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Stryker Commentary

Aug-15-2003 » (0) Comments » Filed Under: 3/2 SBCT

Jed Babbin, a columnist at NRO, applauds the exit of General Shinseki as the Army Chief of Staff. Babbin includes the development of the Stryker vehicle, which Shinseki championed, on his list of the General's failures. Excerpt:

Instead of following Rumsfeld's orders, Shinseki slow-rolled transformation. He rolled it aside entirely on the wheels of his central "transformation" initiative, the "Stryker" interim armored vehicle. Stryker — a 38,000-pound machine incapable of fighting a war for too many reasons to list here — is a $12 billion tribute to the U.N. peacekeeping missions of the 1990s. Caldwell fought for the Stryker, in denial of its failure to meet mission specifications and repeated cost overruns. Kern, one of the architects of Stryker, was kept on by Shinseki for a year after the law required his retirement. Mahan was Shinseki's deputy chief of staff for logistics and part of this same inner circle. Stryker's future is uncertain. It should be cancelled.

Donald Sensing at One Hand Clapping comes to the defense of both Shinseki and the Stryker vehicle program. Excerpt:

The critics' chorus, including Babbin, has long slandered the Army for being too heavy, literally. An Abrams tank ready for battle weighs about 70 tons, Bradleys weigh about 50. Those facts drove the development of the new Stryker armored gun system. Another factor was the obsolescence and overhead costs of the Vietnam-era M551 Sheridan armored vehicle, which only the 82d Airborne Division used as its armored punch. An infantry-carrier version of the Stryker is also being developed.

The Strykers form the core of new Brigade Combat Teams (BCTs), units smaller than a division that can be deployed and supported much quicker and easier. They are roughly the Army's equivalent of the vaunted Marine Expeditionary Units, except the BCTs move by air and the MEUs by ships. There is no way that the BCT can be characterized as a Cold War kind of force. It is exactly the kind of unit, equipped with the kind of weapons, that the critics' chorus called for years ago.

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