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Greene native first to lead elite Stryker brigade

Dec-12-2004 » Filed Under: 3/2 SBCT

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BY TODD MCADAM, Press & Sun-Bulletin

GREENE -- Twenty-seven years ago, 17-year-old Mike Rounds led 300 students in a two-day protest of a biology teacher's dismissal.

The task required planning, organization, leadership and the courage to face suspension. The teacher was still fired, but the students forced the Greene school board to review the principal's decision.

Three months later, Rounds was accepted into the U.S. Military Academy at West Point.

Col. Michael Rounds, 45, does much the same thing today, but the stakes are infinitely higher. He's home from a year in Iraq -- a year spent proving the viability of a brand-new armored vehicle; refining the tactics and doctrine meant to carry the U.S. Army into the next century; and rebuilding an entire province. It was a year spent with the responsibility for the care and well-being of 5,100 U.S. soldiers and 1.9 million Iraqi civilians.

It's not quite what he expected when he was a student body president with a strong sense of right and wrong.

"I was thinking," Rounds said , "of becoming a lawyer."

The Stryker brigade

Instead, he became a West Point cadet, then an officer. Eventually, he got the highest-profile combat command the Army could give him: leading the first brigade based around a new style of warfare. The medium infantry brigade is 5,100 soldiers based around the 19-ton Stryker armored vehicle, the brainchild of now-retired chief of staff Gen. Eric Shinseki.

The battalions using them are lighter and faster than units with M-1A1 Abrams tanks and M-2 Bradley infantry fighting vehicles, but pack more firepower and greater survivability than light infantry units like the 10th Mountain Division.

Rounds' first job was to put into practice the theories about working with Strykers. Then it was to take the brigade to Iraq and prove Shinseki was right.

"We're pretty excited about them," Rounds said. "They can go just about anyplace you can get into."

That said, the Strykers are designed to support infantry units, so fighting means getting out and fighting face to face.

"It's pretty personal," he said. But because the Strykers have less armor than heavier units, there are certain types of combat they should avoid: "You don't lead with your chin."

The battalions in Rounds' brigade were popular with nearby commanders whenever there was fighting to be done. "They would normally turn and ask for a component of the brigade to help," Rounds said.

The result was a string of successes around Nineveh and the rest of Iraq, but at the cost of 20 soldiers killed. The deaths weren't a result of command mistakes or bad tactics or equipment, Rounds said. Death is a fact of war a colonel can't change.

"At the end, all you care about is results," he said. "I like to think we gave them the product they wanted."

There's much more, so be sure to read the rest.


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