Comments on: Strykers in the line of fire

By: Graham Strouse

Graham Strouse — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 23:17:18 +0000

Todd,
Incidentally:
I like your style. Very A-Team. Rather practical, really. Ford F-35 with a lift, skirts, decent armor, an RCWS & gun ports…maybe a kick-ass stereo system.
Very budget-minded, really, in the long run.

By: Graham Strouse

Graham Strouse — Tue, 13 Nov 2007 09:28:03 +0000

Stryker’s biggest operational weaknesses, IMHO:
1) Poor off-road performance. When you can’t go off-road and the enemy knows you can’t go off-road, he’s going to concentrate his ordnance on the roads. This makes for predictable deployments. Tracked vehicles don’t have this disadvantage. They can go where they bloody well please.
2) On-road, they’re well, they’re still 20 ton trucks. Makes ‘em a little tricky to maneuver in city streets. Reminds me a bit of when I kept on failing my driver’s license test as a kid. I had an ’86 Mitsubishi B2600 with no power steering and breaks. K-turns burned me more times then I care to admit. Borrowed my ex-GF’s Toyota and it was a breeze.
3) Unit-cost ($4 million unit initially, $1-$2 million amoritized–I think) vs. unit-survivability. It’s bad enough that the Pentagon has (last I checked) kept Stryker losses classified. I can find pretty reliable figures on Abrams & Bradley mobility & vehicle kills. Nada on Stryker. This kind of obfuscation suggests they’d the Powers That Be would prefer we don’t know how messy it is. Anyway, if the bad guys spend $100 bucks each for every 20 roadside bomb (for example) & get 1 kill in 20 or 2 kills in 20, they’ve effectively won. They’re fighting a war of attrition, after all, psychologically & economically.
Front a tactical/logistical (if not necessarily political) perspective, Israel, frankly, is much better equipped for battle taxi deployment in the middle-east. Shorter supply lines mean they can field their Achzarit HAPCs (some of which are being upgraded with the SAMSON RCWS & optional 30 mm, according to NIMDA). I’m not sure what will happen with the Namer–nifty convserion, but the $1.5 million unit-cost may be more then Israel can/will afford.
Others may disagree, but I just think the Stryker is a poor compromise. And an expensive one at that. And the hush-hush on unit losses makes me nervous.
Graham Strouse
grahamcstrouse@yahoo.com

By: LanceThruster

LanceThruster — Wed, 10 Oct 2007 16:40:49 +0000

I think this is the definitive evaluation on the Stryker.
http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/library/congress/2003_rpt/stryker_reality_of_war.pdf

By: Todd

Todd — Fri, 29 Jun 2007 05:49:50 +0000

I say we heavily arm monster trucks and kick some ass while we’re at it. Semper Fi!!

By: bubba

bubba — Fri, 18 May 2007 20:22:21 +0000

What we need instead of the strykers are heavy duty mine clearing vehicles that are designed to detect and neutralize threats such as the IEDs. Such a vehicle was the Grizzly Combat Mobility Vehicle which is now on display at the Aberdeen Proving Grounds ordinance museum. Ehy is it there instead of Iraq? so Shinseki could get his all tired vehicles known as the Stryker. It was a mistake to purchase the Stryker but the leaders are going to keep trying to prove they were right regardless of how many times the facts prove them wrong.
I am also tired of hearing the Sryker advocates refering to how the soldiers love the the Stryker but not giving the rest of the story that the soldiers only like the Stryker because they didn’t have anything before or were stuck pulling combat patrols in HMMWVs.

By: bigfoot

bigfoot — Wed, 16 May 2007 23:36:50 +0000

I’m not sure that it’s fair to compare the Stryker against heavier vehicles when it’s in a fight it wasn’t designed for. Perhaps the question isn’t whether or not the Stryker is a failure in Iraq. I think the question to ask might be: What are the Stryker brigades still doing in Iraq?
Answer: because there’s nothing to send to take their place.
The Stryker brigades are configured for expeditionary operations where mobility at the strategic and tactical levels are preferred. Mid, and even high intensity conflict. The Stryker vehicles were chosen because they fit that bill. Stryker brigades would have been ideal for the actual invasion of Iraq in 2003.
The problem is that they’re now placed in a low-intensity conflict where they can be attacked at close range in predictable situations in a prolonged insurgency. The threat is no longer 14.5mm heavy machine guns, or even artillery: it’s whatever can be buried on an unguarded road in the middle of the night. As many have pointed out, there’s not much anyone can do to protect against that.
Dismounted patrolling by a large infantry force capable of denying insurgents the ability to conduct operations is historically the best way to beat an insurgency. We don’t have that. So we send the Strykers, again and again, and they do well until the enemy figures out how to take them down.
Patrols can be avoided, but it’s hard to place an IED on a road when there’s someone standing guard over the road. What we need is to get the Strykers out of Iraq (so we can have a strategic reserve again) and lease about eight leg infantry divisions from India. Oh yeah, and the force fields.

By: Max in MN

Max in MN — Wed, 16 May 2007 05:25:52 +0000

It’s always been a contest of one-upsmanship between mobility, firepower, and armor, as some of the posts noted. Since we have no effective defense right now against IED’s in the form of EFP’s, heavier armor is all we have to stop them or reduce their impact rather. Mobility is good to have, but cannot stop an IED. What we really need are force fields, anti-gravity, phasers, etc, but unfortunately those are only fantasy right now.

By: Siconik

Siconik — Tue, 15 May 2007 23:45:46 +0000

Foreign.Boy, you are talking about the Battlecruiser concept. Battleships were designed with enough armomr to withstand hits from the guns as powerfull as the ones they carry, which of course put limitations on range and speed. So the commander of Royal Navy, Jackie Fisher had a brilliant idea: why not build ships armored as cruisers but packing the big guns of the battleships? What could go wrong?
Well, plenty. The ships were originally designed for fast strike operations, but often misused. Whenever they ran into a true battleship (see Hood V. Bismark)it was all over.

By: Jay

Jay — Tue, 15 May 2007 21:01:29 +0000

“I half expect along with radios, gps, c&c we’ll end up with espresso machines and ez-bake ovens ala Homer Simpson“
LOL ;D Good stuff.
“who knows whether IEDs will be relevant at all in the next conflict?“
They’re too good not to be used in the indefinite future.

By: Foreign.Boy

Foreign.Boy — Tue, 15 May 2007 20:18:55 +0000

The arguement about armour is interesting. I’m not much on weapons and all that.. but more into history.
this reminds me of pre-world war 1 where the invention of the dreadnaught changed everything… where people believed speed was it’s own armour. And then the battle where the british sunk 1/2 the germany navy happened and the british lost a lot of ships. I don’t know the exact dates.. but I think there is a comparision that applies.
The big difference is that armoured vehicles generally will move, stop moving, and move again.. where as battle ships keep forward motion.