WASHINGTON (Army News Service, Oct. 15, 2003) -- The Army's newest vehicles are loaded on ships and ready for travel to Iraq in November.

Now Soldiers in the Army's first Stryker Brigade Combat Team -- the Fort Lewis, Wash.-based 3rd Brigade, 2nd Infantry Division -- just have to wait until early November for their flights to Kuwait and move into Iraq.

But waiting won’t be a big deal for Cpl. Jose Chavez because deploying to war is why he and the guys in his unit joined the Army, he said.

Chavez is an infantry team leader in 5th Battalion, 20th Infantry Regiment, at Fort Lewis and joined the brigade a year ago just as it received the Stryker vehicles.

The low-intensity guerilla war the Army is fighting doesn’t concern Chavez or the men in his unit either, he said. Their training was always serious and “to standard,” but everything became even more serious after their deployment orders arrived, Chavez said.

The Army was concerned about the Rocket Propelled Grenade threat, what Chavez called the “enemy’s weapon of choice.”

So two new types of armor have been installed on the vehicles. The most obvious add-on to the discerning eye is called slat armor. It resembles a “bird cage” that will add three feet to the Stryker’s width, Chavez said.

The slat armor installed on the Strykers resembles a big catcher’s mask that wraps around the vehicle. The armor is basically a grill of wire mesh that will cause the RPG to detonate away from the vehicle.

“Therefore it loses its effectiveness,” said Peter Keating, a spokesman for General Dynamics, the chief contractor for the Stryker program.

Keating said that adding the slat armor prior to the brigade’s deployment would give the unit an “operational advantage” once it hits the ground in November.

That slat armor is only one step in the extra protection on the Stryker, though.

The Army has also installed ceramic tiles on the vehicles to give them the capability of stopping heavy machine gun rounds up to 14.5mm, said Keating. Depending on the model, up to 126 tiles could be installed, he said.

That caliber benchmark was as an add-on capability by the Army, he said.

“That’s better protection than generally most armored vehicles of this type category have in the world today,” Keating said. “It’s a real advantage to have that.”

A metal plate has been added to the tile’s backside because a General Dynamics sub-contractor didn’t stick with the original design of the tiles, Keating said. The ceramic/metal plates will be replaced at a future date possibly during or after the deployment, he said.

Keating said the tiles will act the same as the ceramic plates most Soldiers are wearing in Iraq right now. Lightweight and durable, the added weight won’t affect the Stryker’s performance in Iraq because that weight was figured into its design, he said.

“That’s something people tend to forget,” Keating said.

Plans are in the works to add another type of armor package to the inventory next spring, said Keating. That add-on armor is called “reactive armor.” Essentially that armor explodes when an RPG or other anti-tank round hits it, he said.

It’s already on M-2 Bradley fighting vehicles in Iraq right now, Keating said.

That reactive armor won’t always be on the Stryker, said Keating. It can be put on and taken off as a situation warrants, he said.

The idea for the slat armor isn’t new.
“Historically that type of protection has been used as far back as Vietnam,” he said.

But developing and approval only took about six months, Keating said. The approval came in August, he said.

“It’s been live-fire tested and it’s been a real rapid response,” he said of the testing process.

When Operation Iraqi Freedom started, the unit was going through the first of its two evaluations for deployment. Those tests took place at the National Training Center at Fort Irwin, Calif., and the Joint Readiness Training Center at Fort Polk, La.

The situation on the ground in Iraq –- a low-intensity guerrilla war -- was envisioned by then Army Chief of Staff Gen. Eric Shinseki as only one of the environments a Stryker unit would be in, said Maj. Gary Tallman, Army spokesman at the Pentagon.

Shinseki also envisioned major theater wars and support-and-stability operations, also known as humanitarian missions, Tallman said.

The best way to see if the Army's first Stryker-equipped unit is ready to deploy is to look at the validation process the unit went through, Tallman said.

The unit went through what Tallman said was "a full spectrum of training events" before it was certified ready for deployment.

Training included simulating a major theater war, small-scale contingencies and stability and support operations.

All of those events, from the desert environs of Fort Irwin and the restricted, urban-like terrain of Fort Polk, has helped ready the Stryker relatively quickly for deployment, Tallman said.

All of that field time before and after the evaluations was “unbelievable” but necessary, he said.

“You gotta make sure its ready to go to war,” he said.

So now it comes down to Chavez and the other Soldiers in the brigade.

Are they ready? Chavez thinks so and said his unit is chomping at the bit.

They heard rumors about deploying to Iraq when they were in California and were disappointed when they didn’t go right away, he said. But that doesn’t matter now, he said, they’re going and can’t wait to hit the ground.