Early this Fall, the US Army will field 100 Female Cut Gen III IOTV for the 101st Airborne Division’s Female Engagement Teams serving in Afghanistan.
The female version features a slightly different cut to accommodate differences in body shapes.
Tags: IOTV
This is a terrible idea. Ask anyone that know anything about body armor and they will tell you that PEO Soldier is reinventing the wheel here. Can you make armor with cups? Sure but there is no way to standardize the female body, so you would have to make 1000 vests to fit 100 women and STILL not get it right. Law enforcement has gone down this road and at the end of the day, the girls always go back to dude vests. This is tax payer fraud waste and abuse.
Perhaps a lady reader will be along shortly to comment but as I understand it (from the domestic Chief of Staff who is in Afghanistan ant the moment) the problem is not so much in the chest area but the hip to waist ratio. The armour tends to be too loose on the waist and too tight on the hips meaning that its rattling about in the middle and all the weight is forced onto a small area. The recent British Osprey is an improvement on previous body armour because of the way it can be loosened and tightened via a cummerbund but I’m told that if we were designing body armour for women it would be made completely differently rather than trying to bodge the male stuff.
(Speaking as a female) I have only had experience with the NZ/Aus issue armour – there the problem was the size of the plate. Even if we were given the smallest size of armour possible it was too wide at the top – with narrow shoulders it meant I couldn’t get a good grip on my weapon – the plate was digging in to my front deltoid. The slanted cuts in the top corners needed to be bigger.
Our armour had curves to accomodate for the different cup sizes and it did make a difference vs the flat male plates.
As a tiny man, these are similar problems I always experienced. I imaging that women tend to return to men’s cut body armor because it isn’t so much a problem with cup sizes but rather with dynamic torso sizing (even on the same person).
The next thing you know, the DOD will be making specially-shaped IOTVs to accomodate the National Guard.