Live fire testing: assessing blunt impact and acceleration injury vulnerabilities

The joint services live fire testing program is a vulnerability and lethality assessment program in which realistic munitions are fired at combat-loaded U.S. systems. The program provides direct visual observation of potential damage caused by weapons effects on targets and crew under combat conditions and provides data assisting subjective engineering judgments on system vulnerabilities with the rapid advance in munitions technologies. Congress and the Department of Defense recognize the need to improve the scientific capability to estimate the effects of weapon systems on humans and the need to produce precise estimates of potential casualties in combat situations. This study evaluates the current U.S. capability to make credible crew casualty assessments of blunt impact and acceleration injury in live fire tests. It summarizes the results of a 2-day workshop hosted by the Department of Defense to identify potential live fire threats, mechanisms of injury and performance criteria, available data bases, requirements for instrumentation and analysis, use of crew casualty information in weapon system evaluations and risk assessments, and to prioritize future efforts. It also develops a strategy for improving the U.S. capability to assess injury risks.