New Helmets Defective, Pentagon Says

The Pentagon said Wednesday that more than half of the new synthetic helmets it bought to replace the “steel pot” headgear worn for decades by U.S. soldiers are improperly assembled and have soft spots on the top.

The Defense Logistic Agency purchased 761,000 of the new high-technology helmets for the Army and Marine Corps, and 461,000 were found to be defective. But Pentagon officials said that no decision has been made on whether to recall the helmets.

Some of the defective helmets were used during the 1983 invasion of Grenada, but Pentagon officials said they do not know whether any casualties resulted from the defects.

The Pentagon said the defective helmets were manufactured by the Gentex Corp. and were made of Kevlar, an extremely tough synthetic fiber with high energy-absorbing qualities that makes it stronger in some characteristics than steel.

Shrapnel Resistance

The old steel helmets could withstand bits of shrapnel traveling at 1,300 feet per second, Pentagon spokesmen said, but the new helmets can withstand shrapnel at 1,800 to 2,000 feet per second.

The defective helmets were put together out of 17 layers made up of strips of Kevlar, they said. The strips were cut from sheets of material, shaped like parallelograms, and then assembled and shaped to form the shell of the helmet, officials said.

Instead, Pentagon officials said, all of the helmets should have been assembled from layers of whole sheets of Kevlar, a process that would have made them stronger.

“The potential exists, because it wasn’t made the way it was supposed to have been made, for that to be a weak spot,” an Army official said, referring to the crown of the Gentex helmet.

$40 Less Per Helmet

The official, speaking on the condition that he not be identified, said the company, which was paid $21.5 million for the 461,000 helmets it produced, was able to save about $40 on each helmet “and didn’t pass it on” to the Pentagon. The other 300,000 bought by the defense agency were made by another company.

Pentagon officials said no decision had been made on whether to take legal action against Gentex. “It is possible we’ll try to get the money back,” one Pentagon spokesman said.

He said the improper manufacturing was discovered when the helmet was sent to a laboratory for a structural analysis.

L. Peter Frieder, president of Gentex, denied any wrongdoing and told the Associated Press that “over-interpretation” and “poorly defined specifications” were at the heart of the controversy.