We Only Pretend to Fly Armored Vehicles
"September 23, 2003: The Army has overlooked the problems of getting a Stryker brigade on and off air transports at an air base. The Stryker brigades were created to get mobile American combat units to far off places in a hurry. Each Stryker brigade contains 3494 troops and over 300 Stryker LAVs (of various types.) The total weight of the brigade is about 13,000 tons. In addition, you need a steady flow of supplies (about 600 pounds per man per day) to keep the brigade in action. That adds another 1,000 tons (or more) a day. You want to have the Stryker brigade go in with a least three days of supplies, and have another 30 days worth stockpiled nearby.
No problem moving a Stryker brigade by ship. It takes about 40 hours to load, or unload, the brigade from typical ships. Getting a Stryker brigade to Korea (the port of Pusan), from Washington State, would thus take about 11 days (loading, sea travel, unloading).
The original concept was to airlift the Stryker brigades to distant combat zones. But this has never been practical because of a shortage of transports, higher priority users (like the Air Force supporting their warplanes overseas) and the difficulty of getting all that stuff on and off the transports. One recent RAND study calculated that a Stryker brigade could get to Seoul, Korea (from Seattle, Washington) faster by ship (by a couple of hours) than the same brigade could do by air (from Washington State to Osan, Korea), mainly because of the operational difficulties of moving a ready-for-combat ground unit. It takes a lot of time, and precious airbase space, to load a Stryker brigade onto transports, and then unload them at the other end.
The basic problem is that the Air Force has never seen it's transports as practical transportation for any ground combat units except paratroopers and small numbers of armored vehicles. Sure, the specs for air transports always list what kinds of armored vehicles they can carry, but that's mainly for show. The air transports are much more useful, and valuable, moving spare parts for armored vehicles, crews for armored vehicles and just about anything but the armored vehicles themselves. But sometimes fantasies come to life, and that's what seems to have happened with the concept of moving Stryker brigades by air."
When I worked in an S-4 shop I prepared plans for air deployment, because it was policy that we maintained them. The logistics guys said privately we'd never use them because there isn't enough airlift available and what there is would be used mostly by the Air Force in the early going to transport their own units. Have you ever seen an Air Force pronouncement that they will dedicate enough airlift to transport a Stryker brigade overseas in the even of an emergency? I've never seen it.
Plus, the C-130 has never been viewed as a long haul transport for troop units. On the other hand, the long haul transport, the C-17, isn't used to move units into combat zones.
I'd like to see a calculation of how many C-130 sorties, along with tankers to refuel, would be required to move a Stryker brigade to Europe or Asia with enough fuel, ammo, food and parts to keep it sustained in the early weeks of an operation. I'd be willing to bet a steak dinner we don't even have enough spare C-130's and tankers to do it.
A think tank report, I think it was RAND, indicated when the transport issue was finally looked at, the likely solution would be to preposition Stryker equipment - the same solution we use for the present armored force.