Replies

If I remember rightly, the original design for the Stryker was supposed to have beefier armor and tracks.
Shinseki pointed to one or two instances of tanks getting stuck in wadis in Iraq during Desert Storm and said, "Tires are better."

And as you pointed out, and I mentioned, tires get stuck on the darndest things.
And as anyone who has drilled at Drum knows, nothing gets stuck like tires in sand.
The only positive side to me being out of the military is that I do not have to deal with Shinseki anymore!
Thanks for the article, it's more proof of Clintonistas in high ranking positions.

If I remember rightly, the original design for the Stryker was supposed to have beefier armor and tracks. Shinseki pointed to one or two instances of tanks getting stuck in wadis in Iraq during Desert Storm and said, "Tires are better."

Nope. The original design competition was between United Defense and General Dynamics. UD had a very well designed tracked vehicle with a wide range of bolt-on components and armor...it could function as a light transport, heavy armored vehicle, missile launcher, light tank, etc. General Dynamics proposed to do the same thing with this vehicle, only with 30% additional weight.

The Pentagon selected the GD design because they're run by a group of shortsighted fools. I was working on the UD team at the time (designing a prototype enterprise scale vehicle maintenance tracking system for their proposal), and we were actually told that they PASSED on the UD design simply because it had tracks. The Pentagon told UD in late 2000, when the contract was awarded to GD, that they didn't forsee any future wars in areas without roadways, so they would not be purchasing any new tracked vehicles. They bluntly admitted that they were equipping the military for a world where "combat is limited to small scale police actions and humanitarian interventions". When it was pointed out that the General Dynamics proposal (the new Stryker) would fail miserably in major combat operations or against an off-road enemy, we were simply told that "The Pentagon does not forsee that situation arising". Talk about short sighted...

I think I've still got some of the specs, photo's, and artist renderings of the tracked vehicles around here somewhere. They're not classified anymore (that was dumped after the Pentagon selected GD and UD shut down our program), so I'll post a few of the pics up here if I can.

Oh, one more thing. Unless the design has been changed, the GD Strykers were supposed to have an onboard GPS, battlefield communication, and system/environmental monitoring computer that ran on WINDOWS 98! That's all our soldiers need...blue screens in the middle of a firefight!