Facing mounting pressure to acquire body armor quickly because of upcoming deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan, and armed with the final orders to close out the Corps’ vest procurement plan, Patricio had little maneuver room on the vest program.
The first vest failures had come to light in mid-January 2003, as officials with Point Blank notified Marine contract officers of problems at their Oakland Park, Fla., test facility. Hatfield told Marine Corps Times the failures stemmed from improper testing equipment at their ballistic lab.
Over the next year, Natick officials assumed responsibility for testing vests from Point Blank as they investigated why the original failures occurred.
In December 2003, contract officers and testers discovered that multiple vests from two other lots failed ballistic tests, this time at the Aberdeen facility.
Vests from lots 69-9 and 69-12 suffered multiple penetrations of 9mm bullets at speeds below 1,525 feet per second. When gauging performance of a vest against that contract benchmark, testers expect that rounds will penetrate half of the time.
Those penetrations were of particular concern because previous tests yielded passing results at an average velocity of 1,620 feet per second, well above the contract benchmark, according to a document written by Mike Codega, a technical representative at Natick who worked with MacKiewicz on the Marine vest program. Also a point of concern was the complete penetration of a vest from lot 69-12. This one was below 1,450 feet per second, a speed at which no vest penetration should occur.
“I recommended we do more testing to validate or to confirm or to find out what happened,” MacKiewicz said in an April 8 interview at Natick. “And as I continued to test, I got more failures … it continued, it didn’t stop. Which is strange because we had had about four years of experience where we had no problem whatsoever.”
In further tests of lots 69-9 and 69-12, as well as four additional lots, MacKiewicz and his colleagues noticed a continued decline in the Point Blank armor’s ballistic strength. Some of the vests were also showing deep indentations — though not penetrations — at speeds that, taken together with the full penetrations in earlier lots and the fact that the indentations were deeper than they should have been, prompted testers to raise a red flag.
“It shouldn’t have happened … because it was a known system for four years and the results were very high” during previous tests on earlier lots, MacKiewicz said. “To get results that low was very concerning — it was odd to us.”
When presented with the evidence of failures and the testers’ worries, Patricio questioned Aberdeen’s test procedures. In late 2003, in an effort to determine whether testing methodology there was to blame, Patricio brought in H.P. White, the commercial ballistics testing company, to review those same lots.
An Aberdeen Test Center spokeswoman declined to comment on doubts about the testing results and methodology expressed by Point Blank and the Marine Corps.
In reviewing results from both facilities, Patricio wondered why samples from the same lot were passing at H.P. White and at Point Blank’s test site but not at Aberdeen, according to Patricio’s waiver request for lots 69-9 and 69-12 and other documents.
“H.P. White and the contractor’s range have produced passing results for the lots in question while ATC’s data fails the lots,” Patricio wrote in a Feb. 2, 2004, memo explaining his waiver of lots 69-9 and 69-12. “This matter will not be resolved until the Natick technical representatives are able to make a determination regarding the underlying factors of the conflicting data.”
In the memo, Patricio pointed the finger at Aberdeen’s test procedures and asked MacKiewicz and his team to evaluate testing at all three locations to “determine the causes of the discrepancies and correct the inconsistencies.”
“Failing or passing anything — that’s a matter of some testing procedures and interpretations,” Patricio said in the May 3 interview.
Point Blank officials agree with Patricio, saying the vests did not fail follow-up tests at independent labs and were therefore safe to field.
Hatfield, however, refused to name any of the sources who she said verified the performance of the failed lots.
“We see no reason to be concerned that the quality has deteriorated or that the performance has deteriorated in any fashion,” said Hatfield, Point Blank’s chief operating officer, in an April 20 interview at her Pompano Beach production facility in Florida.
Natick officials who investigated the test procedures at Aberdeen and H.P. White found no differences in the test procedures that would cause such divergent test results.
“No issues … relating to instrumentation, test procedure or test facility set-up was found,” Codega wrote in the memo reviewing the failure of lots 69-9 and 69-12.
In fact, said H.P. White President Donald Dunn in an interview, in many cases his test facility fails products that Aberdeen Test Center has previously passed, arguing that his testing procedures are as stringent, if not more so, than those of Aberdeen. He declined to comment specifically on any testing of Marine vests that failed at Aberdeen.
Problems with the Point Blank vest design used by the Marine Corps keep cropping up. For example, as part of the competition for an Army vest contract late last year, that same model of Point Blank’s Interceptor vest failed ballistic tests that simulate shrapnel hits, according to Karl Masters, the lead engineer for the Army’s Interceptor body armor program. That test — a lower standard than for 9mm rounds — was conducted by H.P. White.
Masters noted that his comments were in reference to the Army vest program and declined to speculate on the Marine Corps vest issues.
Though the Army awarded Point Blank the contract after all, it bought vests of a different design than the Marine Corps model, said Army Col. John Norwood, the head of Project Manager Soldier Equipment, the Army office that oversees development of individual gear.
When asked in an interview whether he suspected any material or manufacturing flaw in the vests might be to blame for the rejections by government testers, Patricio said only that “we had the manufacturers involved in the process to the extent that the parties communicated with each other and attempted to work through the process” of addressing the failures.
Despite the official government waiver forms she signed asking for the ballistic specifications to be reduced to meet the declining test results, Point Blank’s Hatfield said she never considered the problem to be one that stemmed from a manufacturing or material flaw.
Patricio noted in a memo dated Feb. 2, 2004, that the urgent need for body armor in the war zone and the time it would take to find out for sure why the vests were failing outweighed his concerns with the vests.
He therefore would issue a “temporary waiver providing Marines with OTVs of questionable performance,” promising that “if, at a later date, the performance is shown to conclusively not meet the government’s performance specification, then the issue will be addressed at that time.”
The waiver turned out to be anything but temporary. Over the next year, Patricio went on to issue waivers for at least 20 lots representing nearly 19,000 vests.
“The OTVs in the stated lots do not fully comply with the current Marine Corps performance specification for the OTV and do not meet existing contractual requirements,” Patricio wrote in one waiver, accepting a shipment of nine lots — about 4,500 vests — that testers at Aberdeen rejected.
“The OTVs are needed by deploying units that must receive them prior to deployment in the very near future. I understand and accept the increased risk posed by accepting the reduced protection against the 9mm threat,” he wrote Nov. 24, 2004.
Patricio said he crafted his waivers using language that was legally required to release the vests and “put them on the backs of Marines.”
While shrapnel from homemade bombs and 7.62mm bullets from AK47 rifles are among the most common threats in Iraq, 9mm submachine guns are also in common use and a “valid operational threat,” said Masters, the Army engineer.
Material tracking problems
Natick officials said they pleaded with Point Blank to properly document and track the materials and manufacture of the vests so they might pinpoint the problem. But they said Point Blank could not deliver the information they needed.
The Marine Corps contract included a premium of about $50 extra per vest to cover additional quality assurance procedures at Point Blank, MacKiewicz said.
Among other information that was of interest to Natick testers was which rolls of woven Kevlar fiber were used, for example, in the assembly of the layered ballistic vest panels.
“That process was basically broken,” MacKiewicz said. “I could not distinguish between one roll of material that went into the first 500 or the second 500 or the third 500.”
In a series of memos written over the summer of 2004, in which MacKiewicz explained his reasoning for rejecting certain lots delivered by Point Blank, the testing expert detailed his concerns.
In recommending the rejection of lot 71-12 on July 19, MacKiewicz warned of “major quality assurance deficiencies at the company.” He recommended “disciplinary action against the company to resolve the issue.”
In a July 21 memorandum to Patricio recommending the rejection of two more lots, 69-84 and 71-9, MacKiewicz wrote: “One of the significant factors, which ultimately led to award a contract to Point Blank, was their proposed quality assurance procedures for eliminating defects and tracking materials. … Point Blank is not compliant with their manufacturing quality control proposal and their contractual obligation for providing consistent product performance and reliability.”
Hatfield said she was forthcoming with whatever data contract officials requested, but firmly rejected government officials’ claims that her vests had any kind of material problem, putting the blame squarely on the tests at Aberdeen.
“We had no evidence that would compel us that we should change anything that we had done for years,” Hatfield said. “I have other sources, and we have compelling evidence that shows no degradation of performance.”
No purchases after ’04
The Marine Corps fielded vests from the failed lots through the end of 2004, documents and interviews show, but stopped taking delivery of Point Blank manufactured vests in early 2005. By then, the contract had not been exhausted — at least 9,000 vests could still have been purchased.
Neither the Marine Corps nor the company would explain why more vests hadn’t been purchased. But in late December 2004, the Army signed a $190 million contract with Point Blank to purchase 360,000 vests through 2006. Point Blank was chosen over 11 other bidders for the contract, the Pentagon said.
The Army, which equips its troops with different versions of the Interceptor body armor system, has never accepted vests that failed ballistic standards, and the service says it stands by the manufacturer despite the Corps’ vest failures. Army officials in charge of equipping soldiers with body armor said in an interview that the service has never issued a waiver for ballistic performance and not one of the more than 680,000 vests fielded since 1998 is from a failed production lot.
The Army versions of the Point Blank vest, dubbed Pathfinder and Pathfinder Plus, differ from the Marine Corps’ “Alpha” package in the weight and number of Kevlar sheets that make up the armor. To date, the Army has accepted nearly 500,000 vests from the company.
Nonetheless, Point Blank’s stock has dropped precipitously this year. In early January, the stock was riding at $17.86 before dropping about 61 percent over the first four months of the year.
On May 3, the day before the Corps announced its body armor recall, Point Blank parent company DHB Industries announced it had named a new president.
The company tapped retired Army Gen. Larry Ellis, who joined the company as a board member last year after retiring from the service. He led Army Forces Command in Atlanta, Ga., before retiring in July.
His appointment follows the hiring of another former Army officer, retired Col. Ishmon Burks, to be DHB’s executive vice president for investor and media relations.
The appointments could help to address DHB’s flagging stock value and reputation.
Matthew Cox, a staff writer for Army Times, contributed to this report.
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