How to add Hard Armor Plates to your Soft Body Armor Vest

Soft body armor vests are standard-issue for almost every law enforcement officer in the US, Canada and Europe. I wore my soft body armor almost everyday for my seven and a half years on the job in San Diego County.

However, there are times when you want the added protection of hard armor plates in addition to your soft body armor vest. In fact, I came up with the idea for what would become our TCCC Base Layer Shorts on just such a callout where we needed to up-armor to hard plates because our suspect was armed with a rifle (it would later turn out that the rifle was an M1 Garand, so our Level III rifle plates were toast if he sent his .30-06 rounds our way). For those times, and for vests equipped with some combination of Velcro hook or loop and/or MOLLE, IcePlate® MOLLE Sleeve is there to let you augment your soft body armor vest with hard armor plates.

While IcePlate® MOLLE Sleeve is designed specifically for the Medium ESAPI profile IcePlate® Curve to create the world's best, most powerful and most capable plate carrier hydration system, it is also perfectly suited and designed to carry hard armor plates. Here are some pictures for context as well as some setup videos.

IcePlate® MOLLE Sleeve will carry any of the following: IcePlate® Classic, IcePlate® Curve, Medium SAPI 10" x 12" x 1" hard armor plate, Medium ESAPI 9.5" x 12.5" x 1" hard armor plate, Medium SAPI 10" x 12" x 0.25" steel armor plate (not recommended).

IcePlate® MOLLE Sleeve Instructions, Setup Video

MOLLE Plate Carrier Hydration Setup