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FreeRepublic , LLC PO BOX 9771 FRESNO, CA 93794
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Posted on 10/11/2003 6:56:10 AM PDT by Cannoneer No. 4
TACOMA -- The Army's faster and more versatile new Stryker brigade, developed at Fort Lewis, yesterday began loading more than 2,500 combat vehicles and equipment aboard cavernous ships bound for a monthlong voyage to Iraq.
But some of the troops in this vanguard of the 21st-century Army carry things more personal.
Capt. Roy Montgomery's wife, Karen, gave him a special journal in which to record all that the 25-year-old Arizona native's senses will take in.
Sgt. 1st Class Michael Hall, a 52- year-old Tennessean who joined the military in 1968 during the Vietnam War, will again take the coin his wife has given him during all his deployments.
Staff Sgt. John Vuksinic, 34, of Chicago will take pictures and memories of the early Christmas he just celebrated with his 2-year-old son, Seth, and wife, Karen, a middle-school math teacher.
"She got me a new laptop for the dirt over there to eat up," he said. "And every husband will have a picture of his wife."
The men and women of the unit are busy gathering memories to savor once they are gone.
"We appreciate the little things more. Taking my wife to dinner, sitting on a couch watching television while my son climbs all over me, these are little things we don't take for granted," Vuksinic said yesterday as the brigade's heavy-combat vehicles rumbled aboard the Navy ship Sisler.
The three soldiers are members of the Fort Lewis-based 3rd Brigade, 2nd Infantry Division, the first of two Stryker brigades created over the last three years as the Army begins to transform itself from a Cold War leviathan into a quicker, leaner fighting force.
The brigade's 3,600 soldiers will fly to Iraq later this month.
Nearly 2,500 Army vehicles have been rolling in convoys from Fort Lewis to the Port of Tacoma this week to load aboard Military Sealift Command's Sisler and USNS Shugart.
Among them are about 300 of the new Stryker vehicles for which the unit is nicknamed, but whose usefulness and safety were questioned last month after a third of their ceramic armor was found to be defective in live-fire tests.
Yesterday, Lt. Col. Robert Choppa, the deputy brigade commander, said the problem has been fixed.
"All 3mm armor added to the vehicles has been done," Choppa said, referring to the plan to fix the problem by adding steel backing to existing armor.
General Dynamics Land Systems, which built the Strykers, rushed several teams of experts to Fort Lewis to strengthen the vehicles within a month after tests at Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland revealed that several different tile types could not stop small-arms fire slightly larger than a .50-caliber bullet.
The Strykers, at $1.5 million each, are the Army's first new combat vehicles in 20 years. Swift and smooth riding with better mileage than any tactical armored vehicle, they can carry 11 soldiers each and feature personal computers capable of "seeing" friend and foe.
None of the soldiers who will use them, who helped create them and trained in every kind of scenario from close combat to major engagements, voiced a hint of a concern with the Strykers.
"We've put them through tests in desert environments in California and in heat and humidity in Louisiana," said Hall, a senior sergeant.
"Now, basically, we have more intelligence-gathering systems -- we have the technology to 'see' the enemy at a distance before we engage."
Vuksinic, who already served in Iraq during Desert Storm but in the Air Force, said flatly, "I have full confidence in the Stryker."
Although attention has fallen upon the vehicles, it is the troops, their training and composition that really differentiate the Stryker brigades.
For the first time, the Army has fully integrated combined arms at the company level -- a coming together, for example, of soldiers proficient in mortars, artillery, armor and infantry into the smaller unit. And most of this brigade has been together since its inception three years ago.
The Stryker is really that good that American soldiers won't gripe about it?
For the first time, the Army has fully integrated combined arms at the company level -- a coming together, for example, of soldiers proficient in mortars, artillery, armor and infantry into the smaller unit.
How can an "infantrycentric" motorized rifle company fully integrate arms they do not have?
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FreeRepublic , LLC PO BOX 9771 FRESNO, CA 93794
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It is in the breaking news sidebar! |
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-----------------------------------------------------------
"... We are in the midst of a revolution in military affairs (RMA) unlike any seen since the Napoleonic Age, when France transformed warfare with the concept of levŽe en masse. Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Jay Johnson has called it "a fundamental shift from what we call platform-centric warfare to something we call network-centric warfare," and it will prove to be the most important RMA in the past 200 years. ...-----------------------------------------------------------
Network-centric warfare and all of its associated revolutions in military affairs grow out of and draw their power from the fundamental changes in American society. These changes have been dominated by the co-evolution of economics, information technology, and business processes and organizations, and they are linked by three themes:
* The shift in focus from the platform to the network
* The shift from viewing actors as independent to viewing them as part of a continuously adapting ecosystem
* The importance of making strategic choices to adapt or even survive in such changing ecosystems
These themes have changed the nature of American business today, and they also have changed and will continue to change the way we conduct the sometimes violent business of the military. We are some distance from a detailed understanding of the new operations--there is as yet no equivalent to Carl von Clausewitz's On War for this second revolution--but we can gain some insight through the general observation that nations make war the same way they make wealth.
The Underlying Economics Have Changed
The organizing principle of network-centric warfare has its antecedent in the dynamics of growth and competition that have emerged in the modern economy. The new dynamics of competition are based on increasing returns on investment, competition within and between ecosystems, and competition based on time. Information technology (IT) is central to each of these.
The U.S. economy has been on a steady growth path generally attributed to the emergence of larger global markets, the globalization of labor and capital, and the widespread application of information technology within business enterprises. ..."
["Network-Centric Warfare: Its Origin and Future," by Vice Admiral Arthur K. Cebrowski, U.S. Navy, and John J. Garstka]
Decision makers
at the very top of our
miltary seem
to be living in --
making decisions based on --
a very strange world...
High tech mortar mount in a Piranha III
Story out of the Olympia newspaper
When I was a young man we had a deck of flash cards with pictures of armored vehicles, and whenever we hurried up to wait instead of standing around scratching our nuts we did hip pocket training on vehicle identification. The gunner got about 2 seconds to shoot or not shoot. Not shooting a bad guy got you razzed by the rest of the crew, or sometimes the whole platoon. Shooting a good guy got you pushups while you screamed "I will not kill our British (or German or whoever) allies!" at the top of your lungs with each repetition.
As an Intel officer I used to conduct threat I.D. with those cards and other devices. After doing so I decided that combat boots were probably the only safe mode of transportation in a war zone.
I still remember seeing that footage of the Apache gunner that took out the Bradley in Gulf War 1. My jaw dropped that he could not tell what it was, even through the NV system. And these guys train hard to be able to tell the difference. That's why we went to draping our vehicles with those stripped panels reminicent of the D-Day invasion stripes.
BTR-80------------------------------------------------BTR-70
LIGHT ARMOR FOR FULL-SPECTRUM OPERATIONS
<
a href="
http://www.combatreform.com/strykerprogram.htm
">title, in this case LIGHT ARMOR FOR FULL-SPECTRUM OPERATIONS
< /a> but delete the space between < and /
Everybody in Congress who cares has already seen that.
Read The Way Things Really Work
You might get a chuckle out of it.
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