What it’s really like to wear the famous bomb suit.

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Hello and happy Thursday. I hope that, wherever you are, you’re safe from the latest outbreak of war¹. This week I’m going to answer a question I got a lot when I was still in service: what is it like to wear a bomb suit? This is also known as an EOD suit, a blast suit, or (if you’re my wife), a “bunny suit” or “gimp suit” (depending on how charitable/freaky she was feeling).

Bomb suits are something that everyone associates with explosive ordnance disposal (EOD), along with robots and “controlled explosions.” The lone operator walking toward a suspect device while wearing this heavy armour is one of the enduring images of the trade:

I’ll start out by describing the suits themselves: what they’re used for, and what they’re definitely not for. Then I’ll talk about the physical reality of having to wear one. I’ll wrap up by laying out what this means for the practice of EOD. In other words, how the limitations of the EOD suit constrain the actions of the EOD team.

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What the EOD suit is… and what it’s not

A bomb suit is an all-over piece of modern armour which is designed to protect the wearer from the effects of explosions. Specifically, they protect against:

• Primary blast injury, i.e. the blast wave itself. This is a high-pressure pulse of air which can burst eardrums and slosh internal organs into jelly. The suit incorporates foams and gels which absorb some of this blast energy.
• Secondary blast injury, i.e. fragments from the bomb and things that are picked up and thrown by the blast wave. Fragmentation is the most dangerous aspect of any explosive blast. EOD suits protect against this with kevlar and hard armour materials covering most of the body.
• Tertiary blast injury, i.e. being picked up and thrown against something hard by the blast wave. The EOD suit protects against this by cushioning the spine.

The bomb suit weighs 35 kg and the helmet is another 10 kg. Some of the most popular versions come from Med-Eng. Their two latest models show some of the common features: a blast jacket with high collar, a helmet with full visor, an armoured chest-plate, blast trousers, and a “nappy” which you can’t see but which gives extra protection to the groin. The over-boots are always worn by models but never (in my experience) by operators.

You might wonder why, in both models above, the hands are unarmoured. This is because dexterity is crucial in EOD. You absolutely must have the full and unencumbered use of your fingers.

The only time that we wore gloves was to avoid contaminating forensic evidence, in which case they were blue latex ones which provided no protection to one’s hands.

You will note the general lack of gloves in the pictures below:

Can an EOD suit protect against every threat? No, of course not. If you’re working on a large improvised explosive device (IED) when it initiates, then you’re probably pink mist. But if it’s a small IED, like a pipe bomb, then the suit will likely protect everything except your hands (see above).

It also provides protection when you’re walking to and from the IED. Blast pressures scale off sharply with distance (to the extent that I doubt the death scene of the operator in The Hurt Locker was realistic, but I’m being pedantic).

This limitation aside, you might still assume from the above that a bomb suit provides far more protection than the usual combination of body armour, helmet, and (possibly) ballistic glasses or visor which soldiers usually wear to protect themselves. That might lead you to wonder why all (or at least more) soldiers don’t wear heavy protective gear like this into combat.

The first and less important reason is that bomb suits are not actually designed for ballistic protection in the same way that helmets and body armour are. The heavy, tough material which dissipates a blast wave is not necessarily the best protection against a hard impact from a rigid bullet.

Bomb suits are designed to withstand impact from fragmentation, sure, but this is balanced with the blast protection requirement. Besides, the fragments used to test bomb suits are not the same as bullets:

The second and more important reason that large protective suits aren’t on general issue is that they destroy your ability to run, crawl, take cover, aim, shoot, run again… basically, all the things that a soldier needs to be able to do.

There are many scenes in The Hurt Locker which make me roll my eyes, but this one is up there. Where the hell does he pull a pistol from? And what does he think he’s going to achieve with it?

I found an interesting discussion paper from the Sacramento bomb squad (.pdf link) which discussed the tactical problem of firing weapons while suited up. Pistols were actually half-okay (I would be a bit sceptical, but then again these guys are cops, so firing a pistol is much more important for them than it would be for someone military like me). Long guns were a no-go, unsurprisingly.

It turns out that wearing a bomb suit seriously hinders your ability to move. Let’s talk about that a bit more in the next section.

How the bomb suit feels to wear

Normally, when I get dressed, I do it myself. I’m lucky enough to have my own faculties but not lucky enough to have a valet or manservant to do this tedious task for me. Putting on a bomb suit, however, was the one time that I could stand still while someone else dressed me.

That was the only good thing about the suit. And even that wasn’t great. The EOD suit turns you from a reasonable thinking human being into a blithering idiot. All it takes is about thirty minutes of searching in the undergrowth for an IED.

EOD suits are so heavy and clumsy that your range of motion and agility are severely limited. You waddle around like a bad robot, shuffling on your feet to look different directions because it’s easier than turning your head. Getting up and down from lying to kneeling to standing (which you do a lot of) takes immense energy.

Your spatial awareness takes some adjusting in the EOD suit. As you might imagine, the job tries to give you a strong aversion to kicking or elbowing IEDs, even by accident. That’s easier said than done when you weigh 50% more, with a similar increase in physical volume. You learn to take your time, to always look twice before stepping anywhere, and to rely on slow, plodding movements.

This duel between the English King and French Dauphin in Netflix’s 2019 The King made me think about wearing an EOD suit. Not that I ever had to fight someone while wearing it, but the clunky, clumsy movements and the quick exhaustion brought back memories of my time in bomb disposal.

You’re supposed to spend no longer than 30-45 minutes in the suit at a time (shorter still if it’s warm). In practice, I’ve seen it pushed to an hour at times. You might also make several approaches during the same operation, returning to your truck and team in between to de-suit, drink water, and update the team on the plan.

The lazy operator (and I always had this weakness) will be tempted to cram more activity into each approach and therefore minimise the total amount of time spent in a suit. Because if there’s anything worse than putting on the heavy suit for your first approach, it’s putting on a heavier, dirtier, rain- and sweat-sodden suit for your fourth. This is a temptation which must be resisted, however, because longer approaches make for mistakes, and EOD is one of those trades which does not reward mistakes:

You can add “EOD operator” to the list above, although you might not last long enough to be fired (except in a literal sense).

But wait, you say. What about these famous air-cooling systems which are included in EOD suits? Surely, they make wearing it a pleasant experience?

Not quite. Any setting short of the maximum provides no relief, and this max setting itself comes at the cost of a jet engine roaring in your helmet, drowning out what little you could hear beforehand. You don’t need to worry about losing your hearing for too long, however, because the batteries (brand new before you put on the suit) inevitably run out halfway through your approach. When they do, your heat stress (which was only bubbling under the surface) bursts forth and threatens to take you down.

Still, you use it because it’s a damn sight better than the alternative, which is no airflow at all. You use it until it breaks down and then you limp back to your control point, strip down, and curse the system and the engineers who designed it, before carefully replacing every single one of the dozen or so batteries needed to make it work again (however briefly).

The EOD suit, in short, is a massive pain in every respect. But you wear it, because the rules say you have to it might just save your life someday.

Conclusion: What this means for EOD tactics

As I wrote previously, there are some seriously unsexy aspects of EOD to go along with the hero moments:

Planning is a crucial (albeit unsexy) aspect of EOD. An EOD suit, on the other hand, is not at all conducive to proper planning. You would find it hard to plan a piss-up in a brewery in an EOD suit², let alone plan to defeat a complex and unpredictable explosive device placed by persons unknown with the aim of killing, maiming, and destroying people, property, and you.

What this means for EOD tactics is that the team makes the plan first, debates it, tests it, and practices it without the distraction and burden of an EOD suit. Only when the operator is happy with the plan and knows it inside out does he or she allow the team to dress them in a bomb suit.

I’ve written previously about how Hollywood gets radio communications wrong. Radios aren’t for making plans, they’re for executing plans which were already made, discussed, and rehearsed long beforehand.

With EOD suits, this tendency is amplified. I rarely used a radio for my manual approaches³. There was normally a pretty simple pre-arranged signal with the team to signify “abandon the approach and return to the control point.” There’s not much else that the team might want to communicate to you, since the correct response to nearly ever scenario will be to return to the truck, remove the suit, and determine the next step of the plan. Lord knows, you’re not going to make a good choice while you’re downrange, staring at an IED and wearing 45 kg of armour.

EOD suits are amazing inventions which have saved many an operator’s life and limb. They do have a trade-off, though, like any piece of technology. Cars make you fat, computers break your back, phones rewire your brain… and bomb suits make you dumb.

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Cover picture: Examination of a suspected vest for explosives. ©Bundeswehr/Bienert (translated from German). Bundeswehr-Fotos, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

1. Which I’ll be writing about in due course. For the moment I’m watching, thinking, and praying. ↩︎
2. An arresting image. Note to self: look into this sometime. ↩︎
3. There’s normally a pretty strict control over all radio-controlled devices near IEDs and the weapons used to counter IEDs. ↩︎