Premier Body Armor Level IV Plate

During this test, Rob Pincus and PDN Contributor Aquil Bey weren’t playing … they fired a .30-06 armor-piercing round at the Premier Body Armor Stratis Level IV Enhanced Plate.

FAILURE POINTS OF OLDER BODY ARMOR PLATES

Aquil Bey is a former Special Forces soldier who now runs Tailored Defense Training Group. During his time in SF, he wore ceramic body armor plates operationally and can speak to the challenges experienced with them, challenges that the Premier Body Armor plates have overcome. The plates he wore weighed 8 to 10 pounds as opposed to the Stratis Level IV’s 4.4 pounds. Older plates were sensitive to temperature and body sweat – Aquil and fellow soldiers wore the plates inside garbage bags to keep sweat off them.

Older body armor plates also had durability issues and needed to be x-rayed upon returning from a mission to make sure they were not cracked. Even dropping them casually on the ground had the potential to crack them and ruin the integrity of the plate. Dropping on a corner of the plate could cause a hairline fracture diagonally across the plate and a shot could then go through. Rob also experienced this when teaching firearms training courses to elite units.

PREMIER’S NEW DESIGN

In short, Premier Body Armor has overcome this with their hard plates. They have created a tiled design so that if the plate is dropped on a corner, it only affects that small area, not the entire plate. What this means is that these Premier body armor plates are multi-strike capable.

The Stratis Level IV plate from Premier supposedly can stop a .30-06 AP round, so Rob fires one at it. What happens? It’s all in the video.

Does everyone need body armor plates as part of their defensive gear? No, but if you’re in law enforcement, that’s a different story. We encourage you to check out Premier’s hard plates.