Land Warfare 2007: Plasan Sasa eyes Australian opportunities

1 October 2007

By Gregor Ferguson

Israeli armour specialist Plasan Sasa is eyeing opportunities to sell vehicle armour – even armoured vehicles – and a new generation of body armour into Australian programs such as Overlander and Wundurra.

Israeli armour specialist Plasan Sasa will use this month’s land warfare Conference to launch a new range of body armour and load carrying equipment in Australia.

The company acknowledges the initial window of opportunity to bid its new armour into Army’s Soldier Combat System project, Land 125 – Wundurra, has closed, but Plasan Sasa says it will make a stand-alone offer to the DMO and has approached all of the Land 125 contenders seeking an opportunity to get into the program. The company is represented in Australia by Melbourne-based Defence Solutions Australia Pty Ltd.

Plasan Sasa is the main supplier of body armour to the Israeli Defence Force (IDF) as well as being its major R&D contractor in this area; as a result, says the company, it can offer combat-proven equipment developed to meet what has become an intense threat environment in Israel and the Palestinian territories.

The LWC launch will highlight a new, ergonomic Tactical Assault Vest designed for greater adjustability to suit the different body types and different types of loads and pouches carried by the soldier.

It is intended to reduce the incidence of upper body and spinal injuries due to ill-fitting equipment and has been developed in partnership with an undisclosed Israeli medical institute.

To meet the demands of modern infantry work the vest is modular to support a wide variety of pouches and containers for ammunition, water, electronic equipment, power supplies and the like.

Critically, it is also designed to accommodate a new generation of sculpted, lightweight armour plates. The company has just completed R&D on the new armour which consists of three new types of plate shaped to provide full ergonomic coverage of the torso and vital organs.

When inserted into Plasan Sasa’s Tactical Assault Vest the ergonomic design ensures the armour settles comfortably and ergonomically around the upper body and provides greater freedom of movement and higher levels of comfort and protection, regardless of the wearer’s body position – standing, prone, or crouching.

The new family armour employs layers of polyethylene and/or ceramic to provide graduated levels of protection, including both penetrations by multiple rounds and blunt trauma from major projectile impacts.

The lightest version of this armour combo, at less than 6kg for vest and plates, provides NIJ Level 3 protection against multiple hits from 5.56mm SS109, Dragunov LPS and 7.62 NATO and Russian ammunition.

But the company notes that the required protection levels are growing from NIJ 3 to NIJ 4 or 4.5; as the protection level rises, so does the weight. This is the challenge Plasan Sasa has set out to tackle.

Traditional Level 3 protection required Alumina-based ceramic plates; Plasan Sasa has developed glass/ceramic and polyethylene armour offering a 25-30 per cent weight saving, it says.

For Level 3.5 protection the company developed glass ceramic armour weighing about 25kg/m2, again a saving of around 25-30 percent over current armour types. And for Level 4.5 protection it offers Silicon carbide/boron carbide armour weighing in at about 35kg/m2 at a weight saving of about 18-20 percent.

Translating that into combat weight carried by a soldier, the Tactical Assault vest with Level 3 armour protection weighs in at 6kg; Level 4 + protection, with multi-hit resilience, weighs 8.4kg.

Individual body armour can be supplemented also by NIJ Level 3 + portable shelter screens which can interlock to create protective barriers, and come with wheels, cut outs and shutters to enable troops to move the barrier, observe and fire their weapons from behind cover.

The company is also offering sculpted High Pressure Polyethylene armour plate, shaped to protect vital organs such as the heart, aorta, lungs, spleen, and liver as an add-on to existing body armour suites. This too offers NIJ Level 3 protection.

Plasan Sasa has been most prominent recently as a supplier to the US military’s Mine Resistant Ambush-Protected (MRAP) vehicle program which will see the US Army and Marines acquire several thousand armoured trucks and lighter vehicles from a variety of suppliers in a very rapid acquisition program.

The company has played a key role in the MRAP program. At the end of May this year the US Marines ordered 1,975MRAP Cat 1 4x4 trucks from International, the biggest single order for MRAP vehicles to date.

The armour for these vehicles, including blast-resistant seats, floor buffers and external and internal armour plate, was designed and will be manufactured by Plasan Sasa.

Earlier, the company had won orders from the UK and USA for cockpit and hull armour for their CH-47D Chinook helicopters.

The company has developed amour kits for the C-130H Hercules, Chinook and Black Hawk and sees potential opportunities for the sale of retrofit armour upgrades to these and other airborne platform in Australia.

The company also manufactures add-on armour for naval platforms which could be exposed to small arms and medium-calibre weapons.

At this year’s Land Warfare Conference Plasan Sasa will be highlighting these and other capabilities in the form of a Survivability Technology Demonstrator, the Sandcat.

The purpose of this is to help attract potential Australian partners to support the marketing and sale of protected vehicles, possible manufacture of components and, of course, in-service support.

Many of the protected vehicle opportunities in Australia will be dictated by Project Land 121 – Overlander, for which a shortlist of contenders was due to be announced around the time this edition of ADM closed for press. At the time of writing no short-listing announcement had been made.

The only certainty was that Defence is serious about acquiring vehicles with significant levels of armour protection and that Plasan Sasa is serious about pursuing any opportunities thrown up by Overlander or other projects.