ARMY Magazine November 2009
http://www.ausa.org/publications/armymagazine/armyarchive/november2009/Pages/Letters.aspx
‘Stryker Update’
The versatility of the Stryker vehicle family was underscored in Scott Gourley’s August “Soldier Armed” column (“Stryker Update”). The Stryker has demonstrated its ability to accept continuous upgrades in response to emerging requirements generated by units in the field.
Improved armor, new floor plates, better seats and new-generation sensors are all examples of major upgrades to the Stryker. Without question, there will be more improvements in the future.
The Army is now looking at the redesign of its heavy brigade combat teams (HBCTs) based, in part, on the replacement of the aging M113s and eventually the Bradley fighting vehicle. As the article suggests, the Stryker medical evacuation vehicle could easily find a place in the HBCT alongside an upgraded Bradley and, someday, a new ground combat vehicle.
I remember back a decade or more to a time when the idea of a wheeled armored combat vehicle generated enormous opposition in defense circles. Not only has that opposition all but disappeared, but we are discovering new ways of employing Strykers.
Without a doubt, the Stryker will be with the Army for decades to come.
Dr. Daniel Goure
Vice President
The Lexington Institute
Arlington, Va.
ARMY Magazine August 2009
http://www.ausa.org/publications/armymagazine/armyarchive/august2009/Pages/SoldierArmed.aspx
Soldier Armed
Stryker Update
By Scott R. Gourley
As the U.S. Army’s Stryker family of vehicles approaches the sixth anniversary of its initial combat deployment, government and industry representatives are continuing to develop and field a number of enhancements designed to increase the survivability and tactical flexibility of the vehicles for Army warfighters.
According to Wendy Staiger, Stryker program director at General Dynamics Land Systems (the prime contractor for the Stryker), many of the ongoing efforts have been designed and developed to meet emerging requirements generated by users in the field.
Staiger pointed to the new Stryker blast mitigation kit, which she described as “focused on improving the survivability from a mine blast underneath the vehicle.”
“That particular kit is composed of four components, with all of the components working together to improve the crew survivability in the event of a blast,” she said. The first component of the kit is a new “belly armor” design. “That’s additional armor that goes on the bottom of the vehicle to protect the crew compartment,” Staiger explained.
“Previously, we had introduced something called the driver’s enhancement kit, which really covered the driver forward. This new kit starts where the driver’s kit ends and goes back through the rest of the compartment. So that’s basically more steel.”
“The next thing within the kit is replacement of the floor plates with new ones that also improve the performance of the vehicle after a blast,” she said. “In order for the kit to work, we have added the capability within the vehicle to increase the distance between the vehicle and the ground. We do that with our height management system, where we can raise it up, and at the end of the day that equals better protection.”
The fourth element of the new kit involves the installation of new blast mitigation seats. “A lot of the injuries that soldiers have seen in the field are really related to what happens in the blast,” Staiger said. “The new seats are basically cantilevered from the side of the vehicle, and what they do is attenuate the blast: They absorb the blast ‘going up’ and they control the descent [of the seat] coming down. That will lessen the risk of spinal compression injuries and also address such injuries as broken ankles and those you might see when those seats are coming back down.”
Noting that the new seats are just being deployed, she said, “We actually just completed the retrofit of the first unit. We’re under contract with the government to provide five brigades with this kit, and we are also under contract to cut portions of the kit into production so that future retrofit will be easier in the field.”
Another new Stryker enhancement kit addressing an identified field need is the remote camera system. Displayed at the 2008 AUSA Annual Meeting, the kit joins a camera into the taillight of the Stryker vehicle. “It gives you vision outside the vehicle, around the area where the ramp goes down,” Staiger noted. “For the soldiers inside, the most critical point of the operation is when that ramp first goes down. This will give them more situational awareness.”
Although the remote camera requirement originally came from the medical community for their Stryker medical evacuation vehicle (MEV), Staiger said that the tactical enhancements resulting from the camera design have led to its adoption for all of the vehicles. “We should start seeing this particular kit going into vehicles this month as they get ready to deploy,” she said.
Another new enhancement kit is an external lighting kit. “It is now fully under contract, and we are just working on the material to put it out there,” Staiger said.
“Those are just a couple of the enhancement kits,” she said. “We are under contract with the government for a number of these kits, and I don’t know that a month goes by when we are not asked to make additional kits to try to meet emerging requirements from the field.”
In addition to those fleetwide enhancements, other new kits in development focus on specific vehicle variants. One example of this variant-specific upgrade is a removable firing pin capability for the Stryker mortar variant. The new kit—prompted by issues discovered with dismounted mortars, never in the Stryker—allows the crew to remove the firing pin so that there could be no chance of a “stuck round” going off. The first 37 safety-enhanced tubes were sent to 2nd Brigade, 25th Infantry Division, in June, with that capability scheduled to enter the field by late July.
In addition to the individual kit enhancements, government and industry planners have also taken a larger programmatic look at the complete spectrum of potential enhancement packages for the Stryker system. A significant milestone in this holistic approach occurred in June 2008, when General Dynamics Land Systems, in support of the U.S. Army Program Management Office Stryker Brigade Combat Team (BCT), hosted a Stryker product improvement program (S-PIP) technology day and request for information. The S-PIP day focused “on design concepts and material solutions” that could satisfy the Stryker capability development document requirements.
Looking back at those efforts over the past year, Staiger observed, “There’s still a lot going on in the S-PIP world. If you take all of those capabilities, there are more than a billion potential combinations that you could put together from a value-added standpoint of what Stryker modernization is going to be. We have completed that initial trade study with the government, and we are in the process now of working with them to put the next phase of S-PIP under contract, which will take us to a preliminary design review.”
In addition to the enhancement efforts within the Stryker BCTs, Staiger acknowledged considerable program excitement over the broader fielding of Stryker MEV variants.
“The MEV is going to see its first deployment very shortly with the 3rd Heavy Brigade Combat Team, 3rd Infantry Division. That really represents, from our standpoint, the first Stryker in a heavy brigade combat team. We are very excited about the MEVs. The crews are excited. They just finished up a National Training Center rotation and they are going to go to port, get these kits installed, do a quick train-up and then deploy for the first time with a heavy brigade,” she said. “There’s so much going on with Stryker every day.”
