*Buying Surplus Body Armor*
By: Penwu
18 May 2007

I think that among your average survivalists, body armor is a topic only vaguely understood and a tool unreasonably neglected. How many other ways are there to take a bullet to the chest and not need emergency medical aid? In a situation where someone is shooting at you, body armor is a huge ace-in-the-hole.

Consider it this way: do you have a contingency plan for a center-of-mass bullet wound?

Now, I don't see much day-to-day risk of being shot at...not enough to justify the discomfort of wearing body armor 24/7. But should I find myself in the midst of a civil or natural disaster...with crazy, desperate, and just plain malevolent folks running around...that armor is an option I want to have.

I don't have the $500 or $600 or more to drop on a new retail vest, though - body armor is not the only prep I need. What I can afford is a surplus police vest - about $200. Armor vests typically have a 5-year warranty, but that time period was chosen to limit liability, rather than for any reason related to the armor itself. Testing by the NIJ, among others, shows that Kevlar armor has no aging problems. So police agencies regularly are discarding perfectly good armor. But before I go too much further, let's look at a couple other issues.

Vest Material

Kevlar, Zylon, Goldflex, Spectra, Dyneema...akk! How does one figure out what's good and what's bad? Well, I encourage anyone planning to get armor to do all the research themselves to really understand things. But here's the basic situation as I understand it. The original, traditional Kevlar 129 fiber works great, except when it's soaking wet (but works fine again once it dries out). Vests made of 100% Kevlar are comparably heavy and stiff, though. So a handful of other materials have been devised to use along with Kevlar to reduce weight and increase flexibility while retaining ballistic protection.

The problem is, these other materials tend to degrade over time and with exposure to UV light. Zylon is the worst example - it seriously degrades, and all vests using it have been de-certified by the NIJ (details on the NIJ in a minute). Definitely DON'T buy a vest that uses Zylon. The others are better, but research appears to show that they do get weaker over time, and in particular are vulnerable to contact-range gunshots (due to the hot gases from the cartridge hitting the vest material).

So, my decision was to stick to only a pure Kevlar vest. Yes, it'll be a bit heavier than the newfangled exotic stuff - but I won't need to worry nearly so much about it weakening. That's particularly important to me because I'm getting a older vest.

Vest Protection Ratings

If you've looked into body armor at all, you've probably seen references to various "Levels" of armor. Those levels are the National Institute of Justice (NIJ) system of certifying what sort of bullets a given vest will protect against. In increasing order of strength, they are Level I, IIa, II, IIIa, III, and IV. Of those, Levels I-IIIa are soft armor to withstand pistol rounds, while Levels III and IV use hard steel or ceramic plates to protect against rifle rounds. You can see the comlete NIJ standards here (PDF), but the gist is: