Army looks ahead to next generation of body armor and helmets.

• Author: Beidel, Eric

Developing body armor for future combat involves some amount of guesswork and requires scientists to take stock of the past and a stab at the unknown.

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U.S. troops already wear the best armor money can buy, Army officials said, but the service continues to look beyond the current vests and helmets in an effort to protect against threats that soldiers haven't yet encountered. In doing so, the Army is investigating ways to make its forces more agile in their protective gear by reducing the weight of its systems and looking at the grains, powders and other ingredients used in body armor at the microscopic level.

"We know what we have today works," said Lt. Col. Jon Rickey, product manager for soldier protective equipment at Program Executive Office-Soldier. No piece of armor has been beaten by a threat it was designed to defeat, he said. "But can it be somewhat less stringent? If it's less stringent, then obviously it allows us to reduce weight."

The latest Army body armor ensemble, when all of the pieces are worn, weighs more than 31 pounds. A soldier can shed a few pounds here and there by using a modified plate-carrier system, but lighter variations leave more of the body open to fragmentation threats. The complete gear covers more than 1,000 square inches of the soldier's body. Though it weighs as much as 8 pounds less, a plate-carrier alternative covers less than half that area.

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"It's all about weight in my view," Rickey said. "We have to reduce the weight for our soldiers in combat." The system of the future will become even more modular and scalable, he said, and a soldier will be able to tailor it to a specific mission. The challenge comes from trying to reduce the weight while providing the same amount of protection. To solve that problem, the Army is studying everything from the changing sizes of soldiers right down to the fibers that form the fabric of the armor.

"The first thing we need to do is look at the anthropomorphic sizes of soldiers," Rickey said. "There isn't a soldier, whether he's really big or small, who can go into combat without body armor that fits him correctly."

A soldier stationed in Germany last year couldn't deploy until the Army manufactured a special helmet for him. He required a size larger than the service provided, Rickey said. The Natick Soldier Systems Center is conducting a study on sizes by using modeling and two-dimensional scanning techniques. The Army...