With future threats emerging and the overall needs of the military changing, the armor mechanics community is always exploiting new materials and technologies to stay at the forefront of defense capabilities. Along these lines, this presentation will cover some of the research conducted at the Army Research Laboratory (ARL) and will be given in two parts. The first part will cover recent work completed on the ballistic testing of two silicon carbides with varying porosity distributions. The second part will go over a brief introduction of the work conducted by the Armor Mechanics Branch at ARL.