Supporting Your Troops: the Right Way, the Wrong Way, and the Kickbacks to our Sponsors Way

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Better body armor could have prevented or limited about 80 percent of fatal torso wounds suffered by Marines killed in
Iraq, a report by U.S. military medical experts obtained on Friday said.

The report, conducted for the Marine Corps by the Office of the Armed Forces Medical Examiner and not released to the public, examined the cases of Marines fatally wounded from the start of the war in March 2003 through June 2005, and found weaknesses in the torso protective gear.

Bullets or shrapnel hit the Marines' shoulders, the sides of their torsos or other areas not fully covered by ceramic plates contained in the body armor in at least 74 of 93 fatal wounds examined in the study.

"Either a larger plate or superior protection around the plate would have had the potential to alter the fatal outcome," the study stated.

Critics in the U.S. Congress have accused the Pentagon of failing to provide the best possible body armor and armored vehicles for American troops fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. But military officials have defended the protective gear provided for troops as well as the quality of vehicles.

The study involved Marines killed due to "a primary lethal injury of the torso," which made up near a quarter of the Marines killed in the time period involved in the study. More than 60 percent of these torso injuries were caused by small arms fire, with 38 percent due to blast injuries from explosions, the study stated...

As reported by yelladog via Cookie Christine:

what if I told you that the Pentagon had been buying body armor with a very spotty record of effectiveness? What if I also told you that there was a commercially available alternative that soldiers and marines were buying because they knew that their standard issue body armor was half-assed? What if I told you that someone in the chain of command was pushing pressure downward to make sure that soldiers were strongly discouraged from "up-armoring" their own bodies? You'd think something fishy was going on, right?

Just business as usual with a thousand points of light in the Corporate States of Amerika.