By John Jeffay, NoCamels -
Countless American soldiers owe their lives to the armored vehicles that protected them from bullets, bombs and improvised explosive devices (IEDs) in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The same armor is now being incorporated into the 150,000-strong fleet of new vehicles that is currently replacing the military’s all-purpose Hummers and jeeps.
But few of those servicemen and women who are being protected will have any idea where the armor was designed.
Kibbutz Sasa, close to the border with Lebanon in northern Israel, has a dairy and a chain of ice cream stores, and grows kiwi, apple, avocado and grapefruit.
It’s also home to Plasan, world leader in armor protection technology for military vehicles.
Plasan has signed contracts worth billions of dollars with the US Army, among others.
It succeeds by challenging orthodox thinking. Other companies designing welded steel boxes to keep the “soft targets” inside a vehicle safe.
“We had an alternative plan,” says Nir Kahn, Plasan’s director of design. “We looked at it like an Ikea wardrobe, instead of as a welded steel box.”
The box is a workable solution, he says, but it’s very heavy, expensive and it takes a long time to build.
Plasan developed a radical alternative, which they call a kitted hull. It’s a bolt-on kit that is lighter, cheaper, and much more adaptable than the box – but still offers the same level of protection.
It’s also much quicker to produce, and that proved critical when the US realized it urgently needed to better protect its soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan.
“This is a kit which you bolt together, which means we can mix and match ceramics, Kevlar, composites and other materials,” says Kahn.
Plasan was founded in 1985, a time when the Israel Defense Forces was battling Hezbollah-backed fighters in Southern Lebanon, and shortly before the First Intifada (Palestinian uprising).
“The IDF started to need protection for light vehicles like jeeps and Humvee,” says Kahn.
“Nobody else really had ever protected those kinds of things. They were not meant to be frontline vehicles. They were only ever a runaround.
“What changed in Israel in the 1990s was that there was no longer a frontline. But you still wanted a light vehicle because you weren’t going to start driving around doing patrols in a tank.”
The patented protection that Plasan developed for domestic use proved to be a lifesaver for the US, when it deployed its forces in Afghanistan (2001) and Iraq (2003).
“The Americans went in with mostly unprotected vehicles,” says Kahn.
“The idea was that after the ‘shock and awe’ air bombardments, they would be able to just roll around in unprotected vehicles and there’d be no threat.
“History had alternative plans, and those unprotected vehicles became really very dangerous places to be.”
What the US needed was what are called MRAPs – Mine Resistant Ambush Protected vehicles – and it needed them yesterday. Plasan was able to churn out the armor for 4,000 MRAPs in a year, which was far quicker than anyone making traditional steel boxes.
It’s now building on that success by providing the armor for thousands of the US military’s Joint Light Tactical Vehicles (JLTVs). They’re replacing the Hummer, also known as the Humvee (High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicle or HMMWV) made famous by the actor-turned-politician Arnold Schwarzenegger.
In 2015, Oshkosh Defense in Wisconsin won the contract to build the first 20,000 JLTVs, with Plasan providing the armor.
The contract went out to tender again after seven years and this time it was won by a rival business, AM General of Indiana. Again, Plasan is providing the armor.
“We’re not a well-known company, not even in Israel,” says Kahn. “But we’re the winning card that other companies hold. We work quietly in the background. We don’t make a big fuss, we don’t make a lot of noise.
“When we were designing it [the armor for the JLTV], I was hyper-aware that we were replacing an American icon. This is replacing the Humvee that had replaced the jeep. I felt a weight on my shoulders.
“And I, as a British-educated designer on a small kibbutz north of Israel was directing it,” he says.
“There are other companies developing ballistic materials. And there are other companies, of course that can do vehicle design, and there are companies that can manufacture. But having all three of those working as closely as we are here under one roof, that’s a unique ticket.”
According to Kahn, Plasan incorporates the same level of protection in gradually smaller, lighter vehicles, through the materials it uses – and through its design and engineering.
It has, for example, an international patent on how the driver’s seat is positioned.
“It’s not a patent on the seat,” he says. “It’s not a patent on the mechanism, it’s a patent on the angles of how the person is sitting in the vehicle and how you adjust that according to the different sizes of people.
“There are also energy-absorbing floors that prevent legs from breaking if the vehicle is thrown three or four meters up into the air and then comes crashing down.”
Plasan blows up its vehicles at test a site in near Be’er Sheva, southern Israel. “We design, analyze, build the prototype, put it on the back of the truck, send it down to be blown up, then bring it back and all crawl over it,” says Kahn.
The company’s next project is an off-road four-seater called Wilder. It’s smaller and lighter than the JLTV – and can even be driven by remote control.
