Military
Some mounted machine guns and artillery pieces are equipped with metal armor plates to protect the gunners from sniper fire and shrapnel from explosions. As well, gun shields are sometimes improvised in the field in using salvaged metal plates. The most common examples were seen in the Vietnam War when the crews of armored fighting vehicles and Patrol Boats would affix metal plates to the machine guns, though gun shields have been in use as early as World War I.
Gun shields fell out of widespread use after Vietnam, but they have seen a resurgence in popularity during the 1990s. Israeli military analysts began urging the use of gun shields when they noted that the automatic weapon fire-filled modern battleground presented a grave risk to soldiers who exposed themselves to fire upon the enemy. In particular, it was noted that many casualties were being hit in areas not protected by body armor or the helmet, such as the neck or face.
The U.S. began using gun shields during the 2000s-era conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. The major drawback of gun shields is that they limit the visibility of the user to the front, though new designs such as the Transparent Armor Gun Shield (TAGS for short) will alleviate this without sacrificing user protection.
Read more about this topic: Gun Shield
Famous quotes containing the word military:
“There are many examples of women that have excelled in learning, and even in war, but this is no reason we should bring ‘em all up to Latin and Greek or else military discipline, instead of needle-work and housewifry.”
—Bernard Mandeville (1670–1733)
“Nothing changes my twenty-six years in the military. I continue to love it and everything it stands for and everything I was able to accomplish in it. To put up a wall against the military because of one regulation would be doing the same thing that the regulation does in terms of negating people.”
—Margarethe Cammermeyer (b. 1942)
“War both needs and generates certain virtues; not the highest, but what may be called the preliminary virtues, as valour, veracity, the spirit of obedience, the habit of discipline. Any of these, and of others like them, when possessed by a nation, and no matter how generated, will give them a military advantage, and make them more likely to stay in the race of nations.”
—Walter Bagehot (1826–1877)