To Protect Soldiers From Bombs, Military Scientists Build a Better Dummy

As sometimes happens in rural America, someone has shot up a road sign. Given the gape of the hole and the fact that the road traverses Aberdeen Proving Ground, there’s a good chance it wasn’t made by a bullet.

A proving ground is a spread of high-security acreage set aside for testing weapons and the vehicles meant to withstand them. I’m headed for Aberdeen’s Building 336, where combat vehicles come to be up-armored — as the military likes to up-say — against the latest threats.

Mark Roman, my host this morning, oversees the Stryker “family” of armored combat vehicles. He’ll be using them for an impromptu tutorial in personnel vulnerability: the art and science of keeping people safe in a vehicle that other people are trying to blow up.

My extremely uneducated guess is that some sort of shaped charge hit that sign. A shaped charge is an explosive double whammy used for breaching the hulls of vehicles and harming the people inside them.

R.P.G.s (rocket-propelled grenades) are the shaped charges most people have heard of, though there are ever bigger, deadlier iterations. Iran is said to have one that can push through 14 inches of steel.

Read More- New York Times

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