Posted on 10/16/2003 8:17:21 AM PDT by Cannoneer No. 4
WASHINGTON (Army News Service, Oct. 15, 2003) -- The Army's newest vehicles are loaded on ships and ready for travel to Iraq in November.
Now Soldiers in the Army's first Stryker Brigade Combat Team -- the Fort Lewis, Wash.-based 3rd Brigade, 2nd Infantry Division -- just have to wait until early November for their flights to Kuwait on move into Iraq.
But waiting wont be a big deal for Cpl. Jose Chavez because deploying to war is why he and the guys in his unit joined the Army, he said.
Chavez is an infantry team leader in 5th Battalion, 20th Infantry Regiment, at Fort Lewis and joined the brigade a year ago just as it received the Stryker vehicles.
The low-intensity guerilla war the Army is fighting doesnt concern Chavez or the men in his unit either, he said. Their training was always serious and to standard, but everything became even more serious after their deployment orders arrived, Chavez said.
The Army was concerned about the Rocket Propelled Grenade threat, what Chavez called the enemys weapon of choice.
So two new types of armor have been installed on the vehicles. The most obvious add-on to the discerning eye is called slat armor. It resembles a bird cage that will add three feet to the Strykers width, Chavez said.
The slat armor installed on the Strykers resembles a big catchers mask that wraps around the vehicle. The armor is basically a grill of wire mesh that will cause the RPG to detonate away from the vehicle.
Therefore it loses its effectiveness, said Peter Keating, a spokesman for General Dynamics, the chief contractor for the Stryker program.
Keating said that adding the slat armor prior to the brigades deployment would give the unit an operational advantage once it hits the ground in November.
That slat armor is only one step in the extra protection on the Stryker, though.
The Army has also installed ceramic tiles on the vehicles to give them the capability of stopping heavy machine gun rounds up to 14.5mm, said Keating. Depending on the model, up to 126 tiles could be installed, he said.
That caliber benchmark was as an add-on capability by the Army, he said.
Thats better protection than generally most armored vehicles of this type category have in the world today, Keating said. Its a real advantage to have that.
A metal plate has been added to the tiles backside because a General Dynamics sub-contractor didnt stick with the original design of the tiles, Keating said. The ceramic/metal plates will be replaced at a future date possibly during or after the deployment, he said.
Keating said the tiles will act the same as the ceramic plates most Soldiers are wearing in Iraq right now. Lightweight and durable, the added weight wont affect the Strykers performance in Iraq because that weight was figured into its design, he said.
Thats something people tend to forget, Keating said.
Plans are in the works to add another type of armor package to the inventory next spring, said Keating. That add-on armor is called reactive armor. Essentially that armor explodes when an RPG or other anti-tank round hits it, he said.
Its already on M-2 Bradley fighting vehicles in Iraq right now, Keating said.
That reactive armor wont always be on the Stryker, said Keating. It can be put on and taken off as a situation warrants, he said.
The idea for the slat armor isnt new. Historically that type of protection has been used as far back as Vietnam, he said.
But developing and approval only took about six months, Keating said. The approval came in August, he said.
Its been live-fire tested and its been a real rapid response, he said of the testing process.
When Operation Iraqi Freedom started, the unit was going through the first of its two evaluations for deployment. Those tests took place at the National Training Center at Fort Irwin, Calif., and the Joint Readiness Training Center at Fort Polk, La.
The situation on the ground in Iraq - a low-intensity guerrilla war -- was envisioned by then Army Chief of Staff Gen. Eric Shinseki as only one of the environments a Stryker unit would be in, said Maj. Gary Tallman, Army spokesman at the Pentagon.
Shinseki also envisioned major theater wars and support-and-stability operations, also known as humanitarian missions, Tallman said.
The best way to see if the Army's first Stryker-equipped unit is ready to deploy is to look at the validation process the unit went through, Tallman said.
The unit went through what Tallman said was "a full spectrum of training events" before it was certified ready for deployment.
Training included simulating a major theater war, small-scale contingencies and stability and support operations.
All of those events, from the desert environs of Fort Irwin and the restricted, urban-like terrain of Fort Polk, has helped ready the Stryker relatively quickly for deployment, Tallman said.
All of that field time before and after the evaluations was unbelievable but necessary, he said.
You gotta make sure its ready to go to war, he said.
So now it comes down to Chavez and the other Soldiers in the brigade.
Are they ready? Chavez thinks so and said his unit was chomping at the bit.
They heard rumors about deploying to Iraq when they were in California and were disappointed when they didnt go right away, he said. But that doesnt matter now, he said, theyre going and cant wait to hit the ground.
Semper Fi
Carry on.
Schoomaker said he wished that the Army's new Stryker Brigade had been ready for the Iraq war. He would love to have seen it flown in to join the 173rd Airborne Brigade when it jumped into northern Iraq. ''Stryker comes with more infantry in it than any other formation - 1,160 per brigade. the Stryker's speed and agility gives us the best operating radius and abilities we have ever had.''
The Army is sending one brigade of Strykers to Iraq this month, and intends to organize five more, including one for the Army National Guard. ''By the time we get to five or six,'' Schoomaker said, ''we may want to go for even more.''
He said that if the Stryker is used properly, he wasn't worried that the lightly armored, wheeled vehicle would be too vulnerable to hostile fire. ''It doesn't matter what you wrap yourself in; someone is always going to build a bigger bullet,'' he said.
The approximately 300 eight-wheeled armored vehicles that make up a Stryker Brigade Combat Team wouldn't start arriving until early 2006
If the brigade is approved, the military would need an additional 23,000 acres on the Big Island, 1,400 acres on O'ahu, and land for 49 miles of private trails to keep the 20-ton Strykers off public roads as much as possible during training.
The vehicles would be based at Schofield and travel by private trail to Dillingham Airfield and Kahuku Training Area for training. Strykers also would be transported by C-17 cargo jets, and use Pohakuloa Training Area on the Big Island.
So the first two RPG rounds blow away all this crap, then what happens? Please God, the boys will dismount about a mile from town and go in in some appropriate patrol formation, with artillery back-up, and on-call air. THis is a big taxi-cab ... no kind of fighting vehicle.
You could not drive this thing down an American alley.It will be immobile and helpless in the rabbit warren towns and villages of the rest of the world.
The survey by the military newspaper Stars and Stripes says one-third of U.S. troops surveyed in Iraq say their morale is low. And half say they're not likely to stay in the armed forces.
The Canadians are running their 8-wheeled armored cars in Kabul with fair success. You reckon Afghan towns are easier to get around in than Iraqi towns?
They will be stationed on Oahu and shipped or flown to the Big Island for training.
150
My understanding is that the ceramic armor not only failed livefire testing with 14.5mm ammunition, but also was penetrated by hits from the 12,7x108mm DShK heavy machinegun sometimes referred to as a *.51 caliber* and slightly more powerful than the US .50x99mm M2 Browning MG with which the Stryker is armed.
The 12,7mm Dash-ka is not exactly *concealable* under a jacket, no mor than a .50 M2. But it's easier to move than a 14.5mm KPV or PTRD rifle, and should be quite capable of chewing the tires right off one side of a Stryker, and when used from above, as from atop a city roof or the sides of a mountain pass [as when the Afghan Mujahadin ambushed Soviet BTR wheelies in Afghanistan and cut through their roof armor from above] should cut through the Stryker's half-inch steel top plating like hot marbles through butter. And the KSVK semiauto 12,7 Russian rifle equivalent of the M82A1 Barrett Light Fifty should do the same.
-archy-/-
2 Strykers per C-17 sortie load, plus seperate transport for crews, spare parts, [LOTS of extra wheels and tires; I understand they're deploying with 150% spare tires, 12 spares per vehicle] maintenance crews and other useful accessories, assuming fuel and ammo in place where they arrive. Accordingly, a ballpark answer would be 300 flights.
The Air Force originally programmed to buy a total of 120 C-17s, with the last one being delivered in November 2004. The fiscal 2000 budget funded another 14 C-17s for special operations duty.-US Air Force C-17 FactFile.
-archy-/-
If I was a little birdy wanting to see something interesting, I might fly over the Steeles tank gunnery range and Wilcox Multi-Purpose Digital Training Ranges....
Or as the little birdy said: Hey, wasn't that a MGS I just spotted...?
If that's all a C-17 can carry, I don't see the point of the Stryker. You can pack 10 time the HUMVEE mounted fire-power in that bird for a fraction of the cost. Or even one Bradley or M1.
If that's all a C-17 can carry, I don't see the point of the Stryker. You can pack 10 time the HUMVEE mounted fire-power in that bird for a fraction of the cost. Or even one Bradley or M1.
The reason given for the cancellation of the Crusader self-propelled 155mm artillery piece [and more importantly, its equally high-performance ammunition support vehicle] was that only two could be carried aboard a C-17.
And so, given a choice between a full-tracked 155mm SP gun also mounting an M2 .50 Browning heavy MG, with the main gun having a range of 30+ miles, commanders can instead have their choice of an eight-wheeled armored car of similar size and bulk, which mounts only the .50 MG usable out to 1200 meters, or they can walk.
The usual loadout for the M113A3 personnel carrier in a C17 is five of the fully-loaded, 11-ton vehicles, which can also be airdropped from a C17- the Stryker can't. There's also a 1-meter longer stretched version of the M113 known as the MTVL, which can carry a squad of 11 over the Standard M113 or Stryker's 9-man squad, should a medic, combat engineer/EOD minesweeper, K9 operator or POWs need to be transported with the squad. The MTVL is also adaptablte to a somewhat wider range of armament than the parent vehicle, to include the now-experimental 8-shot ground launch Hellfire AT guided missile with a near 10KM tankkilling range.
And of course a mix of armored HUMVEEs and M113A3s in a C17 is very possible, and has been done dozens of times, probably hundreds- if not thousands. The M113A3 and MTVL are amphibious and can swim a river or lake; the HUMVEE of course, is not.
-archy-/-
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