Materials
The flak jacket consisted of manganese steel plates sewn into a waistcoat made of ballistic nylon (a material engineered by the DuPont company); therefore, flak jackets functioned as an evolved form of plate armour or brigandine. The first flak jacket weighed 22 pounds.
During the Korean and Vietnam wars, the flak jacket was changed and the manganese steel plates were replaced by other materials. The U.S. Army's vests (Body Armor, Fragmentation Protective, Vest M69) weighed under eight pounds and were made of several layers of ballistic nylon. The vests used by the U.S. Marines (Vest, Armored M-1955) weighed more than ten pounds and were a combination of ballistic nylon layers and fiberglass plates known as Doron. Doron was made of the fiberglass fibers in an ethyl cellulose resin under high pressure. It was named after then Col. Georges F. Doriot, then director of the Military Planning Division, Office of the Quartermaster General.
The generation of armor developed in the 1970s through the National Institute of Justice incorporated layers of soft armor in the form of DuPont’s Kevlar fabric, which has since become synonymous with ballistic protection and a general term used for several similar (aramid-based) materials.
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