Stryker Brigade News

Strykers Featured in Wired Magazine

Nov-28-2007 » Filed Under: 4/2 SBCT

(Via FOB Tacoma)

Last summer Noah Shachtman of Wired magazine spent some time embedded with the 4-9 INF, 4/2 SBCT in Iraq. The result of that trip is a lengthy article just published titled, "How Technology Almost Lost the War". We're excerpting a long section related to the Strykers below, but be sure to read the entire piece.

For additional reading you can see the article he wrote for Popular Mechanics last spring regarding the Land Warrior System. Finally, be sure to watch the video we just posted featuring the 4-9 INF.

Tarmiyah, located about 20 miles north of Baghdad, is an ugly town — traced with rivulets of sewage, patrolled by stray dogs, and strewn with rubble and garbage. Insurgents fleeing US military crackdowns in Baghdad and, farther north, in Baqubah, have flooded the city. The local police quit en masse almost a year ago, leaving the security of Tarmiyah's 50,000 residents to 150 men from the US Army's Fourth Battalion, Ninth Infantry Regiment — known since an early-1900s tour of duty in China as the Manchus.

Typically, soldiers spend hours of every day at war just trying to figure out where their comrades are, and how to maneuver together. But hand out GPS receivers and put everyone's signals on a map, and those tasks become a whole lot simpler. Luckily for the Manchus, the 4/9 is arguably the most wired unit in the Army. Select troops wear an experimental electronics package, including a helmet-mounted monocle that displays a digital map of Tarmiyah with icons for each of their vehicles and troops. The unit's commander, William Prior, rides an upgraded Stryker armored vehicle that shows the same info on one of many screens. It's packed with battle command stations, advanced radios, remote-controlled weapons turrets, and satellite network terminals. No commander at his level has ever been able to see so many of his men so easily.

"It increases the unit's combat power, no question," Prior says. Trim and dark-eyed, the lieutenant colonel knows his tech. He has a master's in physics and taught science at West Point in the late 1990s. [...]

Today, every three-man team in the Manchus is an icon on every other team's monocles. Network-centric doctrine says that these plugged-in soldiers should be able to cover a bigger swath of the battlefield and take on more enemies. And, yes, the gear does let them clear neighborhoods more efficiently and respond to enemy attacks more quickly. But a handful of soldiers still can't secure a town of more than 50,000. Half a dozen Manchus have been killed or wounded by snipers during their five months in Tarmiyah. Prior has handed out 25 Purple Hearts to the 150-man Comanche Company guarding Tarmiyah. It's even worse outside town, where the equally small Blowtorch Company was trying to keep the peace in an area three times the size of Manhattan, until the higher-ups ordered the company onto other missions.

"A well-informed but geographically dispersed force," Garstka and Cebrowski wrote in 1998, should be able to triumph over any foe, regardless of "mission, force size and composition, and geography." But neither Cebrowski nor Garstka was thinking about the kind of combat where foes blend into the populace and seed any stretch of road with bombs. Lawless towns like this can be pacified only by flooding them with troops — collecting tips and knocking heads. That's what Prior needs, not more gadgets. "They're just tools," he says in his flat Iowa accent.