[dragoon500ly]

Originally Posted by Panther Al

Part two:

So, what's the Stryker- and its Brigade- good for? Well, to be fair, it would be a great National Guard formation. Its cheap - relatively. Its light so the guard units can train freely on civilian streets without ripping them out. And should the crap it the fan, they can be rapidly sent overseas easily, or stood up, if time is available for retraining, on other equipment while maintaining a basic knowledge of armoured fighting.

But if not the Stryker, then what do we use for light (ok, lightish) units, especially in a RDF role?

What a RDF needs has been already mentioned, as well as why the Stryker isn't it, though it comes close.

For starters, it needs tracks - they might lose out on road speed, but that's not important enough to cut down its combat durability in exchange by going wheeled. It needs to have vehicles that share as many components between -all- its armoured vehicles as possible, likewise for its un armoured wheeled support vehicles. And it needs to have all the components it needs to operate on its own so it can operate without needing to have another unit helping out. A lone wolf regiment you might say. Replace the CFV's with IFV's and the ACR is perfect formation wise. Just needs a vehicle.

So, an armoured, tracked platform with a max weight of around 30 metric tons. It needs a variant for every use, from heavy gun platform, IFV, TOC, SPM, SPAAG, SPG, and so on and so forth.

Nothing out there meets that, but the CV90 does come very close - all but the SPG is in, or has been in, production- and so did the FCS program the army was forced to drop.

Given that we are stuck with the Stryker, and we seem dead set to trash every heavy combat unit we have - after all, no one out there has hordes of tanks and wants to start a war with anyone right? *cough North Korea - Iran - and I'm sure you all can name more...*

So we absolutely need an RDF that can fight - and survive for a while- that the Stryker and its brigade can't.

We won't, or can't, afford to develop a whole new platform, nor do we really have time. There is a turnkey, in production, with development costs already paid for, in the CV90. Maybe the US Army needs to get over its "Not Invented Here" problem and take a serious look at what's going on. We are, as the saying goes, training and equipping for the last war, or at least the one we are in, and already finding out that wheels are not it - as other nations have found out in afghanistan and have started to ship over tracked vehicles, and heavier and heavier at that.

So- what do you all think of all my blithering?

Well for a 3ACR man...not bad!

I think we both agree that Stryker was a waste of time. I personally feel that if we had to go with wheeled, a modified LAV-25 would have been a better choice. Reequiping the NG infantry battalions to a medium config would have made a lot more sense then deactivating heavy divisions.

Soooo whats the best answer?

I feel that the new division concept lacks the capability that the older divisions had for sustained combat. The platoons are smaller, the companies are fewer. There is a lot of talk about the force multiplier of the new electronic systems...but these are new systems that haven't had the time to be fully developed and tested. A lot of the new combat systems have shown serious problems in Afghanistan and Iraq, and yet major changes are being made based on what these systems are supposed to be capable of. I sometimes wonder just how great these new toys will perform in a nuclear environment.