The US Army literally has hundreds of thousands of Gen I & II IOTVs. Over the course of the program, the Army has significantly upgraded the outer carrier but the soft armor remained virtually the same. PEO Soldier’s Gen III conversion kit takes servicable soft armor inserts and placed them in new, Gen III carriers in OCP.
In addition to the great savings afforded by this program ($413 for a conversion kit vice $791 for a complete vest), the Army is also taking a hard look at life cycles for soft armor, challenging the standard five year shelf life. Recent testing has already extended this shelf life to seven years and a new round or testing may extend it further; to 15 years. This is just as important for LE activities who rely on ballistic vests as critical, day-to-day PPE.
Read the whole story here usaasc.armyalt.com.
Holy typos Batman. Anyway, smart decision by the Army, better than flooding the market even more with soft inserts for IOTVs or complete sets with the armor.
Garbage. Utter complete worthless garbage. The Gen II is by far superior to the Gen III.
Don’t you like the Quad Trigger Release on the GEN III? (suppressed giggle)
No, worse I hate the giant plastic clips on my shoulders….well I would if I had even brought the thing.
No a plate carrier is superior to an IOTV, that vest is complete garbage, I’m so glad I got to wear my Eagle PC w Cummerbund in Afghanistan that thing actually saved my life. Everyone I ever saw wear an IOTV was either too slow or cumbersome to do their job properly, oh and those soft armor inserts didn’t stop sh*t just like they didn’t stop sh*t in Iraq. What a joke, when is the Army gonna get the memo that SF and Batt got that shows that a PC is better.
We reaped what our privates sewed… some f#ckstick bitched he didn’t have armor to Rummy, and the shit rolled down hill into the turtlefuckery that is WAY TOO MUCH coverage.
Jon, OPT
Yup, I’ll take maneuverability over being slow and “armored” any day.
I actually like the SPCS, and I am looking forward to the GEN II SPCS since it looks like it has a cummerbund. Need additional coverage for certain roles/mission, add an optional belt and daps like peripheral armor. Problem solved.
I’ve had the chance to wear all three and haven’t seen a significant difference in the performance, although I did like the elastic cummberbun in the Gen I/II that’s now gone in the Gen III. Otherwise they’re very similar. The quick release buckles negates the pain of reinserting the cord release handle from Gen I and II. The molle sticks on the Gen III also make it easier to adjust the outer cummberbun, but we’ll see how those hold up.
Why do you feel the Gen II is far superior? I’m genuinely interested.
Supposedly there is already a Gen IV, but I don’t know what it actually changes. PEO Soldier mentioned it in their Portfolio.
The release system is far to complicated and makes the entire system bulkier. I hate have little plastic boxes sitting on top of my shoulders and the clips in front are over thought and were never intended for the prone.
The only good features are the back pocket and the cummerbund molle sticks.
I like the Gen III a lot more than the Gen II. The release system is far better in the III and overall its more comfortable for me. Plus its symmetrical in design which can’t be said for Gen I and II. That may not be a big deal for some but it made running the TAPS system a lot easier.
I will agree though that a plate carrier is way better in nearly any situation. I chose to have speed and mobility over a few extra inches of soft armor coverage any day.
I have about 5 minutes of experience with the IOTV, I’m still using an IBA (stupid unit can’t get a PSG a small IOTV) I was issued an IOTV, don’t know the gen, before going to Afghanistan, tried it on to get the right size and put in a duffel where it stayed for the entire deployment. I wore my personally owned PIG plate carrier and loved it, no numbness in my fingers or hands or back pain like with the IBA. I would be wearing my PIG now but have to wait until the CAL guard switches to OCP.
Well, at least we can all be tactical turtles in the new pattern!
Only the Army could take armor from one carrier, put it in another, and claim that it is a financial success… Turning common sense into NCOER and OER “excellence” through crafty wordsmithing.
This being done by the same military that is incinerating BILLIONS in small arms, parts, optics, Thermals, NODS, radios etc in Afghanistan rather than sending them home or letting deployed units keep them on their books and taking them back with them.
I need my daily cup of cheer after reading this,
Jon, OPT
The Army property motto – it’s easier to do the easy wrong than the hard right.
I cried watching MK48’s, Pocket Thermals, Aimpoint 3x, etc being sent to the pick yards for destruction… I won’t even go into how they were ending up in the hands of Hajis outside FOBs, on guys EBay and Gunbroker accounts etc, I’ve already seen one guy lose everything because he decided his pick yard score would fetch him top dollar on Gunbroker. Oh, the fucking humanity.
And now this is somehow a huge WIN? The walls the DoD builds with simple paperwork and “pots of money” defy the logic of any man to the point of utter frustration. The military has an awesome way of painting itself into a corner through its own paper trail of regulations and funding.
Jon, OPT
My unit could have used all that. Tens of thousands of dollars of Theater Property that they wouldn’t let us sign for. I’ve got CCOs for maybe 30% of my weapons and SAWs that still have the old style foregrip. Buddha wept.
We ended up bringing stuff back and “FOI’-ing it at home station. That used to work, but big Army caught on and now any FOI for ‘x’ dollar value is an automatic FLIPL. It hurt my pride to have to do the wrong thing to ultimately do the right thing, but now my old unit has capabilities that we needed and didn’t have before, so that’s a win/win for me. I was able to leave it better than when I got there.
That being said, the Bagram retrosort yard made my soul bleed. When we first got there I filled countless shortages and got my guys good kit from their stocks, but halfway through the controlling unit changed and what we could sign for became more and more restrictive… And yet whenever we (the Army) closed a FOB or COP the stinkies ended up with most of the stuff… And don’t get me started on the stuff we ‘gifted’ to the ANSF…
I was there in late 2013, pretty sure that was the same time this happened. On our way out of BAF they shut the pick yards off to everyone, even the most wiley of scroungers couldn’t get in. Problem was, they kept the shitbirds inside the wire who were working the yards, and were the problem in the first place, many who were corrupt as all hell.
Try Billions, with a capital B.
We did it in the gulf as well. DX’d and buried our deuces and 5 tons and wrote them off as war loss.
Is that UCP IOTV mounted backwards on the mannequin torso?
Yeah, for everyone trying to square away their unit by packing off equipment with zero accountability there’s ten guys squaring away their bank accounts by packing off equipment with zero accountability.
Y’all need better S-4s.
This is a G4 and above problem… Aim higher.
Command supply discipline is run by companies and supervised by battalions.
Of course, blaming incompetence at echelons above reality is much easier than actually fixing your own problems. I’ve seen G4 problems, and this ain’t it.
What would S4 provide? The topic brought up was a policy of not redeploying THEATER property. This has nothing to do with BN or CO or even a unit’s S-4 (which for SOF is at SOTF level) which could not even be from the same unit or service as you.
Like someone else mentioned, theatre assets, given explicitly for use in theatre by higher leadership, are paid for with other people’s money. They may not even belong to your parent command, or even higher than that. They have such a strangling amount of paperwork attached to them that it’s far easier just to destroy them than go through the hoops of trading accountability and transferring them to units that would not even be normally allowed to possess them if not for whatever initiative or allotment was given to them.
That doesn’t make it any less braindead though.
I am truly interested how the G-4 and battalion level S-4s for USSOCOM and NSW actually work. I’m sure most of it is at least on a need to know basis, but I am curious what kind of strings they are allowed to pull and what kind of audits are actually performed. Clearly there is a metric shit-ton of gear that ends up in the hands of ebay sellers and on the civilian market, but I’m sure an equal amount of perfectly good gear is destroyed against their best interests.
Any equipment that is improperly accounted for and ends up in an excess yard somewhere was the responsibility of a company which should have been properly supervised by their battalion. That’s a failure of basic command supply discipline right there.
Now, if you want to take high-speed TPE home with you, the process would be fairly simple: get your high-speed gear authorized via an operational needs statement and eventually via an MTOE change (to keep it permanently), make sure the TPE PBO is okay with letting the stuff go (which if it is legitimately slated for destruction they should be okay with) and conduct a lateral transfer to get the equipment on your MTOE property book.
This is a process driven by your battalion’s S-4 shop. And it consists of one memo and some legwork.
Yeah, not how it works, how it should work, sure, but not how it was working.