Enhanced Individual Body Armor: Novel Approach to Achieving Significantly Improved Torso, Abdominal, and Extremity Protection

U.S. military forces are becoming increasingly involved in a variety of actions such as counter-terrorism, counter-drug, disaster relief, and nation assistance [collectively termed Operation Other than War(OOTW)] that have much in common with civilian law enforcement (LE). Consequently, military OOTW and civilian LE have overlapping technology needs---one of the most important of which is effective, affordable, and comfortable personnel protection against increasing threat levels and multiple-hit probabilities. Veritay Technology, Inc., has conceived a novel defeat mechanism , which when couple with a variety of proprietary design architectures for both hard and soft body armor, holds the promise of near-term market entry by leveraging existing and "soon-to-be-available" materials, textile technologies, and manufacturing processes. Working in conjunction with experts from the NYS Center for Advance Ceramics at Alfred University and the US Army Natick RDEC during Phase I, Veritay proposes to demonstrate the feasibility of employing a unique defeat mechanism to achieve improved systems performance (e.g., multiple hit, reduced weight, etc.) via relatively minor modifications to current individual protective body armor components. Phase II will be devoted to demonstrating the potential of this technology to significantly enhance both performance and affordability through the adoption of proprietary system designs and architectures. Anticipated Military Benefits/Potential Commercial Applications of the Research or Development: Potential benefits arising from the proposed work include rapid near-term market entry, caualty reduction, and cost savings through the application of incremental improvements to currently available body armor system components. Long-term benefits include increased world market share through the introduction of significantly enhanced total body armor system designs.