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I’ve always believed the Stryker became bloated and overweight because of “mission creep” in it’s design, but troops patrolling in and fighting from these vehicles have reported overwhelmingly positive results.

1. Superior up-time. Wheeled vehicles don’t take as much maintenance or incur down-time like their tracked counterparts. And they’re much easier to fix when they do go down.

2. Superior mobility. Strkyer can move quicker and quieter than tracked vehicles. I spent most of my military career with tracked vehicles and the Stryker does have an edge here.

3. Survivability. There are cases where Stryker’s have taken serious hits from IEDs and have been ROLLED BACK OVER to drive away. When you wire two or three 155mm shells together, no vehicle is going to survive without injury. Even the mighty Abrams has fallen to a few roadside blasts of high-order.

While the concept and implementation can be improved, the Stryker seems to be a very popular vehicle that is well-supported by the troops that use them.

The Stryker program originally was to make a vehicle that could be carried by ONE C-130. The current version takes 2 C-130â€™s to move it. Wheeled does have itâ€™s advantages. M-1â€™s have had over 100 damaged so badly they had to be returned to the factory for repair. The South Africans have a beast(name escapes me at the moment) that has seen some action in Iraq. it does very well against IEDâ€™s and is light enough to be carried by a C-130.In the end a Stryker is better than an up armored Hummer but still not a silver bullet.

When you wire two or three 155mm shells together, no vehicle is going to survive without injury. Even the mighty Abrams has fallen to a few roadside blasts of high-order.

Very true. SO has the magnificnt Merkava.

I have reservations about the Strykers, but don't think we have enough data yet - like you I've heard good and bad. I suspect they'll prove themselves valuable, just not as the cure-all magic fit-for-all-purposes vehicle some people astoundingly thought they would be. War, like any other human activity, requires a selection of different tools for different purposes. The Stryker is likely to be one of them.

Like a lot of military projects, Stryker evolved from concept to delivery. It's mission or "purpose" was constantly being defined and redefined by the politicians and the military brass while the designers and the engineers tried to keep up with the moving target of the concept. What was untimately delivered was far far removed from what was originally conceived. The world and the tools we need to work in it can change a lot faster than we are able to conceive, design, fund, and deliver such vehicles or weapon systems.
This is my "old ride":

The old 113 did it's job in it's day;
but it would be devastated in the current world situation.