NBC ran a segment the other day alleging that the U.S. military is giving our soldiers inferior body armor. I remember reading the piece on Monday and wondering where the errors were; the coverage just seemed off. But I, along with most viewers, don’t know much about body armor, so I had no way of knowing whether NBC was leading me astray.

The guys at the military blog Op-For, however, do know a thing or two about body armor and have done a great job finding NBC’s errors here and here. An excerpt:

NBC also neglected to mention the weight penalty of the Pinnacle SOV 3000 Level IV Dragon Skin vests, which can weigh up to 47.5 pounds or 20 pounds more than the Interceptor vest with ESAPI and ESBI. They appear to have tested the armor, flat, which favors the flexible Pinnacle armor. And they tested it at room temperature only, which means, I suppose, that if you are a soldier who never leaves the office, say, at NBC headquarters, the Dragon Skin may work well for you. If you, however, actually have to go outside, well, you may not want to throw away the Interceptor with the ESAPI quite yet.

And an excerpt from a great blog post on the NBC report over at the military blog <a href=”http://rokdrop.com/2007/05/24/playing-politics-over-body-armor/-6001″>ROK Drop:

… at the rate this body armor debate is going, the Democrats will be advocating that we wear medieval armor like King Arthur pretty soon. With the amount of weight on us that the Democrats want, it will slow soldiers down that much more and make it easier for the snipers to target soldiers and the Democrats will get all the body armor testing results they could possibly imagine.

Read these posts if, like me, you got the feeling that NBC News wasn’t giving you the whole story. Turns out it wasn’t.