Every single day, there are members of the US Army around the world who get in the line of fire while fulfilling their duty for the country, and needless to say, some of these encounters result in serious injury or even death. The US Army intends to cut down on the mortality rate by handing over $90 million to Johns Hopkins University so that a team of researchers at Rutgers University, the University of Delaware and the California Institute of Technology, accompanying private companies and the military, will work on a new kind of protective armor which has the final goal of reducing body armor weight by 30% while ensuring it is 50% more efficient.
At the end of the day, the ‘perfect’ body armor would be a careful balance of ratio between weight, mobility and protection. Of course, there are some projects in the past that relied on spider silk to create a “bulletproof skin”, but if you are talking about protection from an Improvised Explosive Device (IED), then it is safe to assume that nothing at this point in time will be able to protect a soldier as even a tank can be done in by an IED. Of course, Captain America’s fictional vibranium shield does seem to be able to handle anything thrown at it, so until that day arrives, we will just have to keep our fingers crossed that the “superior armor” the US Army is looking for will be conjured up in labs, soon.
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