Next Generation Ballistic Eyewear

What we talked about.

Sunny Ray sits down with Chris McKenna, a former Maine law enforcement officer turned inventor, who spent nearly two decades on patrol in Waterville and as a sergeant in Skowhegan before shifting into product design and defense technology. Alongside police work McKenna built a creative parallel career, writing nine feature screenplays, producing award winning short films, and designing book covers, a restless drive that eventually led him to identify a major gap in protective gear standards. He explains how ballistic eyewear has not meaningfully changed since the 1950s, leaving the eye and mandible region, the so called T box, without the same protection level as helmets or body armor, despite accounting for a large share of battlefield injuries and increasingly from drone strikes. McKenna details the years long path to developing and patenting a transparent ballistic lens capable of stopping fragmentation, the surprise of having his patent temporarily recalled after being granted, and why he believes adoption, not engineering, is the real obstacle facing his company Tardigrade. The conversation traces his origin story from a childhood accident with a dented hard hat through his law enforcement years to his current push for a new industry standard.

A Maine cop turned inventor on why ballistic eyewear hasn't changed since the 1950s, and how he's fixing it.

The questions, and the answers.

Give us the 30 second, high level version of what you're building.

I'm changing the eyewear standard for law enforcement, military, and first responders. It hasn't moved since the 1950s, and I found a way to do it that's not only practical but also maintains the weight standard. We're basically knocking that wall down.

Why is this important?

When you talk about standardization of protection equipment, look at the helmet, it protects against fragmentation and blast. But the T box, the eye and mandible area, has no equivalent standard. In Afghanistan and Iraq that small area accounted for about 14 percent of battlefield injuries, and now drones have made head level bursts even more common.

How could this have been overlooked for so long?

You run into institutionalism. Companies already make a lot of money on eyewear, why would they change a standard when they have a bottom line to feed? They've got tooling and people in place. I'm basically a disruptor to all that, which is why it's taken so long, yelling at a wall for seven plus years before finally getting real traction in the last year and a half.

Where did you grow up, and what pulled you toward putting on the badge in the first place?

I grew up in Oldtown, Maine, a few blocks from where Stephen King lived. My dad brought home a hard hat from the mill, I put it on, climbed a treehouse, and fell out, hitting a rock. It dented the helmet but saved me. That sparked my fascination with personal protection, later fed by G.I. Joes and playing Police Quest as a kid.

What did your years on patrol in Waterville teach you about how gear does or doesn't hold up when it matters?

You learn things can turn serious in a snap, like a routine traffic stop going bad. You become very aware of your equipment, how it's set up and used in the field. You start thinking about those things constantly, almost obsessively, the way most officers eventually do.

You hold a patent on transparent ballistic armor that plenty of people assumed was physically impossible in a lens. What was the insight?

It's a proprietary stack up, I don't want to give away the details. But think of it like cars. Old cars were rigid steel and you rode the impact straight through. Modern cars are designed to crush and dissipate energy. I applied that same thinking to the lens, it just took years to get there.

What in the drone footage and data from Ukraine made you certain the timing for this was now?

Drones changed everything. You used to be able to get within a mile of a hot zone, now you have to stay a hundred miles out because of drones. Ukraine looks like World War One trench warfare again, everyone digging in. Blasts target head level now because extremities are already protected by chaps and groin armor.

You said the most counterintuitive thing you've learned is that this problem can be solved easily. Why are people wrong to push back on that?

Easily in the sense that building and distributing it is a walk in the park, the technology exists. The hard part is adoption, convincing people to pay more for something when there's no standard requiring it yet. That's the real fight, changing mindset, not the engineering.