Thursday, August 25, 2005

War on Terra makes cops less safe

The best fabric for making bullet-proof vests is a fabric called 'Spectra'. Because it is 40% stronger than Kevlar, bullet-proof vests made with this fabric can be less bulky while providing more protection. There's only one problem with Spectra: You can't get it.

Why? Well, only one company makes it -- Honeywell, via their subsidiary, Spectra Technologies. This company has a fixed capacity. It doesn't make sense for them to expand that capacity because their normal customers, companies making bullet-proof vests for police agencies, don't buy enough of the fabric to fully utilize that capacity. There's only one problem: for the past three years, the U.S. Department of Defense has basically declared a state of emergency and bought up every single stitch of Spectra fabric available in order to use it to make body armor for soldiers bound for Afghanistan and Iraq.

As a result, police agencies have been forced to buy protective vests for their officers made of other fabrics, one of which is Zylon. Which, it now turns out, doesn't work.

Yet another way that the Cheerleader-in-chief has harmed the actual day-to-day security of America...

- Badtux the Connecting-the-dots Penguin

1 comment:

  1. Yes, America can win in Iraq if we just keep sacrificing for it.

    ReplyDelete

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