Stryker gets praise and modifications

“The Stryker is the system that is providing our Soldiers with battlefield speed, situational awareness and protection that is unmatched with any other Army system that we have,” Brig. Gen. Jeffrey Sorenson, director of Management and Horizontal Technology Integration, said during a Stryker media round-table at the Pentagon Dec. 9.

Army procurement officials have taken lessons learned from Iraq and are making changes to be implemented in the near future to provide the most combat effective equipment to support Soldiers on the battlefield (see details at the link).

This illustrates why we need to get the four M8 AGS prototypes over in Iraq, along with a United support team for maintenance.  There's no better test of a system than live combat. We'd learn things which would help design a better vehicle IF AND WHEN we decide to provide the Airborne with the mechanized, armored firepower it may need for some strategic response missions.

Ways are being sought to reduce the overall weight of the vehicle with the add-on slat armor to prevent it from getting stuck in the soft terrain in Iraq.

This is all well and good, but we can't afford to taxi all our troops around in large, heavy, $2M vehicles which can't be rolled off ready to fight nor airdropped (though tests are rumored); and up-armored Humvees are inadequate and overweight, so we need to program to develop specs for a 4- or 6-wheeled armored and armed recon vehicle. In the interim, we need to purchase an existing vehicle which is close enough to what we need (a number of countries have such vehicles which are superior to the Humvee).

0556Z WED 15DEC04. Army News (via Stryker Brigade News).