You very rarely see depictions of soldiers wearing bullet resistant face masks. I understand that these only protect from small caliber weapons but wouldn’t you take all the protection you could get?
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You could argue the same about any type of PPE in most industries. Why isn’t everyone wearing steel toed boots, hard hats, cut & heat resistant gloves, reflective Nomex, fall restraints, splash resistant goggles etc… all the time? Because they are annoying and if the risk isn’t worth the inconvenience, people would rather not wear them.
Heck, even when there is a legitimate risk people still refuse to wear PPE unless it’s forced upon them. Kind of like when seat belts first became mandated and everyone lost their minds…
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like you said, it only protects against small calibres. Most soldiers are gonna be using rifle cartridges that fly fast. That, and soldiers probably don’t wanna deal with the breathing and visual obstructions.
No God damn way I would have worn it.
My shit was already heavy enough. Besides I was a stupid 19 year old. I had to be reminded to wear by ballistic glasses and probably would have rolled without my frag vest often enough if they would have let me.
No. Even if they would have worked we wouldn’t have worm them.
Sounds heavy, hot and dirty.
They are only useful in movies. The protection offered is relatively low and like helmets more geared to shrapnel with many mobility issues mentioned above.
A lot of people are right when they say it adds a lot of weight and restricts your ability to actually fight by obstructing your vision, making it harder to breath, being hotter, and a whole host of comfort issues with a very limited benefit.
I’ll point out something a lot of people haven’t brought up, protection is usually for critical areas of the body. Most body armor as chest plates and maybe some side plates, they don’t cover 100% of your chest, only the really really vital parts. Plenty of places you can get shot in your torso that are unarmored. That’s because the likelihood of being killed by shots to those places are significantly lower and they would only add weight and bulk. Sure you can get shot in the leg or arm and it could hit an artery but that’s the risk.
The truth is, your face is a pretty safe space to be shot. Unless you are getting hit straight on, a shot to the side of your face or even at 3/4 is very survivable. Essentially as long as the bullet doesn’t go through and hit your brain, brain stem, spinal chord or one of your arteries you’ll probably survive. Now it won’t be great, you’ll absolutely be knocked out or be in shock, you might lose much of your jaw or an eye, there will be facial reconstruction, but you’ll survive. I’d take a shot to my face rather than my brain and as it happens we protect our brains with helmets because while it’s possible to survive a shot to the head, the possibilities are much lower and recovery might leave you in a bad place.
If the trade off is . . .
Wear a ballistic face shield that provides marginal at best protection to the wearer, while impeding your ability to effectively see and kill the enemy,
OR
go without same and be able to better see, sight, and kill those trying to do the same to you,
most soldiers will avoid those face shields like the plague.
Two things. First, the majority of casualties do not occur due to small arms fire. Most casualties in modern war occur from artillery, which these masks would not be effective against. Second, there is a constant balancing act between not wanting your head/face to get damaged, and being able to do things with your head/face such as breathing, seeing, or hearing. If we go back to medieval helmets, period artwork often shows soldiers in pitched battle with raised visors since the ability to see better, breathe more easily, or order subordinates more effectively were more valuable to them than the added protection of keeping their visor down. This is why modern helmets are entirely open faced. The ability to see better and breathe more easily is more important than any token amount of added protection.
Try wearing a ballistic mask on for a few minutes. It can get hot and stuffy and your breath can fog the glass, as well as restrict movement, hearing, and vision. On a battlefield those cons would massively outweigh any pros.
Being able to see a guy before he sees you is much better protection than heavy sweaty mask that you can barely see through and can’t stop a heavy or a fast round anyway.
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