Skeleton Jelly said:
Well, they didn't mass produce Dragon Skin Amour for their soldiers, so I don't think they'll use this.
And Dragon Skin Amour is basically a amour that can take a loooot of bullets.
Well there was a lot of contreversy over the next gen armor projects like this, including the implication that the mass produced versions of the armor that were being passed off were no where near as effective as the prototypes, which may have also been staged. I remember reading some stuff to this effect years ago when it was more recent.
Also at least in the US there are political aspects to the entire thing that can get really messed up. A lot of people in our goverment take a very anti-military position and believe in a "peace at any price" doctrine. While it would be political suicide for someone to not support our troops publically, you have seen a lot of people taking a "I'm for our troops, but agains the war" attitude. This has lead to things like body armor and armoring hummers having become political volleyballs where politicians (and some surprising ones) have come out in favor of providing body armor to protect American lives publically, but then not actually followed through in trying to get actual approval. It was a big deal for a while. The general attitude being that as much as these guys might "support our troops" they feel the best way to stop the war is for those same troops to die so there would be increasing pressure to bring them home. It's fairly easy to find stuff on going both ways, though few sources state it quite this clearly.
Along with the issue of quality, there is of course the issue of some politicians trying to discourage the current war by keeping a close handle of the purse strings. A body armor upgrade being something that is going to meet with opposition.
Similar to how our military was developed to pretty much being death and destruction to the enemy, get in, kill everyone and break everything, and then leave. Exactly the kind of engagement doctrine that current American morality has an issue with. We are supposed to be quick on the offense, with no real care for civilians, and force the enemy into a position of constantly having to try to adapt to us rather than vice versa. Hence all of these "Daisy Cutter Bombs" and such which we spent all this time developing, their very existance shows a kind of engagement doctrine that wasn't supposed to be concerned with an "antiseptic engagement".
We weren't expecting to act as an occupying police force, and thus the vehicles our military has were not designed for it. Pretty much existing in the extremes of "unsubtle mobile killing machine" (ie tanks and such) and very light vehicles meant to go from point A to point B carrying information/personell/light supplies without engaging in battle. We never planend to have the hummers and jeeps being used to patrol through hostile territory with insurgents hiding among an sympathetic (to them) civilian population waiting to ambush. The whole "war" we're involved in now pretty much matching the very definition of what our military was NOT supposed to do.
However, before anyone screams about this, understand that part of the contreversy has been that if the US military was given more light armored vehicles, and more body armor for troops, this preparation would encourage the military to be used in this capacity more often. Something opposed by both those who fear America becoming more of the police force we're accused of being (and engaging in casual occupations, which we would get better at with time), and those who don't want such things to dilute our current combat doctrine, feeling that it will be nessicary should we have to engage in a serious "total war" of the sort we prepared for.
The point being that a lot of politicians don't want our troops being involved in things like this (and heck, might not even want a military) and don't want to spend the money on it. Others would much rather take the money and invest it in "real weapons". The arguement by the latter side being that for the cost of equipping 50,000 dudes in fancy new body armor they could roll out a couple dozen tanks or whatever and believe that it would be more effective to have the tanks in the kind of war we should be fighting (not a specific equivilency, just explaining the attitude).
The latter attitude based on the idea that while wars DO ultimatly come down to how many boots you can put on the ground, the idea is for the infantry to clean up after you've already bombed the living crud out of the target with planes, tanks, and artillery. Infantry being the guys who come in for the "clean up" rather than the forefront of the attack unlike other wars, hence the minimal equipment (barring special units). The role of grunts (to a certain manner of thinking) being for them mostly to act as forward observers for the real weapons.... all stories about "Rambo hits the beaches" or whatever are entertaining and all, and had their place, but the American theory on war has been all about having a small, more highly advanced force and doing most of the fighting with technology, missles, bombs, and war machines. Part of what justified a lot of the military downsizing before we got involved in the current mess... the idea being that we didn't need to maintain huge mobs of infantry if we were going to do all our fighting with tanks and such. Bases could be closed because while we needed some, we didn't need anything close to what we had. Sort of ironic since the first real conflict we got into saw us pretty much ignoring all of the tactics we decided we were going to use, largely because in the end we were too moral to pull the trigger (so to speak).
Ah well, enough rambling. In short, whether you agrere with me on the specifics or not, the point is that there are political aspects to this. Who says what and what they are saying doesn't matter much in the scope of the overall point I guess.
