Staying Afloat

Written by Peter Buxbaum

Should that occur, the additional weight being carried by personnel in the form of armor can work against survivability in a watery environment. “It doesn’t matter if you’re in three feet or 30 feet. If you’re pinned, drowned is drowned,” said Frank Borelli, principal in Borelli Consulting, in Lusby, MD, an organization that performs product evaluations for U.S. military and law enforcement organizations.

“A U.S. soldier who falls into a river in Baghdad is likely to sink,” Borelli added, “especially if he is wearing heavy trauma plates.” “Warfighters and security forces are increasingly boarding vessels for search and seizure operations and doing more work on maritime docks,” said Sean Martin, director of business development at BAE Systems’ individual equipment group. “This has also led to the need to marry flotation technology and body armor.”

In the past, devices that combined buoyancy with ballistic protection were built around the traditional foam vests worn in naval and maritime environments. These proved too cumbersome for a ground soldier who might be carrying 60 pounds of equipment and armor.

“Picture a personal flotation device from the recreational boating industry sewn into a ballistic structure,” said Martin. “It would be very bulky and would restrict movement.”

“In the past, a foam vest was typically used for buoyancy because of its reliability,” added Steve Seybold, who works in military business development out of Annapolis, Md., for Mustang Survival Inc., a company based in Richmond, British Columbia. “But these foam devices ended up compromising the performance of the individual.” The challenge for manufacturers, then, was to achieve a desired level of ballistic performance and buoyancy in a smaller package with less bulk. A number of different approaches have emerged.

One approach involves a modular design, which allows armor to be inserted into a flotation vest when the need calls for it. A variation on that theme is to design a flotation vest that allows its inserted armor to be easily ditched once personnel found themselves in a liquid environment. A third approach is to develop specialized armor that itself provides inherent buoyancy. Yet a fourth approach is to develop inflatable flotation devices that can be integrated with protective vests.

There is probably no right or wrong answer to the question as to which type of device is best. It depends instead upon the specific situation and application that is being addressed.

“One factor to consider is what level of ballistic protection is needed,” said Martin. “The degree of buoyancy is also an issue.” Some devices can achieve true, selfrighting buoyancy, so that the wearer’s face is above water, and can save the wearer’s life if he is unconscious. Other devices can provide neutral buoyancy, so that the wearer can force himself underwater in order to evade some form of threat. Some products would not be recommended, Martin added, when the user’s work takes him over or near water as one of his primary functions.

The U.S. Coast Guard’s deployable specialized forces has determined that modular vest design best suits its purposes. “A modular flotation design permits the operator to wear the flotation device with or without ballistic protection,” explained Lieutenant Commander David Jelin, chief of equipment standardization for the Coast Guard’s Deployable Operations Group. “This permits greater muscle memory, with the same equipment in the same location, whether in training or any operation.”

The Coast Guard has managed to fulfill these requirements with commercial and government off-the-shelf (COTS/GOTS) equipment. “A study of global armed threats in parallel with COTS/GOTS ballistic protection revealed ample ballistic protection identified to meet these threats,” said Jelin. “The flotation equipment identified is designed to keep the weight of the ballistic protection system and operator afloat.” BAE Systems has taken the approach of developing an outer tactical vest that incorporates a quick release feature that allows the ballistic inserts within the vest to be discarded. The U.S. Army Special Forces Command is currently procuring that model.

“Much of design for this product crossed over from air survivability devices and materials used in that design,” said Martin. “The release allows the wearer to cut away the ballistic protection and be left with flotation.”

Mehler Vario System of Fulda, Germany, is one manufacturer that has developed an integrated product, which includes ballistic protection in a vest that provides inherent buoyancy. “We have designed this vest to provide movability in water,” said Thomas Kuehnlein, the company’s sales manager for ballistic products. “It is not something that guarantees 100 percent rollover to provide lifesaving properties in case a person is unconscious. It emphasizes more the aspect of a good flotation aid and allows movement in water to be ready for action.”

The MVS device consists of a shell, which itself is a soft armor vest and which can be supplemented with armor plates to provide protection up to Level 3. Those armor plates, which are designed and manufactured by MVS and made from high performance polyethylene, provide positive buoyancy.

“We put a larger plate in front and a smaller one in the back to get a special lift in the front part of the vest,” Kuehnlein noted. “We also added some foam in the shoulder and chest area to give the product some additional lift. The flotation devices and armor panels are sealed watertight.”

MVS sells its protective devices to military and law enforcement organizations, primarily in Europe and Asia, and has been tested in action in places like Afghanistan, Kosovo and Africa. Kuehnlein noted that the company is completely integrated and performs all functions related to the fabrication of its products, from research and development to the procurement of materials to manufacturing.

Mustang Survival develops flotation devices that are easily integrated with ballistic vests used by many military organizations. The company was originally contacted by the Kuwaiti military to develop a life preserver that could be integrated with body armor and tactical vests. Soon thereafter, the company also began to receive orders from the U.S. Marine Corps and U.S. Navy’s Expeditionary Combat Command. In addition, the U.S. Army’s combat engineers now use a similar vest developed by Mustang Survival.

The tactical life preservers supplied to those services feature both manual inflation and automatic inflation variants. Manual inflation is required in aviation environments, noted Seybold.

The company then moved on to develop a damage-tolerant life preserver (DTLP). These devices were designed for users operating in hostile environments to provide emergency flotation even after a direct hit from a firearm, ballistic fragmentation or stabbing puncture. “The DTLPs were developed with a dual cell design, so that if one cell that is compromised; the other can be inflated to provide emergency flotation,” said Seybold. “The DTLP is designed for those who need full flotation to offset heavy gear. If the primary cell is damaged, a fully integrated secondary cell offers the same 65-pound buoyancy.”

DTLPs also come in less bulky, compact versions, which provide 65 pounds of buoyancy when fully inflated or 35 pounds if one cell is compromised. The DTLPs can be seamlessly integrated with tactical gear and are available with a manual inflation option or with automatic hydrostatic inflation. The hydrostatic technology uses a pressure valve to inflate the life preserver when immersed in four inches or more of water.

The DTLPs are also equipped with a ballistic pouch in order to mitigate the effects of direct ballistic impact, which can cause a CO2 cylinder to rupture. “The containment pouch disperses the force of the CO2 and prevents the cylinder from becoming a projective, while containing dangerous fragments,” said Seybold. “Inflatable life preservers contain 30 to 37 grams of compressed gas. When the bottle is compromised by a foreign object or ballistic round, it can cause a pretty violent explosion. The bottle is shatterproof but the explosion can still cause damages to the flotation device as well as to the individual wearing it. The ballistic pouch contains the damage and protects the wearer as well.”

Mustang Survival is currently in the process of introducing a new horse-collar type of life preserver. Traditional collar flotation devices contain redundant systems with two bladders that are situated side by side, noted Mustang Survival’s Brian Henley. “When one side gets compromised, it renders both useless,” he said. “Our new product made the two bladders redundant but independent of each other. If one bladder is damaged, one still gets full circumferential inflation, where in the past the user would just be sitting there with a unit that didn’t work.”

Other organizations are also working on innovations to their product lines. BAE Systems will be introducing a group of products later this year that Sean Martin describes as both modular and scalable. The scalability feature involves the ability to accommodate ballistic protection at Level 3 or at Level 4 and above. “It can also be configured to include a flotation collar to provide full self-righting buoyancy in the water,” he said.

MVS’s Kuehnlein said his company seeks to improve its product quality on a yearly basis. “We have two shooting ranges that enable us to test product quality in house,” he said. MVS’s customers constantly demand that the company reduce the weight of the armor plates that it manufactures, he added, and the company generally succeeds in doing so every year or two.

The Coast Guard’s Deployable Specialized Forces, for its part, continues to research and identify suitable ballistic and flotation devices through the Office of the Commandant, the Coast Guard Research and Development Center and Department of Defense agencies, according to Jelin. The aim of these efforts, he said, is “to develop future requirements and identification of equipment toward increased mission success and officer safety.” ♦

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