was asked in the May 3 interview if he could locate the vests and recall them if ordered to do so, a Corps spokesman abruptly ended the interview and hung up.
But a day later, the Marine Corps listed the serial numbers that correspond to the 11 production lots in a Corpswide message the service is calling a “precautionary recall.”
The message did not state how Marines could determine whether their vest belongs to one of the nine other production lots that didn’t pass muster at Natick.
The Corps faces serious challenges in even locating the vests it plans to pull back. Because lot numbers, serial numbers and other manufacturing data are handwritten on body armor labels, the writing is sometimes smeared, faded or otherwise illegible.
The commander of Marine Corps Systems Command, Brig. Gen. William Catto, refused to be interviewed. But in a written statement, he acknowledged that problem, saying “every effort will be made to locate the waived vests, with the understanding that some may not be detectable due to normal wear and tear or other reasons associated with deployed conditions.”
The Army also buys body armor from Point Blank, but service officials said they have bought several versions of the Point Blank vest and that they never accepted vests from lots that failed testing.
Facing two upcoming seven-month rotations of about 25,000 leathernecks to Iraq and ongoing deployments to Afghanistan, field commanders urged Systems Command to supply their units with vests, command officials said.
“At this critical moment, are we sure these are bad lots? Are these lots that we’re sure we do not want to put into the fight? … That’s a judgment call,” said Lt. Col. Shawn Reinwald, director of combat equipment and support systems for Systems Command. Reinwald was Patricio’s boss briefly after joining Systems Command in late 2004.
“Had we had a lot of schedule to play with, we might have slowed down. … The schedule was bearing down on us.”
Deployment demands
The judgment call fell to Patricio, who over 10 months last year would waive and accept at least 20 lots of outer tactical vests that didn’t pass muster with government testers.
Systems Command did not inform field commanders about the waivers when the equipment was distributed, Reinwald said.
Patricio said he briefed Catto in February 2004 when the first waivers were issued, as well as in subsequent meetings on procurement of various types of armor to protect Marines and their equipment from the growing threat of insurgent attacks in Iraq.
In his written statement, Catto said he agreed with the decision to issue the waivers.
“I concurred with the program manager’s decision to waive the 11 lots in order to rapidly replace the PASGT flaks with a superior, advanced body-armor system,” Catto said in the statement. “Due to the massive deployment associated with [Operation Iraqi Freedom], this was considered to be an urgent need, and was deemed to be in the best interest of deployed Marines at that time.”
Both Reinwald and Patricio said the notion of redistributing Interceptor vests already fielded among deploying forces was considered, but deemed too difficult to execute in time for the deployments.
“This was one of these situations where they’re screaming for these OTVs [and] these guys have to get them,” Reinwald said. “At that time, we had the operational requirement that we didn’t have the schedule to play with.”
The waivers came at a time when U.S. forces were facing increased risk from roadside bombs, ambushes and intense urban combat. The military rushed to field the Interceptor armor to all its troops, not just those typically involved in close combat, pushing the vests to the field as quickly as they were produced.
Systems Command officials responsible for developing and issuing the Interceptor vests argue that since the vest is worn in concert with the armor insert plates, the combined system offers more protection than the older personnel armor system for ground troops, or PASGT, that it replaced.
The Interceptor outer vest protects the wearer against 9mm rounds and shrapnel; a pair of armor insert plates offer additional protection against small-arms fire up to 7.62mm. Interceptor affords 10 percent greater protection against shrapnel threats than the PASGT vests, according to Army officials.
All vests stand some chance of failing, but the vests issued to Marines from waivered lots have a greater chance of being penetrated than vests that met Natick’s test criteria, experts there said.
“You have an increased risk of ballistic incident — statistically” with these vests, said Bob Kinney, director of the individual protection office at Natick. Kinney has worked on individual protection equipment such as chemical and biological defense suits and body armor at Natick for more than two decades.
The Marine Corps has been buying its Interceptor body armor vests through the Army’s Soldier Systems Center since 1999. Natick manages the contract and tests random samples of each production lot at Aberdeen Test Center, Md., to ensure the vests meet specifications. Aberdeen is the Army’s chartered agency for ballistic quality assurance verification. The Army does not conduct its testing at Aberdeen, however, instead using commercial labs because of their independence from the service and the speed with which they deliver test results.
continued...........
Flawed body armor
Corps recalls more than 5,000 vests that experts rejected — but some remain in the field
By Christian Lowe
Times staff writer
The Marine Corps issued to nearly 10,000 troops body armor that government experts urged the Corps to reject after tests revealed critical, life-threatening flaws in the vests.
In all, the Marine Corps accepted about 19,000 Interceptor outer tactical vests from Point Blank Body Armor Inc. that failed government tests due to “multiple complete penetrations” of 9mm pistol rounds, failing scores on other ballistic or quality-assurance tests, or a combination of the two.
“Since these are lifesaving pieces of equipment and are being used in support of the Iraq war, I urge immediate action since this technical office has little confidence in the performance of the items to provide the contracted levels of protection as defined in the performance specification,” wrote ballistics expert James MacKiewicz in a memorandum rejecting two lots of vests on July 19, 2004.
MacKiewicz is responsible for verifying that each production lot of Marine vests meets protective requirements and other quality standards. He works at the Army Soldier Systems Center in Natick, Mass., and has 18 years of experience with ballistics and armor systems.
A second government agency, the Defense Contract Management Agency, backed Natick’s conclusion and also recommended against the waivers.
“Anything less than full compliance for a safety item such as the [Interceptor body armor] is unacceptable,” DCMA wrote in a 2004 memo recommending that the Corps reject the vests.
But according to documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act and interviews with officials at Natick, the Marine Corps and Point Blank, the service rejected that advice. Instead, the Marine program manager responsible for fielding the vests, Lt. Col. Gabriel Patricio, and Point Blank’s chief operating officer, Sandra Hatfield, signed waivers that allowed the Corps to buy and distribute vests that failed to meet the Corps’ minimum standards and specifications.
Faced with the imminent publication of this story, the result of an eight-month investigation by Marine Corps Times, the Marine Corps on May 4 issued a Corpswide message recalling 5,277 Interceptor vests from 11 lots that failed government ballistic performance tests — slightly more than half the total vests issued to Marines from questionable lots.
The Corps has not said what it intends to do with the more than 4,000 other vests the testers urged to be rejected that are now being worn by Marines. Nor has it said what it will do with the remaining 10,000 that it accepted over the objections of the test labs but which haven’t been fielded.
Despite signed waivers acknowledging that the vests were substandard, the Marine Corps questioned the accuracy of the government test results all along. The Corps pulled samples from some of the challenged lots and had them tested at a private, commercial lab.
Patricio and other officials with Marine Corps Systems Command at Quantico, Va., said the second tests show that the vests meet safety standards and do not put Marines at increased risk of injury.
“I did not ignore warnings or advice from my staff. I simply looked at all the factors involved as the program manager and made the decision that I needed to make based on all the information that I had,” Patricio said in a May 3 telephone interview. “The decision was mine and within my immediate authority as program manager” to waiver and accept the rejected vests. Patricio recently retired from the Corps and now works as an independent acquisitions consultant.
While each vest has a unique serial number on it, Point Blank would not provide a list of serial numbers from the lots Natick said should be rejected. Point Blank said that information was “proprietary.”
Corps officials initially would not provide lot or serial number data to Marine Corps Times; when Patricio was asked in the May 3 interview if he could locate the vests and recall them if ordered to do so, a Corps spokesman abruptly ended the interview and hung up.
But a day later, the Marine Corps listed the serial numbers that correspond to the 11 production lots in a Corpswide message the service is calling a “precautionary recall.”
The message did not state how Marines could determine whether their vest belongs to one of the nine other production lots that didn’t pass muster at Natick.
The Corps faces serious challenges in even locating the vests it plans to pull back. Because lot numbers, serial numbers and other manufacturing data are handwritten on body armor labels, the writing is sometimes smeared, faded or otherwise illegible.
The commander of Marine Corps Systems Command, Brig. Gen. William Catto, refused to be interviewed. But in a written statement, he acknowledged that problem, saying “every effort will be made to locate the waived vests, with the understanding that some may not be detectable due to normal wear and tear or other reasons associated with deployed conditions.”
The Army also buys body armor from Point Blank, but service officials said they have bought several versions of the Point Blank vest and that they never accepted vests from lots that failed testing.
Facing two upcoming seven-month rotations of about 25,000 leathernecks to Iraq and ongoing deployments to Afghanistan, field commanders urged Systems Command to supply their units with vests, command officials said.
“At this critical moment, are we sure these are bad lots? Are these lots that we’re sure we do not want to put into the fight? … That’s a judgment call,” said Lt. Col. Shawn Reinwald, director of combat equipment and support systems for Systems Command. Reinwald was Patricio’s boss briefly after joining Systems Command in late 2004.
“Had we had a lot of schedule to play with, we might have slowed down. … The schedule was bearing down on us.”
Deployment demands
The judgment call fell to Patricio, who over 10 months last year would waive and accept at least 20 lots of outer tactical vests that didn’t pass muster with government testers.
Systems Command did not inform field commanders about the waivers when the equipment was distributed, Reinwald said.
Patricio said he briefed Catto in February 2004 when the first waivers were issued, as well as in subsequent meetings on procurement of various types of armor to protect Marines and their equipment from the growing threat of insurgent attacks in Iraq.
In his written statement, Catto said he agreed with the decision to issue the waivers.
“I concurred with the program manager’s decision to waive the 11 lots in order to rapidly replace the PASGT flaks with a superior, advanced body-armor system,” Catto said in the statement. “Due to the massive deployment associated with [Operation Iraqi Freedom], this was considered to be an urgent need, and was deemed to be in the best interest of deployed Marines at that time.”
Both Reinwald and Patricio said the notion of redistributing Interceptor vests already fielded among deploying forces was considered, but deemed too difficult to execute in time for the deployments.
“This was one of these situations where they’re screaming for these OTVs [and] these guys have to get them,” Reinwald said. “At that time, we had the operational requirement that we didn’t have the schedule to play with.”
The waivers came at a time when U.S. forces were facing increased risk from roadside bombs, ambushes and intense urban combat. The military rushed to field the Interceptor armor to all its troops, not just those typically involved in close combat, pushing the vests to the field as quickly as they were produced.
Systems Command officials responsible for developing and issuing the Interceptor vests argue that since the vest is worn in concert with the armor insert plates, the combined system offers more protection than the older personnel armor system for ground troops, or PASGT, that it replaced.
The Interceptor outer vest protects the wearer against 9mm rounds and shrapnel; a pair of armor insert plates offer additional protection against small-arms fire up to 7.62mm. Interceptor affords 10 percent greater protection against shrapnel threats than the PASGT vests, according to Army officials.
All vests stand some chance of failing, but the vests issued to Marines from waivered lots have a greater chance of being penetrated than vests that met Natick’s test criteria, experts there said.
“You have an increased risk of ballistic incident — statistically” with these vests, said Bob Kinney, director of the individual protection office at Natick. Kinney has worked on individual protection equipment such as chemical and biological defense suits and body armor at Natick for more than two decades.
The Marine Corps has been buying its Interceptor body armor vests through the Army’s Soldier Systems Center since 1999. Natick manages the contract and tests random samples of each production lot at Aberdeen Test Center, Md., to ensure the vests meet specifications. Aberdeen is the Army’s chartered agency for ballistic quality assurance verification. The Army does not conduct its testing at Aberdeen, however, instead using commercial labs because of their independence from the service and the speed with which they deliver test results.
continued...........