I have worked on some law enforcement/security products for Safariland, and headgear for US special forces (sorry don’t know exactly more about the customer). For design firms these can be very lucrative projects to land, as they measure time in “man-years” so a small firm can have a “bread and butter” client for a long time, easing the worries of overhead and payroll.
Crye Precision in Brooklyn NY does nice work; the founder Caleb Crye is a very good designer/product developer and a Cooper Union grad. I’ve worked in the periphery of some of his headgear projects. After Cooper: Crye Precision | The Cooper Union
On the flip side the bureaucracy is unbelievable.
I think the over-riding sentiment among people who design for the military sounds something like the values shared by the warfighters themselves, that its more about the guy (or girl) next to them in the fight, than it is about the State Dept or politicized overseas conflicts. When designing with a strict rubric of “save this person’s life when being fired upon” the motivation tends to become very clear.
The Eames leg splint was designed expressly for the military.
