Stryker Rollovers Still Occurring
On Monday, the Pentagon issued a press release noting that a Stryker brigade soldier had died in Al Qadisiyah, Iraq, on November 12 “when his Stryker military vehicle accidentally rolled over.” The accident is under investigation and the circumstances behind the rollover are not yet clear. We don’t know how many Stryker rollovers have occurred in Iraq since those numbers are not released publicly. However, insiders say such rollovers are not uncommon and aren’t limited to Strykers.
“Unfortunately, one of the best methods for avoiding IEDs (roadside bombs) is to drive like a bat out of hell and swerve a lot,” one insider told us. “This throws off the timing of the guys (insurgents) who are trying to either remotely or hard wire detonate an IED. Most of the time, their timing is too slow and the blast misses the vehicle.
“The down-side to this is there are a tremendous number of vehicle accidents associated with hyped-up young soldiers doing this day after day with Strykers, trucks and especially HMMWVs. All it takes is one mistake, and if you look at the number of nonhostile vehicle deaths due to accidents (again mostly in HMMWVs) you can see this unfortunate fact.”
This may be true, but the Strykers appear to be a special case in at least one way. Because rocket-propelled grenades are a major threat, the Strykers in Iraq were outfitted with an add-on, 5,000-pound “slat” armor. This bird-cage armor increases the vehicle’s profile, and changes the vehicle’s handling characteristics.
A December 2004 study of the Stryker brigade in Iraq (pdf; pgs 45-65) by the Center for Army Lessons Learned noted the handling problem and recommended more training. At the time, the problem was that the Stryker drivers at Fort Lewis, Washington, were training on Strykers that didn’t have the add-on armor. When they got to Iraq, driving the Strykers with slat-armor was like driving a whole different vehicle.
A story in today’s Aerospace Daily & Defense Report (paid subscription req'd) quoted a general saying that earlier rollover problems with the Stryker had been solved with more soldier training. However, even the extra training is a band-aid solution. The real fix will come when the manufacturer delivers vehicles with effective armor that doesn’t require the add-on cages.
1. The slat armor to my knowledge hasn't been pinpointed as a source of the Stryker rollovers (http://www.thenewstribune.com/news/local/story/4617218p-4288984c.html). However, I'm not going to pay for the Aerospace Daily article, and maybe it has specific information that subsequent rollovers have been correlated to the slat armor.
2. Training is a huge factor and not just a "band-aid" solution. A driver must understand his limits when driving the vehicle, and exceeding limits results in consequences. For example, there were a rash of rollovers during the first three months of this year, nearly all involving the M1114 Up-Armored HMMWV. What was most striking to me was the fact that the HMMWV is a very stable platform due to its very wide wheel base, and while you add several thousand pounds to the HMMWV in making it a M1114, the fact that the trend occured at the beginning of the rotation for units indicates a training problem to me(http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/iraq/2005-03-17-humvees-usat_x.htm). Also, vehicle occupants also need to know what to do to protect themselves in the event of a rollover - this obvious doesn't change whether a vehicle rolls or not, but it does reduce the chance of serious injuries and/or death in the event of a rollover.
3. Furthermore, you cannot discount the terrain as a factor. We are operating in the Tigris and Eurphrates River Valleys throughout Iraq, meaning we are navigating irrigation canal roads and other raised roads that reduce your margin for error - in otherwords, you pay for poor driving unlike if you were operating on improved, paved, four-lane roads. When we are operating away from these river valleys, we are typically using unimproved roads that may be built up, once again increasing the penalty for poor driving. Also, the Iraqis are terrible drivers. One of the fatal rollovers with the Stryker involved swerving away from an Iraqi vehicle to avoid a crash while driving at a high rate of speed. Whether the driver wasn't experienced enough or failed to implement his training, I don't know, but the fact is that you can't swerve that quickly at a high rate of speed, and he should have chosen the lesser of two evils and hit the Iraqi vehicle that was on the same side of the road. A 20 ton vehicle will win that battle, although you will still have some injuries.
4. Next, the ERA tiles that can replace the slat armor will actually add additional weight and won't significantly change the center of balance of vehicle, if it does at all, in comparison to the vehicle with slat armor. So, if the CB of the vehicle with slat armor is the issue (it isn't), then it follows that ERA would still be an issue, and so your proposed solution wouldn't really be a solution. Fortunately, what I've seen points to training, terrain, and enemy as being the factors contributing to rollovers.
5. Finally, I don't know why you would swerve when driving as the "insider" proposes. That certainly wasn't an officially published technique nor one that I heard or saw unofficially while in country or since I've redeployed. Maybe his unit or vehicle crew adopted it, but it makes no sense to me, and in fact, contradicts the offically published techniques, tactics, and procedures that are taught during pre-deployment training, in Kuwait, and preached by the IED Task Force in Iraq as they travel around to the various commands.
Posted on: Nov 23, 2005 at 09:13 AM