Army Recalls 44,000 Flawed Helmets

The Army is recalling 44,000 Advanced Composite Helmets after recent tests revealed that they fail to provide the required level of ballistics protection.

All of the recalled helmets are made by ArmorSource LLC, formerly Rabintex USA LLC, based in Hebron, Ohio. Soldiers whose helmets carry the ArmorSource label have been told to turn them in and exchange for an ACH from another manufacturer.

The defective helmets have been widely distributed, and the Army does not know where or exactly how many are being worn by Soldiers. “We don’t know where they are. They could be on some Soldier’s head in either Iraq or Afghanistan. They could also be anywhere else in the world,” Brig. Gen. Peter Fuller, head of Program Executive Office Soldier at Fort Belvoir, Va., said during a bloggers’ roundtable May 17 at the Pentagon. PEO Soldier is the Army’s center for advanced equipment.

Since the helmet recall notice went out the night of May 13 to all Army forces, a number of helmets have been turned in by Soldiers at the massive military base at Bagram in Afghanistan, Fuller said.

The suspect helmets could also be on the heads of Air Force or Navy personnel. Up to 24,000 of the recalled ArmorSource helmets purchased by the Army were sent to the Defense Supply Center in Philadelphia, where they were distributed to the other services. 

ArmorSource is one of four vendors that have produced 1.6 million ACHs for the Army, Air Force and Navy. The Marine Corps uses a different type of helmet, called the Lightweight Helmet. The recalled ArmorSource helmets make up just 4 percent of the total ACHs in the Army’s inventory.

Fuller said the Army is working with the Philadelphia supply center to track down all of the defective helmets. There are plenty of helmets in the service’s inventory to replace the recalled headgear, he said, and additional ACHs from other manufacturers have been sent to Iraq and Afghanistan in case more are needed.

Army noncommissioned officers have been told to personally check all of their Soldiers' helmets to look for the defective headgear. The Army’s central warehouses are also examining their ACH stocks to see if any are from ArmorSource. The ArmorSource label is located inside the helmet on the left, by the ear. Recalled helmets should be taken to the base central supply warehouse. All of the recalled helmets will be destroyed, Fuller said.

The defective helmets were produced between August 2007 and November 2009. The Army had contracted with ArmorSource for 102,000 helmets, of which 44,000 were fielded. Another 55,000 are in bonded storage and the Army refused delivery of an additional 3,000.

Questions about the reliability of ArmorSource helmets first arose in November, when Soldiers noticed the factory-applied paint was peeling off them. While the paint has no impact on the helmets' protection, it did raise flags among Army officials, Fuller said.

In December, the Department of Justice informed the Army that it was investigating UniCorps, which makes helmets for the Marine Corps but subcontracts the actual helmet construction to ArmorSource. On Jan. 10, the DOJ told the Army it was expanding its investigation to include ArmorSource’s ACH and recommended that the Army retest the helmets in its inventory.

Army officials went to the ArmorSource plant to see firsthand how the company was addressing the issue of the peeling paint, and what they saw there led them to issue a stop-work order on Feb. 2. Contract termination proceedings began on April 27. The ACHs cost $250 each.

On May 11, DOJ provided “critical additional details” on its investigation, Fuller said. The next day, the Army received the preliminary results from the ballistics tests at Aberdeen, Md. On May 13, the Army issued the recall notice. Army officials said they could not comment on the details of the DOJ investigation. 

Some of the 55,000 ArmorSource helmets in Army storage were pulled for additional ballistics testing at the Army’s test center in Aberdeen. Fuller said the Army’s ballistics testing did not result in “lethal penetrations,” but also said the helmet did not meet “full Army standards.”

He said a combination of “worst-case” scenarios would have to result for troops who might be wearing the ArmorSource ACHs to be injured.

The initial lot of ArmorSource’s ACHs was put through a full range of tests before the Army signed a production contract, and sample helmets passed. Fuller said he did not know why the helmet’s defects were not revealed in those earlier tests, but the helmets pulled and tested this time around were found to have problems.

Col. William Cole, the program manager for Soldier’s protective equipment, said: “The helmets that we pulled at random from our stocks and conducted ballistic testing on fell short on Army standards -- not by much, but the standards are absolute.”