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My View

By John Zutz

In early April, the small town of Kewaskum, near Milwaukee, was forced to hold a referendum to allow the school board to exceed spending limits by $430,000 for five years. The money was to be spent on new textbooks and computer systems for the schools. It barely passed.

To discover what this has to do with military spending, please examine one of our newest military purchases: the Stryker interim armored vehicle.

The Army signed a $4 billion contract to produce just over 2,100 Strykers (about $1.9 million apiece). They weigh about 19 tons, have eight-wheel drive, will go 60 miles per hour and travel 300 miles on a tank of gas (5.5 miles per gallon). The basic steel hull will protect the internal areas from 7.62 mm bullets. The Stryker's tires can be inflated or deflated from inside the vehicle to adapt to surfaces ranging from deep mud to hardtop, and it has run-flat tires, a built-in fire-suppression system, and self-recovery winch. They weigh around 38,000 pounds, which allows them to theoretically be transportable in a C-130.

Sounds like a pretty good deal, right? Three hundred and eleven Strykers are in service in Iraq today—supporting our troops. And it probably would be a pretty good deal, except for some minor problems.

The 126 pieces of crew-installable appliqué ceramic-steel armor increases the protection to .50 caliber armor-piercing rounds, RPG-7, and 152 mm artillery airbursts, but adds 7,000 pounds. The Stryker's Caterpillar engine struggles to move the extra weight, so the armor isn't normally in use.

In order to accommodate the weight of the extra armor, the tires are inflated to 90 pounds and the central inflation system is disconnected. This causes the Stryker to bog down when surface conditions change. That would be bad enough, but the Stryker's winch isn't sufficiently strong to recover it with the external armor.

There are some major flaws in the Stryker design as well. The Stryker needs a waiver from the Air Force to be carried on a C-130. The waiver is necessary because the vehicle is too wide to accommodate the 14-inch safety aisle around all sides that is required by the Air Force for the loadmaster. Additionally, due to it's weight, only a portion of the Stryker crew may fly in the same aircraft. The infantry carrier variant requires multiple alterations to fit into a C-130.

The weapon system doesn't shoot accurately when the vehicle is moving. Computer and other systems malfunction because of air conditioning problems. Troops can't fasten their seat belts when wearing body armor. We'll be paying billions more in the future to update and refit these lemons.

Still, the Stryker is a piker when it comes to cost. A few of the Pentagon's favorites:

Abrams main battle tank: 10,000+ made, $4.3 million each, 1,100 in Iraq, 69 tons, over 80 damaged so badly by improvised explosive devices they needed to be shipped back to be rebuilt.

Bradley fighting vehicle: 1600+ made, $3.2 million each, 25 tons.

Tomahawk cruise missile: 4000+ made, $1.4 million each.

B1B bomber: 100 made, $200 million+ each.

Nimitz class aircraft carrier: 12 in service, average life-cycle cost $444 million annually, 50-year lifespan.

I'm not saying we shouldn't have some of these things. I do think we could get by with fewer, so the kids in Kewaskum and other small towns can have modern textbooks.