The truth about "foreign" armor materials quality
One of the most absurd concepts I see coming from social media is the idea that everything purchased from a foreign source is inferior to US manufactured armor components or materials.
Most US armor manufacturers get at least a portion of their materials from overseas - especially ceramic strike faces. Bitossi (Italy) is arguably the highest quality ballistic tile in the world. They offer ceramic with 98-99.7% purity - much higher than the 90% typical US tile. For a given ceramic material, lower ceramic purity means less redundancy and decreased density. Using a lower purity tile is acceptable given a certain armor system, but it does increase the chances of inferior homogenous distribution and subsequent performance problems.
Even if the tile is obtained from US providers, the adhesives are not. Most armor adhesives come from Europe.
High quality is high quality, no matter where in the world you find it. We bond the highest quality materials we can find given the type of ceramic, the purity, resins in the polyethylene and the adhesives. When designing an armor system, the bonding elements and performance interfaces between all of these sub-systems matters.