Future soldier
Jon Russell testing the durability of personal equipment following impact.
Integrating new systems with established ones
those human factors trials and we’re now procuring a number of those systems over the next 6–12 months with additional sizes.”
4.7kg
The amount by which the Virtus system is lighter and better fitting than the Osprey body armour it replaced.
350g UK MOD 18
The amount by which the Virtus helmet is lighter than the Mk7 it succeeds.
This is not unusual for combat clothing or military equipment as a whole – as a system sees active duty or use beyond its initial parameters, issues will inevitably arise, and therefore a modern military needs to be able to incorporate feedback from its soldiers and its industry partners in order to enhance and improve their equipment. Since the adoption of the Virtus system, it’s been issued to approximately 100,000 military personnel across all of the British services. This gave the individuals and units that used the first generation of Virtus to suggest modifications to the system to the MOD, which also adopted developments suggested by the manufacturer, such as load carriage systems. “Some units and users have different roles and different equipment that we didn’t originally accommodate for, given that [the Virtus systems] was meant to be for high-readiness troops initially,” explains Russell. “The uptake of Virtus has been a lot wider and larger than initially planned, because of its popularity.” Other modifications make the Virtus helmet less prone to snagging when used by paratroopers, or minor tweaks such as a changeable cover for soldiers conducting peacekeeping operations.
“The key is good communication and links with the manufacturer to ensure [any issues] can be identified early on, and to get those better products or better modifications as soon as possible,” says Russell. “Equally, providing feedback to the manufacturer is also important – on what works, what doesn’t work, and so on.”
The development of any personal armour system requires a balance between the degree of protection and the degree of burden, but this can be complicated when integrating new systems with older ones, or also when updating systems. In evaluating such a system, Russell makes it clear that the MOD’s first priority is to evaluate what a soldier can accept from a wearability perspective in terms of physical and thermal burden, and comfort levels. As stated earlier, while it would be great to be able to protect a soldier from every threat they might face, in practice that is simply not possible – therefore, the MOD evaluates what is acceptable from a soldier’s perspective, and from there optimise the threat and coverage it can provide while also integrating effectively with other equipment. “So, rather than just specifying ‘X number of layers of very highly protective material that’s very good at stopping the threat but is not very comfortable’, it will be the other way around,” Russell explains. To evaluate comfort, physical and thermal burden, Dstl use hard- set measurements based on metrics for considerations such thermal stress, depending upon the type of trial. “We have something called the ‘Human Factors Assessment Framework’, which has three levels of assessment for a user trial,” Russell explains, before breaking the framework down.
The first level consists mainly of subjective feedback from the user, such as perceived exertion, discomfort and thermal stress. “They might say they’re hot, but without the ability for us to actually measure and quantify that,” Russell adds. Level three, on the other hand, is usually a lab-based trial where Dstl monitor a number of biological markers on the test subject, including heart rate, temperature and internal core temperature, among others. Level two, meanwhile, is a mixture of both. “We might, for example, record heart rate while they’re going over an obstacle course – and use a mixture of those types of tests and the subjective questionnaires with the user at the end.” With all this in mind, Russell works to ensure that test processes and performance requirements ensure that items are tested as they’re intended to work and in a realistic representative and repeatable environments. However, tests can only take you so far, as Virtus has established – sometimes equipment is used in scenarios it wasn’t initially intended for. It’s up to militaries to ensure, therefore, that the testing they carry out mimic in-the-field conditions as closely as possible, and to swiftly work to address any issues that come to light after that point. “With most things, it’s not until you’ve actually tried it that you find out the issue, and then try to mitigate those going forward,” says Russell. “Personally, I’m an advocate – when I do ballistic testing – of testing things as they’re worn, ensuring that you test them in realistic and representative ways to how they’ll see service.” ●
Defence & Security Systems International /
www.defence-and-security.com
Crown Copyright
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