Shattered Minds: How the Pentagon Fails Our Troops with Faulty Helmets

Shattered Minds is the first book to investigate how American military bureaucracies have let our troops down by failing to upgrade one of the most important pieces of personal safety equipment - the combat helmet. Two longtime employees of North Dakota defense contractor Sioux Manufacturing discovered that the required density of the Kevlar material woven into netting of combat helmets was being shorted. After bringing their discovery to the attention of management, rather than cleaning up the illegal practice, their boss accused them of stealing company secrets and having an adulterous affair. Both employees were fired, leading to a lawsuit and a judgment they won in court which eventually brought the company's bad faith practices to light. Around the same time, a separate whistleblower, retired Navy doctor Robert Meaders, was pulled into a bizarre and irrational struggle with Army and Marine bureaucracies when he found out from his Marine grandson that the protective webbing inside the military helmets provided to troops was inadequate. Why was the military so resistant to upgrading its combat equipment, the most essential gear used to protect from Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) that plagues soldiers long after their days of combat? By interweaving these two sets of whistleblowers' stories, authors Robert Bauman and Dina Rasor explain why the military, despite news coverage with revelations about these whistleblowers' personal efforts, continued to do the indefensible. Using their combined 85 years of knowledge covering and investigating the Pentagon, the authors try to explain why such a betrayal of our troops has persisted. They also offer information on how the public, press, and military departments can fix the problem and give U.S. troops a better helmet that will help them survive their service to the United States of America.