Testing is inconsistent on body armor ballistic inserts, and the Army office in charge of the equipment plans to make changes in line with Department of Defense Inspector General (DoD IG) recommendations, a new report said.
The DoD IG is conducting a series of Interceptor Body Armor audits at congressional request–this is the fourth–and has criticized the program and its testing in reports dating to 2008. This audit evaluated product quality assurance for seven Army contracts valued at $2.5 billion for ballistic inserts awarded between 2004 and 2006.
The contracts went to six contractors: ArmorWorks (two contracts), Simula, Cercom, Composix, Armacel Armor, and Ceradyne [CRDN].
Specifically, auditors determined if results for the first article tests and lot acceptances tests met contract requirements and whether quality assurance personnel performed the product quality surveillance in accordance with contract requirements.
Auditors found the Army Program Manager Soldier Equipment (PM SEQ) could provide only “limited assurance” that approved ballistic materials for approximately five million inserts on seven contracts met contract requirements, the Aug. 1 report (D-2011-088) said.
“This occurred because PMSEQ did not consistently enforce the requirements for testing the body armor ballistic inserts,” the report said. “Specifically, on two contracts, PM SEQ did not conduct all the required tests because they had no protection performance concerns on these inserts.”
Additionally, on all seven contracts the PM did not always use the correct size ballistic insert for the first article tests, a consistent methodology for measuring the proper velocity or enforce the humidity and temperature requirements. Also, weather and altitude tests were not required on six of the seven contracts.
In response, PM SEQ officials said neither “the size of the ballistic insert nor the humidity and temperature would affect the test results.” Additionally, the proper velocity wasn’t always calculated because the contracts didn’t define the process for determining velocity and weather and altitude tests were eliminated, “to expedite (first article tests) in support of the urgent wartime requirement for the ballistic inserts.”
Also, the Defense Contract Management Agency Phoenix personnel didn’t use an “appropriate random sampling methodology” to select a statistically representative sample for the lot acceptance tests, the auditors wrote.
This occurred because DCMA personnel believed their sampling process provided a representative sample. “As a result, the (lot acceptance tests) results cannot be relied on to project identified deficiencies to the entire lot.
However, the IG report said: “because we did not conduct any additional testing, we could not conclude that ballistic performance was adversely affected by inadequate testing and quality assurance.”
Army acquisition personnel agreed with the report’s recommendations, which consisted of three points: that the Program Executive Officer Soldier should revise the Contract Purchase Description (COPD) to “clearly define the point at which velocity is to be measured; perform the weather and altitude tests as the COPD requires, and perform a risk assessment on two lots to find out if the ballistic inserts will perform as intended.