Is the US Army ready for the Army Tactical Brassiere?
Turns out there’s quite a history behind the creation of the Army Tactical Brassiere. The need for such a garment was driven home by Operation Desert Storm, the first war where women were eligible to serve in all positions including combat roles.
Good job women soldiers didn’t find themselves in harm’s way at any point between 1991 to 2018, when […]
The idea of an Army bra was first broached in 2018, when [project engineer Ashley Cushon] tried to develop the Biometric Algorithm Monitoring Brassiere (bambi), which would not only keep bosoms in place but would use built-in sensors to monitor physiological changes in the wearer. The high-tech performance undergarment had the potential to tell you if you were tired. It was a non-starter.
Getting the story up to date, in 2023 they’ve designed the Army Tactical Brassiere (featuring four different concepts, since this is the very definition of a problem for which there isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution) and are about to gather data from end-users.
Who knows, give it a year or two and the ATB might be in active service.
Drafting this post I wondered where the UK armed forces were on this topic, half-expecting that the Ministry of Defence would be waiting for the US Army to roll out the Army Tactical Brassiere and then hoping to find a UK supplier to subcontract to produce a UK version of the ATB.
Turns out that according to this article from the UK’s Ministry of Defence since 2021 the British Army has been providing professionally fitted sports bra fitting to all new recruits at all British Army Basic Training centres and at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, working in conjunction with sports bra maker Boobydoo.
The article doesn’t make it clear whether Boobydoo are also responsible for providing support1 to female members of the British Army who are already past the basic training stage of their careers, but then the New Yorker article is also about designing the ATB more than it is about how and when2 it’ll be distributed.
[Via Kottke.org Quick Links]
Sorry. I just couldn’t resist the pun. :-)↩︎
As the article notes, fielding (Army-speak for “distributing”) the ATB is the responsibility of an entirely different division to the one our reporter visited in order to see and try on the ATB. It’s entirely possible that the US Army will follow the Ministry of Defence’s approach of making ATBs available to new recruits initially.↩︎