Based out of Washington state, the Army’s the 3rd Brigade, 2nd Infantry Division is built around its intimidating Stryker armored vehicles. Weighing 19 tons and carrying troops on eight wheels, the Stryker is supposed to represent the Army’s best balance between armor protection and speedy transport. However, that balance is only struck when the vehicle goes to war. And while the 3rd Brigade, 2nd Infantry division will head to Afghanistan in December, its Strykers aren’t invited.
The brigade, naturally, is downplaying the significance of leaving its Strykers back home. Its soldiers will ride in Mine-Resistant Ambush Protected (MRAP) vehicles instead. But it’s an embarrassing admission that the Army spent billions purchasing a vehicle that isn’t relevant to a major war. Think of it like the military’s version of Garfield Minus Garfield.
The Stryker Brigade will go Stryker-less for two reasons. First, the Afghan terrain can’t handle a heavy wheeled vehicle that’s about the size of a school bus. You don’t want to take that thing up mountains or roll it through river valleys that lack paved roads. Second, the vehicle is too flimsy to handle homemade bombs. Unlike MRAPs, the flat bottom of a Stryker absorbs the brunt of a bomb impact, rather than deflecting it.
The Stryker did well in Iraq — the brigade deployed three times there — earning the appellation “ghost riders” from President George W. Bush. But Iraq has paved roads, less rugged terrain (on the whole) and different kinds of homebrewed bombs.
In 2009, the flat-bottom Stryker accompanied the 5th Stryker Brigade, 2nd Infantry Division to Kandahar. As 37 troops died and 238 were wounded, the brigade’s soldiers began to call the behemoth the “Kevlar Coffin.” The Stryker, retired Lt. Col. David Johnson of the Center for Advanced Defense Studies toldStars & Stripes, “isn’t perfectly suited for the environment in Afghanistan or a low-intensity conflict with IEDs.“
It wasn’t supposed to be this way. Back when the Army had only acquired 800 of 1200 Strykers in 2004, the Government Accountability Office estimated that the vehicle cost $8.7 billion to develop and purchase. A decade ago, the Army’s Training and Doctrine Command, hot for Strykers, told Congress the vehicle would be “capable of operating in all types of military operations, from small-scale contingencies to a major theater of war.” Oops.
And look at what its replacement vehicle is: an MRAP. That was a truck the Army was lukewarm on — until former Defense Secretary Robert Gates surged them into production for the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Hard questions await the Army about the utility of the lighter, more mobile MRAP after the wars end. But for now, it can operate wherever soldiers do.
The cost of an MRAP? Under $1 million per vehicle. Each Stryker, as of 2004, cost over $4 million.
So what’s a Stryker Brigade without its signature vehicle — the vehicle that it trains around and forms the basis of its tactics? Infantrymen.
“The important part is not about the vehicle for us,” Lt. Col. Wayne Brewster, the brigade’s deputy commander, told reporters. “Even though we’re a Stryker brigade with Stryker vehicles, the strength of the brigade is that we’ve got over 4,000 — it’s an infantry brigade — armed soldiers inside of it.” And those soldiers will be riding in a truck the Army never really wanted, rather than the one it wanted badly.
Posts
