Striking Back

In early August, a battalion in the Army's 3rd Brigade, 2nd Infantry Division operating in northern Iraq received orders to pack up and move 500 kilometers south to participate in a key combat operation. The battalion arrived at its new location within 24 hours. To civilians, that might not sound very impressive. To most soldiers, it was revolutionary.

"That's unheard of in my Army experience," said Maj. Chuck Hodges, the brigade operations officer, in a telephone interview from Iraq. "[In another unit] it would take a couple of days at best-about three-to get everything geared up and ready to go." The 3rd Brigade is the only one in Iraq equipped with the Army's new medium-weight combat vehicle called the Stryker. By battlefield standards, Strykers are fast, traveling 55 to 60 miles per hour, and they get better mileage than many civilian sport utility vehicles, which cuts down on the logistics train needed to support them. In the 10 months the 3rd Brigade has been deployed to Iraq, the vehicles have shown themselves to be exceptionally capable and reliable, says Hodges.

A senior military officer at U.S. Central Command at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Fla., which oversees military operations in the Middle East, says Strykers have expanded the Army's capability in Iraq. This officer, Hodges and others say Strykers and their occupants have withstood numerous attacks from rocket-propelled grenades and roadside bombs. The vehicle has a built-in winch that enables it to recover from explosions. This self-repair capability has been particularly useful in Iraq, where improvised explosive devices litter the highways and have blown the tracks off numerous Bradley Fighting Vehicles and Abrams tanks-the heavy hitters among the Army's combat vehicles.

To be sure, Strykers deployed in Iraq have less firepower than Bradleys and tanks. But they are far faster, easier to maintain, more maneuverable and outfitted with superior communications equipment, all of which renders the soldiers using them capable of some operations previously impossible for the Army.

The Stryker family of vehicles-there are eight variants and two more under development-is the centerpiece of the Army's plans to transform itself into a more agile, responsive combat force. The Stryker's performance in Iraq has been much anticipated by both its advocates and critics. For years, detractors (many of them associated with manufacturers who lost the bid to build the vehicles or those proposing alternatives) have said the Stryker is too heavy to be deployed quickly and too light-skinned to withstand enemy attack. To deal with the vulnerability issue, the Army has retrofitted the vehicle in Iraq with a cagelike armor package.

"The complaint we always heard was the Stryker's not armored enough, it's going to get itself blown up," says Hodges. "When we survived the first two hits it emboldened everyone's confidence in the vehicle's capabilities."

Weight Problems

The Stryker is intended to fill a gap in capability the Army has suffered since the end of the Cold War. The service had spent decades building and pre-positioning equipment for a heavy-armored tank force that could go head-to-head against the Soviets. The service also maintained light infantry forces that could be deployed worldwide within a matter of hours. What it lacked was a force that could deploy quickly with enough firepower to be able to respond to the kinds of battlefield threats the military faces today.

In late 1999, then-Chief of Staff Gen. Eric Shinseki told Army leaders that they were facing irrelevancy if they didn't build a new force capable of responding to post-Cold War threats. With the ultimate goal being to design units that are as quickly deployable as light infantry, but as lethal as heavy armor, Shinseki set out to create "medium-weight, interim" units with off-the-shelf technology that would tide the Army over until technologists could develop the ideal force. The 3rd Brigade is the first of those interim units. At 19 tons, the Stryker is far lighter than the 30-ton Bradley Fighting Vehicle or the 70-ton Abrams tank, and with Stryker's 14.5 mm armor-piercing machine gun, it carries more firepower than light-infantry units.

But it's not a perfect answer to the Army's problems. The Government Accountability Office pointed out in an August report that Strykers are harder to transport than Army planning documents had indicated. The Stryker is designed to be transported within a theater of operations by C-130 aircraft-the workhorse of the Air Force's tactical airlift fleet.

Thus far, the eight variants of the Stryker in production have been certified as being deployable by C-130, but just barely. GAO reported: "An armored C-130 aircraft taking off in ideal conditions, such as moderate air temperature, could transport 38,000 pounds for a maximum range of 860 miles. Adding just 2,000 pounds on board the aircraft for associated cargo such as mission-related equipment or ammunition reduces the C-130 aircraft's takeoff-to-landing range to only 500 miles. Furthermore, a C-130 with a 38,000-pound Stryker vehicle on board would not be able to take off from locations in higher elevations, such as Af-ghanistan, during daytime in the summer."

Army officials maintain that the C-130 remains a viable transport option in most cases. In addition, the C-130 is not the only way to transport Strykers across a battlefield-they can be flown by the larger C-17, drive themselves to the battle, or be shipped by rail. Nonetheless, Sens. John Warner, R-Va., and John McCain, R-Ariz., stalwarts on the Senate Armed Services Committee, both have said they intend to hold hearings on Stryker transportability later this fall.