You’ve probably seen all kinds of products — including mobile accessories – whose manufacturers advertise they’re made of special military-grade materials or meet military specifications. The message manufacturers are trying to send boils down to “Our products are rugged, and if you don’t believe us here’s proof: they adhere to military specifications.” That sounds impressive, but what does it all mean?
According to the bastion of credibility that is Wikipedia, “a United States defense standard, often called a military standard, “MIL-STD”, “MIL-SPEC”, or (informally) “MilSpecs”, is used to help achieve standardization objectives by the U.S. Department of Defense. Standardization is beneficial in achieving interoperability, ensuring products meet certain requirements, commonality, reliability, total cost of ownership, compatibility with logistics systems, and similar defense-related objectives. Defense standards are also used by other non-defense government organizations, technical organizations, and industry.” The entry goes on to state “According to the Government Accountability Office (GAO), military specifications “describe the physical and/or operational characteristics of a product”, while military standards “detail the processes and materials to be used to make the product.” Military handbooks, on the other hand, are primarily sources of compiled information and/or guidance. The GAO acknowledges, however, that the terms are often used interchangeably.”
Many of the MIL-SPEC cases we carry (Including products from Body Glove, Element, Griffin, Incipio, LifeProof, PureGear, and Speck.) fall into a variation of MIL-STD-810, which indicates “test methods for determining the environmental effects on equipment.” That makes sense within the context of the mobile accessory industry. Our partners are so smart and rugged! According to MIL-STD-810’s page, “MIL-STD-810 addresses a broad range of environmental conditions that include: low pressure for altitude testing; exposure to high and low temperatures plus temperature shock (both operating and in storage); rain (including wind blown and freezing rain); humidity, fungus, salt fog for rust testing; sand and dust exposure; explosive atmosphere; leakage; acceleration; shock and transport shock; gunfire vibration; and random vibration. The standard describes environmental management and engineering processes that can be of enormous value to generate confidence in the environmental worthiness and overall durability of a system design. The standard contains military acquisition program planning and engineering direction to consider the influences that environmental stresses have on equipment throughout all phases of its service life. The document does not impose design or test specifications. Rather, it describes the environmental tailoring process that results in realistic material designs and test methods based on material system performance requirements. Finally, there are limitations inherent in laboratory testing that make it imperative to use proper engineering judgement to extrapolate laboratory results to results that may be obtained under actual service conditions. In many cases, real-world environmental stresses (singularly or in combination) cannot be duplicated in test laboratories. Therefore, users should not assume that an item that passes laboratory testing also will pass field/fleet verification tests.”
Some terms and tests are purely marketing gimmicks, but in the case of military specifications, there’s no fog obscuring the war on keeping devices in pristine working order. We don’t know but we’ve been told, our rugged cases are mighty bold.
Additional Reading
Military Drop Tested Cases from VoiceComm
U.S. Army Test and Evaluation Command Standardization