The Overmatching of Military Soft Body Armour: Preliminary Results

Abstract

Modern military soft body armour provides protection from fragmenting munitions, which are the major cause of injury in warfare. Protection from high-velocity (rifle) ammunition is usually provided by ceramic faced / composite backed plates. There is a growing interest in what happens when body armour is overmatched i.e. it is perforated by a threat that it is not designed to protect the user from. In this work, a military soft body armour was overmatched with 7.62x39 ammunition (steel core, lead nose; produced in 1983; Sellier and Bellot, Zbrojovka Vlàsim, Czechoslovakia). The target was a combination of swine tissue (skin, underlying tissue, ribs) - gelatine (10 % by mass) - swine tissue (ribs, underlying tissue, ribs). The impact velocity varied between 524 m/s and 547 m/s (equivalent to an engagement distance of ~180-200 m). This paper considers whether the body armour affected damage caused to the target during an overmatching event.