Army improving stryker's lethality, mobility.

• Author: Tadjdeh, Yasmin

The U.S. Army is working to increase the lethality and mobility of the Stryker armored fighting vehicle.

Thousands of the wheeled platforms are in the Army's inventory, and the service is working to retrofit a number of them, said Col. Glenn Dean, program manager for the Army's Stryker brigade combat team at program executive office ground combat systems.

One of the biggest modifications to the General Dynamics-built system is the addition of a 30 mm cannon to some platforms, he said.

"This will be the first new direct-fire weapon system in this family of ammunition that the Army has fielded since we put the 121 mm cannon on the Abrams tank," he said.

The program stems from the United States' European Reassurance Initiative, an effort intended to support U.S. partners by funding a persistent, rotational air, land and sea force in the region to deter Russia and to bolster training, Dean said.

The Army is leveraging investments it made during the failed ground combat vehicle and Future Combat Systems programs, he said.

"All that is coming together," he said during a panel discussion at the Michigan Defense Exposition in Warren. The National Defense Industrial Association's Michigan Chapter hosted the conference.

The service is testing the system at Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland. The Army intends to execute the program quickly, taking only three years from when the requirement was drafted to fielding. The cannon will be deployed on a Stryker next year, he said.

The addition of the weapon will result in a significantly new capability for the armored vehicle, he said.

"The Army does intend to put this cannon capability...across the entire Stryker fleet," he said. "We're looking right now to what our requirements and our acquisition strategies would be to do that for the cannon-armed Stryker."

The Army is also working to increase the platform's mobility and survivability, Dean said.

"We spent a lot of time in Iraq and Afghanistan putting survivability kits on the vehicles," he said. "We gained a lot of weight in the process, and so in order to return the vehicle to its original mobility we've shifted focus to mobility power generation, engine upgrades, suspension upgrades [and] power generation upgrades for the double-V hull platform."

The effort is part of a program known as the Stryker engineering change proposal, or ECP.

"We still have some reliability tests ongoing, but initial production contracts are in place and they'll actually start...