How the Military Helmet Evolved From a Hazard to a Bullet Shield

How the Military Helmet Evolved From a Hazard to a Bullet Shield



The object itself is impressive. A Kevlar casque, covered in a sheath of pale-brown desert camouflage cloth, it has a neoprene olive-drab band around the helmet’s lower rim, with the soldier’s name embroidered on it in black. But on this helmet there are also four black stars in its front, just above the visor and “name band.” The stars are there because this particular helmet once belonged to General Norman Schwarzkopf, Jr. , the commanding American General in Operation Desert Storm, which began in January, 1991.To get more news about green bulletproof vest, you can visit bulletproofboxs.com official website.

“What’s most amazing to me about General Schwarzkopf’s helmet,” says Frank Blazich, Jr., curator of modern military forces at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C., “is that it represents how technology and innovation work together in the field of ground-forces protection.”Known as PASGT (for Personal Armor System Ground Troops), the helmet was introduced to the U.S. ground forces in the years following the Vietnam conflict—and was initially employed in limited numbers during actions in Grenada and Haiti in the 1980s. It was in wide use by American ground forces by the time Operation Desert Storm was initiated in 1991, when U.S. forces led a coalition of 34 nations to liberate Kuwait after its occupation by Iraq in August of 1990.
On May 20, with Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf’s Operation Desert Storm helmet as a centerpiece, the Smithsonian’s Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation will host Military Invention Day, an exploration of how objects developed for the battlefield have been adapted into endless aspects of American culture.
Along with General Schwarzkopf’s helmet, will be examples of the entire line of American military helmets over the past century; alongside a thorough timeline of other, different implements of modern warfare. In each example, the program will showcase how advancing military technologies have changed the face of battle and force protection since World War I, and how those technologies than migrated into other areas of American life.

Still, no area of military personnal technology might be more indicative of how change has come to war than the American military helmet. “In 1917,” Blazich says, “when America entered World War I, we used a variation of the British helmet of the time, called the Brodie Helmet, or Mark 1 helmet.” The American helmet was called the M1917.

Effectively an overturned metal dish weighing about 1.3 pounds, with a basic liner to keep a soldier’s scalp from chafing against the helmet’s manganese-steel alloy shell, plus a solid chinstrap that cinched tight, it was a primitive tool at best. As a protective device, Blazich says, it didn’t do much more than keep explosion-driven rocks off the tops of soldier’s heads while they were in the trenches of France. “Though it could also be protective against shrapnel, which was also a big concern in that war,” Blazich adds.

Yet with no real face and side-skull coverage, it left troops wide open to facial and cranial injury, and lasting disfigurement from shell fragmentation was an enormous problem in World War I.

The Brodie Helmet also had other inherent dangers. The chinstrap, which once tightened down, was hard to release: so if a Doughboy’s helmet got trapped or lodged between objects the situation could prove fatal, as the soldier would have a difficult time getting the helmet off and would therefore be trapped and immobile on the field of battle.