Army Transforming Stryker Into Lethal Combat Platform for Great Power Conflicts
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By Dan Gouré
April 27, 2019
Great Power competition is back and with it the requirement that the U.S. Army be able to deter heavily armed peer adversaries. In Europe, the Army found itself outnumbered, outranged and outgunned. One of the few steps it could take immediately was to put a bigger gun on its thousands of Stryker Infantry Fighting Vehicles. As an experiment, it added a new gun and turret to a handful of vehicles in one brigade. This effort proved so successful both in speed and outcome that now the Army intends to up-gun the remaining eight brigades.
When Russia invaded Crimea, the U.S. Army was shaken out of its near-reverential fixation with counterinsurgency operations. It faced the prospect of a high-end conventional conflict with two near-peer competitors who had spent decades designing and building military forces intended specifically to defeat U.S. forces. In the likeliest theaters of confrontation, Eastern Europe and the Western Pacific, U.S. forces were at a disadvantage. Years of relative peace had encouraged successive U.S. Administrations to withdraw most Army combat forces from Europe, leaving behind a corporal’s guard consisting of two light brigades: one, a two- battalion airborne unit, and the other a lightly-armored Stryker formation.
https://www.realcleardefense.com/articles/2019/04/27/army_transforming_stryker_into_lethal_combat_platform_for_great_power_conflicts_114370.html
