New Stryker has more punch
Published 9:00 pm Sunday, September 17, 2006
FORT LEWIS – Soldiers at Fort Lewis have begun training on the Army’s 10th and final version of the Stryker armored vehicle.
Five years in the making, the Mobile Gun System looks a lot like its predecessors but has a 105-mm cannon, and Army officials say it packs more power than other versions armed with a heavy machine gun, a grenade launcher or anti-tank missiles.
“This will bring a lot more firepower, a lot more versatility to what the infantry can do,” said Sgt. 1st Class David Cooper, a tanker who leads a platoon of three of the new vehicles in the 2nd Battalion, 23rd Infantry Regiment.
The MGS, as the Army calls it, is designed to back up infantry with a gun that can blast through walls, knock out fortified sniper nests, stop other armored vehicles and clear streets of enemy fighters.
General Dynamics Land Systems began delivering the new vehicles a couple months ago, and now company teams are training crews.
At about $3.7 million apiece, the MGS is the most expensive of the 10 variants of Stryker armored vehicles. For now, Fort Lewis – an Army post south of Tacoma – will be home to 27 of them. Eventually, the Army plans to buy a set of 27 for each of its seven Stryker brigades.
Local Stryker troops now fighting in Iraq won’t get the MGS before coming home next year. But the brigade that’s breaking in the new vehicles at Fort Lewis expects to take them to Iraq when it likely goes there next summer, The News Tribune reported Sunday.
Fort Lewis Stryker troops plan to take the vehicles to the Yakima Training Center in Eastern Washington late this month to conduct various tests, validating skills based on the experiences of soldiers now fighting in Iraq, Cooper said.
The 49,000-pound MGS is operated by a three-man crew: a driver, a gunner and a vehicle commander, said Thomas Crooks, the company’s service lead at Fort Lewis. The gunner and the vehicle commander track targets on computer screens inside their hatches in the turret.
