Contemporary body armor: technical data, injuries, and limits

The introduction of firearms in the fifteenth century led to the continuous development of bulletproof personal protection. Due to recent industrial progress and the emergence of a new generation of ballistic fibers in the 1960s, the ability of individual ballistic protections to stop projectiles greatly increased. While protective equipment is able to stop increasingly powerful missiles, deformation during the impact can cause potentially lethal nonpenetrating injuries that are grouped under the generic term of behind armor blunt trauma, and the scope and consequences of these are still unclear. This review first summarizes current technical data for modern bulletproof vests, the materials used in them, and the stopping mechanisms they employ. Then it describes recent research into the specific ballistic injury patterns of soldiers wearing body armor, focusing on behind-armor blunt trauma.