How Effective Is The Ballistic Helmet? I’m not terribly old. In fact, I feel, at best middle aged. But I am old enough to remember a time when SWAT teams did not always use Ballistic Helmets. In fact, when I first joined a SWAT team, we did not use ballistic helmets. Bean counters felt they were too expensive and many of the operators did not want to trade what they thought was...