An assessment of the current state-of-the-art of incapacitation by air-blast.
Target vulnerability methodology requires a criticality measure for all international components which contribute to a system or to a system's weapon effectiveness, including that of the human target. Such measures have been developed for personnel targets and for kinetic energy penetrators; however, there is presently no generally accepted quantitative measure of incapacitation to infantry or crew personnel from the prime blast threat. Vulnerability analysts presently use lethality data derived from Lovelace Foundation research to infer an incapacitation level for blast, but these criteria are not very realistic in that they tend to underestimate casualty production from blast threats. Thus, a generalized criteria for estimating incapacitation to military personnel from air blast overpressures is urgently needed to provide vulnerability analysts a realistic measure of blast effectiveness as well as to establish a common base for comparing incapacitation to personnel from blast and from kinetic energy threat mechanisms.