Army puts the Stryker on a fast track: light armored vehicle to prove its value in urban, peacekeeping operations.

• Author: Tiron, Roxana

In anticipation of extended peacekeeping duties in Iraq and future contingencies in urban areas, the Army is stepping up efforts to field its first Stryker light-armored vehicle brigade.

Despite a string of controversies that plagued the program in its early going. Army officials strongly support the decision to move forward with the $4 billion program.

A critical test took place in April, when a Stryker Brigade Combat Team participated in a series of mid- to high-intensity exercises at the National Training Center in Fort Irwin, Calif. Following that, the brigade was transported by rail, sea and air to the Joint Readiness Training Center in Fort Polk, La., where, for two weeks in May, it conducted operations, primarily in urban terrain.

The first SBCT--the 3rd Brigade of the 2nd Infantry Division, based at Fort Lewis, Wash.--is now entering the Initial Operational Testing and Evaluation phase.

"The IOT&E Strykers are the configuration that we want to get to," said Steven Campbell, the Stryker systems coordinator for the Army.

The Stryker is a 19-ton, eight-wheeled armored vehicle with two variants--the Infantry Carrier Vehicle (which comes in eight configurations) and the Mobile Gun System. The configurations for the ICV are: mortar carrier, reconnaissance, commander's vehicle, fire support, medical evacuation, engineer squad, anti-tank guided missile (ATGM) and the NBC reconnaissance vehicle, which is going to go into low rate production this December. The other configurations will enter full-rate production, once the program achieves Milestone III, said Campbell. Milestone III is a go-ahead to enter full-rate production.

The SBCT has 3,614 soldiers. In addition to the headquarters, it has three infantry battalions--each with 65 Stryker vehicles; a cavalry battalion in charge of reconnaissance, surveillance and target acquisition--with 53 vehicles, and an artillery battalion equipped with M198 155mm howitzers and counter-fire radars. The brigade also has a support battalion, a military intelligence company, an engineer company, a signal company and an anti-tank company.

The Army is planning to write an Operational Evaluation report to Congress, which is due this fall. The service is looking at converting five more brigades into SBCTs. The Army budgeted for six brigades.

Urban Combat

The Stryker's high-tech sensors and communications systems would have proved invaluable in operations in Iraq, said Col. Robert McClure, chief of war plans at the Army Staff. "It would have been phenomenally useful in those populated areas," McClure said at a Pentagon news conference.

The vehicle also would have been useful, "wherever you wanted to bring in more capable forces than light infantry and airborne," said Col. William Grisoli, deputy director for Army transformation.

The Stryker brigades are designed to be "fast-entry" units. The vehicle can travel 300 miles at 60 miles an hour before needing refueling.

It is also transportable on a C-130 cargo aircraft. It was not clear earlier in the program whether the Stryker would be able to meet the 38,000-pound weight requirement.

After some modifications to the vehicle by contractor General Dynamics Land Systems, the Stryker is light enough to load inside the C-130 cargo bay, but it can't fly very far without air refueling. Campbell said the farthest the Stryker has flown in a C-130, without refuelling, was 200 miles. But during a recent congressional hearing, Stryker critics complained that the range is only 60 miles.

Several factors affect C-130 transportability, said Campbell. One of them is the armor protection that the Air Force added around the crew compartments, which ups the weight of the cargo plane itself.

"The Air Force will say, 'depending what the mission is, we'll give you the kind of aircraft to meet your mission requirement,"' Campbell said.

"Most people that I have talked to will say that they can't see a C-130 going that fir [1,000 miles] to drop off the Stryker. You fly it in a C-17," Campbell added.

How fir the Stryker can fly in a C-130 also is a function of air temperature, elevation and runway, said Brig. Gen. Jack Gardner, the Army's deputy commander for transformation.

"If it is a lot of weight, high elevation, short runway, it may be 100 miles. If it is different elevation, different runway and different temperature it may be 700 miles," he said.

It ultimately becomes an operational decision to figure out how far the Stryker could be flown versus how far it would have to drive. "It may go into a runway that has better protection," Campbell said.

Lt. Col. Mick Nicholson, a military assistant to the secretary of the Army, explained that the C-130...