at the Company level Strykers are weird at the Company level. I've maneuvered Platoons with in a Company in force on force with Strykers and Bradleys, I might just be a Platoon level NCO but when I had an opinion the Battalion Command team would listen and when the Company Commander couldn't get to it he trusted my judgement in maneuvering while under fire (force on force) without checking in with him every step.

if by documented you mean Gulf War 1 things have changed they didn't have a clue what they where up against people know what we can do now. Evolve or die

Gotta be bold if your gonna be an Infantryman cant have all that misplaced faith in your thermals and armor

yeah casualties are unavoidable in that type of situation, just a fact. all of this doesn't really matter shouldn't be seeing any Javelin equipped infantry taking on Brads and Abrams anytime soon.

I'll take choabram armor any time I can get it.

I've been ridiculously bold at times.  to the point of reckless.  But throwing dismounted infantry at armored units when you have real tanks is the height of foolishness.

I just hope no one is stupid enough to actually throw strykers into the mix when going against a real threat.

fortunately that will probably never be the case.  I just hope they stop using them in low intensity warfare instead of MRAPs.  That got a lot of people killed.

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Don't throw Infantry at shit, find the enemy set the most favorable terms, engage destroy or engage and break contact rinse and repeat. Hell man the ridge line with grunts put a platoon of tanks, brads or strykers at the base engage draw the enemy in then pull back and let the vehicles clean up from the reverse slope until you can reoccupy

I gave up on feeling safe in a world filled with IEDs, I always found they built them big enough to deal with whatever we where driving, the shitty part of it was I always assumed sectors from guys with Bradleys in 1151's so we where gonna be toast in the 1151 when we hit a Bradley killer

Didn't unsupported SF guys with javelins fuck up a shit-ton of Iraqi armor during our last invasion of that noble country?

Yes Sir I do believe so.

Well, I think what we are running into is more a discussion of "which is a true IFV? Tracked or wheeled"?
I think that for arid and semi-arid terrain, wheeled is better. The Ratel and Buffel cannot stand toe to toe with a MBT or AT weapon (except land mines and IED's) operated by trained and experienced personnel. In hauling troops, supplies and providing a heavy weapons platform, it excelled. It was used as the spearhead in Angola - where chances of encountering MBT's were slim. In unconventional war, I think few are equal for mobility, protection and price. Maybe in the same lines as the BTR? If you want more firepower, then maybe a Rooikat?
The Stryker, which I so wanted to like, just seems a bit too much of everything and too little of what really matters. I suspect that anyone that's had time with a BTR90 would have a chuckle at the Stryker.
But back to the Bradley - I never watched the so called documentary and everything I know about it, is from reading books and first hand accounts of people that know a hell of a lot more about these things than I do. I am by no means experienced in combat, APC's or IFV's. I simply rode them to school and then for a few weeks a year around the training grounds.

Is there any mission we could realistically use the Stryker to good effect?

Parades.

Technically if we are talking about shuttling folks around where the threat of combat is NIL, Uber can't be beat.

LPCs.

They're the cheapest.

Not really.

If there is fighting to be done and you can use mechanized forces, use an HBCT.

If there is driving around the same AO over and over again with IEDs and small arms, MRAPs.

If nobody is shooting, HMMWVs and LMTVs.

The stryker was strangled from birth by the requirement to be C-130 "capable"

Which was a lie.  An absolute total unquestioned lie.

You'll never get the AF to fly them in any sort of responsive manner and they are ineffective off the ramp anyway.

This was directly a response to having to fly in Brads and Tanks for IFOR in Dec 95 when the bridge at Zupanja got flooded out and what was supposed to take the engineers 3 hours under fire took 4 weeks.

Couldn't get forces in theater fast enough so this was the idea.

Light infantry, incapable of comprehending anything other than a 9 man squad, suddenly thought they were tankers and were gonna stop the commie hordes.

Bradleys and Abrams are getting shot at and with Kornets,Konkurs and Iranian TOW copies daily in Yemen.

and getting raped.  Interesting AARs out of Bellingcat (I think thats the name)

You'd assume these guided missiles would be getting raped by counter fire but they are so far away and their signature so low that the best defense appears to be ATGM crews hunting other ATGM crews.

Any  MBT or armored vehicle without active missile protection is a liability at this point.

Don't worry, the USAF will claim the F-35D (for derp) will be the best network-centric, stealth, VTOLOLBBQ troop carrier in the history of existence.  It just needs to be fed 100% of GDP, and your firstborn, to be C2D2'd into existence.

It pains me to say it but the best use of stryker infantry is as a JTAC escort service.

You know what we need? M50 Ontos, hundreds of thousands of them.

I've faced real tanks firing real rounds in light vehicles with both javelin and TOW.  You immediately realize the reality that you don't have anything close to a chance when they already know you are there.

If you can use terrain and the element of surprise, combined with CAS/FIRES you have a real shot at something awesome.

If you are facing a real combined arms team which is going to prep with artillery, the focus is staying alive, not ATGMS.

If I didn't have the option of armor, I'll take what I can get.  But if I have the choice...

Yeah, I'll be back here drying my socks.  Go do that armor shit.

No.

Just ... no.

I remember when FMC used to make those Beer cans  

With drones and even TV cameras in artillery shells, the "element of surprise" is going to be mighty uncommon on the battlefield.

In a battlefield with freedom of the air and the spectrum sure.  Lose those and surprise will be in no short supply.

lol

Berlin V2.0 also to be known as The 5th Crusade.

The best use of the tech in that video is to make cool videos and try to persuade our adversaries to waste money on a useless tech arms race.

As a vehicle operator, maintainer or passenger I wouldn't want to have anything to do with that outside of helping to make cool videos. It's an overly complicated mechanism for a hub with none of the shock absorption that you get from a tire and full of gravel-swallowing gaps to help self-destruct the works. Fuck being the sorry SOB that gets to repair that thing when it brakes or worse, being the poor SOB who gets to sit waiting for a recovery vehicle. We break enough HMMWV drive hubs as it is and those are relatively simple gearboxes cushioned by fat tires. I'm also thinking the ride you'd get from these things would be worse than sitting near the tailgate in the back of a 5-ton going 30 MPH while it rolls over a street made entirely of speed bumps.

We once screwed with our BMO's HMMWV by taking it's wheels off and bolting up M113 road wheels in their place. (yes, it's the same lug pattern) That's probably not far off from what it must feel like riding in that Darpa toy.

No thanks.

why?

Yeah, you don't use IFVs for IFVing. They might get shot. You use behind-the-lines all terrain trucks instead and load them up with armor until their frames buckle.

You don't need freedom of the air to shoot an artillery shell with a camera in it over the battlefield, and spread-spectrum technology is available to both sides.  IF you have the ability to jam enough of the spectrum to shut down the other side - you are also shutting down yourself.

None of which is going to stop a satellite downlink, or a recon drone communicating by a microwave laser.

More like why didn't we think of that?

Goes for both sides, yeah? It would seem to make it easier for us to have the element of surprise.

I can't think of anything that'd be better at mechanized urban patrol where the road infrastructure is good. But then I'm no expert on such things.

Those things are awesome. They used 105mm tubes, right?

If so they can fire LAHAT

It was rules, man. BMO's HMMWV always had to get fucked with.

Another time for our weekly SGT's time training we did basic infantry maneuvers at a paintball joint. At the end of it all, We all emptied our hoppers on BMO's ride. It was...  colorful. At least it was a short ride back to the motorpool in the rainbow wagon.

Wish I still had those pics.

Satellite downlinks are not jammable?  Interesting.

They should up-gun it with the 40mm Bofors.

There wouldn’t be much space left for dismounts, but who needs those when you have a proper cannon?

I wish we would just buy the CV90.

I have no idea whats going on in this thread, but I did always think Bradleys looked cool.

What's you take on the use of Stryker in Syria.

Looked like quite a lot of Strykers but nothing heavier.

So it is tools in the tool box.  My SWAG:

I did a training event with the strykers when they started out

They are very unbalanced in terms of weight. You have eight wheels but maybe half the weight in the engine sits over the front axle.  The squad of dismounts is good, but the weight of the engine unbalances the vehicle as it is all out over the nose.  Since it is wheeled, not tracked, it tends to bottom out on soft ground over the engine.  I saw strykers get stuck in places nothing gets stuck in.  Always over the nose. Also, the flat bottom is bad for IEDs.  
However, also saw a stryker platoon maneuver on bad guys and they are quiet, quiet, quiet.

So its a good motorized vehicle, and great in MOUT in a counterinsurgency for raiders that want to dump a platoon somewhere and kick in some doors. The thermals are great and the ability for all the joes in the back of the stryker to see the thermals and get a picture before they drop ramp is helpful. You can put a platoon in four strykers, not eight humvees, so the C2 isnt a huge convoy charlie foxtrot...and thats good.  But they have surprisingly significant trafficability issues. A roadbound lightvehicle with a flat bottom isnt that great for a wide variety of missions when the IED comes out.  Which it will, unless you are fighting fools, in which case anything works.  But if you put a track on it, to go cross country, its just a brad with no turret and some extra guys.

I did some time with Sheridans in a past life, and have always been sceptical when I later went to a mech unit and saw how much gas the M1 guzzled.  You want a 70 ton tank that goes really fast? What people dont realize is the thing is like an armored knight on an armored steed.  It needs gas. Lots of gas. Did I say gas?  And that goes in some really unarmored wheeled HEMMTs that cant go in lots of places. The M1 runs out of gas every day.  We should have had the M8 as well.  A battalion of paratroopers and a platoon or two of light armor was a nice combination.  Lots of firepower and not a huge deployability footprint when the USAF showed up.  I know a two star general who was a company commander in the 82nd whose mission was to go downtown in Port au Prince in 1994: one rifle company and two sheridans with 152mm HE and flechettes.  Quite a few guys were going to do that when 3/73 was going to drop in.   A 152mm is just a flying trashcan of HE.  Just so much HE goodness. And the flechettes?  The 152mm shotgun round was joyous.  Mowed through everything.

The Brad is more or less our light tank.  I did the Bradley leaders course in the 90s.  The 25mm with thermal is way better then a mk19 or .50.  On the other hand, the thing is loud.  Poor recon vehicle.  Also flat bottom hull, bad vs IEDs.  It was designed by Depuy who was channelling a lot of influences, from Rommel's massed machine gun positions, to US mech infantry in '45, to the '73 Israelis, to Fulda Gap.  The dismounts always got short shift in exchange for firepower...which is not a bad idea. It was designed by a gunfighter to replace the M113, which was a box on tracks, and not that imaginative. But we always viewed the bradley/M1 as a team.  As an 82nd guy once who saw grunts and M8s as a team, a mech co minus the tanks and a light battalion wouldnt be bad. A bradley company would have crushed the Mogadishu reistance lickety split, for example.  The gas efficiency of  the diesel, vice the jet engine of the M1, is a big plus

The stryker is probably the best, low gas guzzling, expeditionary wheeled  thing you dump off a C-17 when you jump in and take some dump airfield in Africa or whatever.  It is also the best choice in Baghdad or somewhere you can guarantee when riding on asphalt.

For long term COIN, as I say before, we never really did solve the IED problem.  I have seen the uparmored humvees get towed in that some guy got killed in.  Seen PLs get very leery of going places, and I can guarantee two AT mines can kill you in a horrible way in a flat bellied truck.  Of the MRAPs, the base MRAP, MAXXPRO, and MATV, I like the one that carried the four guys in the back, the MAXXPRO, even though the new MATV with the CROW had sweet accuracy, didnt tip, and had some good horsepower to weight.

I wish the armored corps would get a second tank, like a 35 tonner with a diesel, that isnt tied to the mobility parameters of the fuel truck. The Marines need it, too. Barring that, Id go back to a pure mech battalion or two.  The M1 tank is a beautiful thing but the class III of the same jet engine the F16 had, pushing 70 tons of steel, overwhelms lots of bridges, lots of ford sites. In Korea, the locals dont spend the money to rate bridges to 70 ton.  Hell, in my home town they dont do it either.  For that matter, anywhere you have water, like a small bridge, the Abrams has problems.  We just dont know it yet.  ***CRUNCH*** goes the bridge.  You get the idea.  And if a couple of insurgents can stop your HEMMTs your fuel dries up, and that is that for your tanks.

Since they aint gonna do that the next best gun below the 120mm isnt a 90 or 105 on a light tank...I guess its the brad.  Thats not great, but it will do.   Heck, you could take the 76mm or 90mm off the scorpion British tank and that would be swell.

For a forced entry scenario, I could see the 82nd jumping in a securing an airhead, then the strykers deploy out of C17s and maneuver.  I think in a lot of cases a bradley is better.  An M1 is best but the logistics footprint gets you , I dunno, 50% more capability with 300% more logistical problems.

So its tools in a toolbox.  I like light tanks as they rock and we dont have any, and against realistic threats you can use the bradley for it.  The M1 is the best solution for a small set of problems. The stryker is a great solution for a very small set of problems.  I wouldnt throw the MRAPs away, they are an acceptable solution for a lot of problems.

One of the reasons the brad gets badmouthed post 1989 is we slap firepower on an infantry carrier, because the US Military has one, yes one tank, and didnt build the second one that we really need.

Had a Bundeswehr guy who was a real tank and IFV/APC nerd and also a big Pro EU guy. Tell me that he thought the Bradley is the best IFV on the planet. And I should note he was a critic of the M1 Abrams and thought the Leopard 2 was the greatest thing since sliced bread.

The Brad was a fucking machine in MOUT, which is the most treacherous place for any armor. So the Korea argument thing is something I don't all that much agree with. That thing was raping shit all over the place, in direct action role in the cities we fought in all over Iraq.

So but anyway, after my real positive experiences in Iraq with how well the Bradley performed, and hearing that from a guy who has no business to compliment American forces, and being obsessed on researching combat vehicles. It was all a pretty good validation of my experience and views.

Maybe I'm getting rose colored glasses but I like the bfv for assaults. There was a yard full of catstrophic bfv in my old AO but they where all killed on patrols.

6 Bradley's w dismounts and an air weapons team can show up at daybreak and clear a small city by sunset. Hard to argue with that.

Hellfire truck?