Stryker Brigade Research Articles

What mix of brigade combat teams should the US Army Field?

During the past decade of war, the US Army has employed its forces in roles they were not intended to fulfill. The Army could have been better prepared if it had fielded a better mixture of forces. Instead of focusing on specific threats that narrowly specify which conflicts the Army will best be prepared for, the Army should maintain a broad range of capabilities that can meet a variety of circumstances. Accordingly, the Army should seek a force structure that exhibits a 3:1:1 ratio of Infantry, Armor, and Stryker brigade combat teams (BCTs) based on the possible range of conditions that US forces could face.

Behavioral health trends throughout a 9-month Brigade Combat Team deployment to Afghanistan.

This descriptive report details primarily qualitative information on behavioral health capabilities, utilization, and referral rates for a Stryker Brigade Combat Team deployed to Afghanistan for 9 months from 2012 to 2013. Limited quantitative data on standardized risk assessments throughout the deployment cycle are presented. Initial data on the postdeployment care at an embedded behavioral health clinic are also provided, with referral data comparing pre- and postdeployment periods. Lessons learned for providing brigade-level behavioral health services during combat deployments are discussed, including consultation with the rear detachment, utilization of telehealth assets, and distributing the network of care throughout the battlespace.

War Narratives

WHILE THE US-LED WARS in Afghanistan and Iraq have been going on for fourteen years, much of American literature from these conflicts is only now emerging. I appreciate the veterans who’ve woven the simultaneously “worst and best days of their lives” into literature. They have turned to all forms to find their truth—poetry, short stories, memoir, and the novel. (Disclosure: I’m the mother of a Marine who served in both conflicts and is now one of the novelists listed here.) I have framed these suggested readings with a history from the Great War a hundredyearsagoandwithadiaryofoneof the long-serving detainees in Guantánamo. Truth in literature is determined in part by point of view. In these books, the reader can take a journey from many perspectives. Margaret MacMillan The War That Ended Peace: The Road to 1914 Random House In this nonfiction book, Margaret MacMillan narrates history through the lives of those responsible for World War I. The characters and cousins could populate a fiction collection with their dramas, imaginations, and absurdities .MacMillanoffersaninsideview,revealing the people and stories behind the politics and events that led to a war many feel—and felt at the time—shouldn’t have happened. Brian Turner My Life as a Foreign Country: A Memoir W. W. Norton The author writes of his deployment as an Army sergeant, beginning in the US learning to identify body parts, watching combat on television, and then arriving in Iraq and facing real combat in the first Stryker brigade. “We rode on a war elephant made of steel,” he writes of the nineteen-ton tank. A poet (Here, Bullet), Turner narrates his experiences and his return home in a poet’s language, which spins the harshest circumstances—the soggy, trodden straw—into gold and art. Phil Klay Redeployment Penguin A veteran of the US Marine Corps assembles a dozen short stories and first-person narrators —soldiers on the front lines, in the rear, at desks, with their family, friends, wives, and girlfriends back home. The narrators’ voices are witty, unflinching, nostalgic, and the stories make the reader laugh, cry, and wonder how a generation honed on this conflict will return to life as it was. Elliot Ackerman Green on Blue Scribner This novel narrates the war in Afghanistan from the point of view of an Afghan orphan who gets caught up on the American side of the conflict in order to keep his brother alive. He quickly learns that the war has too many sides and so many points of view that truth shimmers only in the eyes of the beholder. Mohamedou Ould Slahi (Larry Siems, ed.) Guantánamo Diary Little, Brown Guantánamo Diary tells the story of the “war on terror” from the point of view of one who has been detained, tortured, and continues to proclaim his innocence. With a literary and humane voice, Slahi, edited beautifully by Siems and redacted by a censor , renders the horror and humanity in this war that will not end. Joanne Leedom-Ackerman is a novelist, short-story writer, and journalist. Her works of fiction include The Dark Path to the River and No Marble Angels. A vice president of PEN International, she also serves on the boards of the PEN/Faulkner Foundation, Poets & Writers, the International Center for Journalists, and Words Without Borders. 6 WLT SEPTEMBER / OCTOBER 2015 what to read now War Narratives by Joanne Leedom-Ackerman Notebook The war has too many sides and so many points of view that truth shimmers only in the eyes of the beholder. ...

Risk Factors for Musculoskeletal Injuries for Soldiers Deployed to Afghanistan

This study determined injury incidence and examined the association between musculoskeletal injuries and potential intrinsic and extrinsic risk factors. This retrospective cohort study involved a survey of 593 volunteers from two battalions of a Stryker Brigade Combat Team upon completion of a 12-mo deployment to Afghanistan. The survey included questions on physical characteristics, work duties, equipment worn, fitness training, and injuries experienced during the deployment. Of the surveyed soldiers, 45% sustained an injury during the deployment. Total injuries resulted in 5049 d of limited duty, an average of 8.5 d per injury. The body regions with the largest numbers of injuries were the low back (17.4%), knee (12.7%), and shoulder (10.0%). The majority (65%) of injuries occurred while working. The most frequent activities soldiers reported as the cause of injury were lifting and carrying (9.8%), dismounted patrolling (9.6%), and physical training (8.0%). Older age, higher enlisted rank, female sex, months deployed, more time spent standing, longer strength training sessions, heaviest load worn, and heavier or more frequent lifting tasks were all associated with injury. Tasks requiring physical energy expenditure such as load carriage, lifting, or standing resulted in an increased risk of musculoskeletal injury in this study. Lifting/carrying, dismounted patrols, and physical training were associated with 26% of musculoskeletal injuries. The weight of loads carried and lifting may be exceeding the work capacity of the soldiers, resulting in injury. These injuries in turn limit available work days for military units, reducing combat power.

Lifting Tasks are Associated With Injuries During the Early Portion of a Deployment to Afghanistan

U.S. Army soldiers spend months at a time working in austere environments during deployments. The numerous physical demands placed on them during deployment can lead to musculoskeletal injuries. These injuries account for the majority of medical evacuations and lost duty days, seriously affecting mission readiness. Because of limited electronic injury data, little research has been done on physical demands associated with injury in deployed environments. To this end, this study conducted a survey on 263 soldiers in a Stryker Brigade Combat Team during their third month of deployment to Afghanistan. In the third month, 23% sustained an injury and 43% of injuries affected the low-back, shoulder, or knee. Dismounted patrolling and lifting were reported to account for 36% of injuries. Wearing heavy loads and lifting tasks were identified as injury risk factors. Wearing heavier equipment and lifting objects higher may increase physical demands and may result in injury.

DYING IN WAR POETRY

3 3 R D Y I N G I N W A R P O E T R Y L O R R I E G O L D E N S O H N In the poetry of war, homage to dead soldiers undergoes all the modification by time and history that war itself endures, as war and the war poem move from phalanx to Stryker brigade, from hoplite to corporal, or from dactylic hexameter to free verse paragraph . More than two millennia ago an anonymous Chinese poet wrote in somber elegy: The warriors are all dead, they lie in the open fields. They set out, but shall not enter; they went but shall not come back. The plains are empty and wide, the way home is long. Up to this point the poem, with its stalled and hapless dead, could have been written in the twentieth or twenty-first century, although the poet would have substituted a less anachronistically tinged word like soldiers for ‘‘warriors,’’ and the translator’s biblical cadence would have been muΔed. But in addition to the poem’s load of ancient weaponry, its final lines, with their visionary a≈rmation of the exalted afterlife of the fighter, are also wholly unmodern: 3 4 G O L D E N S O H N Y Their tall swords are at their waist, their bows are under their arm; Though their heads were severed their spirit could not be subdued. They that fought so well – in death are warriors still; Stubborn and steadfast to the end, they could not be dishonoured. Their bodies perished in the fight, but the magic of their souls is strong – Captains among the ghosts, heroes among the Dead! A millennium later, while a troubadour like Bertrans de Born could revel unashamedly in assault, death, and destruction, the clean separation between mutilated body and journeying soul becomes far more enigmatic than in the Chinese poem. Alive, the troubadour sang: ‘‘My heart is filled with gladness when I see / Strong castles besieged, stockades broken and overwhelmed, / Many vassals struck down, / Horses of the dead and wounded roving at random . . . I tell you I have no such joy as when I hear the shout / ‘On! On!’ from both sides and the neighing of riderless steeds, / And groans of ‘Help me! Help me!’ ’’ But when the magical soul of Bertrans de Born shows up dead in Dante’s ninth circle of hell, he has become the infamously quarrelsome figure whose magic is a gruesome irony: A headless trunk that walked, in sad promenade ShuΔing the dolorous track with its companions, And the trunk was carrying the severed head, Gripping its hair like a lantern, letting it swing [Inferno, Canto 28, trans. Robert Pinsky] Nevertheless, while faith in the reach and sustainability of warrior glory may have dimmed, the notion of war as fiendish fun will not go away. Even Jim Nye, an American veteran of the Vietnam War, can be heard singing out in favor of death and mayhem as he inhales the coppery smell of blood and cordite. ‘‘My God, I love it,’’ Nye writes, although he admits that his love of war comes ‘‘from something dark in my soul’’ (‘‘Chimaera’’). On one hand, the warrior may have been ejected from his seat in heaven, but on the other, war calls up the same old thrill. D Y I N G I N W A R P O E T R Y 3 5 R Continually assailed by the spectacle of today’s indefatigable war making, we cannot at the same time avoid seeing how current literature reflects a pervasive skepticism concerning the honor and glory of death in battle. Even as public faith in martial e√ort remains high, flashes of revulsion and rejection keep pulsing at lower levels, as our emphases in describing war, our ideas of what is heroic, what is humanly dignified and worthy, appear stubbornly open to mutation. Dismay and horror have always been present in war literature, from Homer to the latest publications flooding from Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere. Indeed, horror and dismay must cling to any full account of war; but it...

“Face to Face”

the ruthlessness of our attempts be rid of [unconscious impulses] ... might be one reason why illegally occupying armies, who can neither settle nor face their own conscience, become so brutalized--it their own discomfort they are trying erase. --Jacqueline Rose (1) To be in relation with the other face face be unable kill. --Emmanuel Levinas (2) During 1970, hundreds of thousands of United States citizens marched in protest against atrocities committed in Vietnam by U.S. soldiers brutalized by a situation that rendered them victims of their government's projections of fear and terror. In that year, the U.S. bombing of Cambodia and the shooting of protestors on college campuses by the National Guard were further rungs on the ladder of escalation. An earlier rung had been reached with the publication of horrific photographs of Vietnamese burn victims, including children, caused by the U.S. use of napalm, which provoked new forms of artists' dissent in 1967. Then, in late 1969, color images of the My Lai Massacre reproduced in Life magazine regalvanized artists and intellectuals utilize photographs of atrocities and their perpetrators force members of the government and the military face their own consciences and mobilize support for the anti-war movement. Consider, for example, the face of Lieutenant William Galley, leader of the platoon responsible for the killings at My Lai, reprinted as masks be worn on the back of protestors' heads in 1970 and '71. His eyes' blank circles metaphorically represented him as unable look at, see, be face-to-face with the Other in Vietnam. Judith Butler writes that for Emmanuel Levinas, the face is that vocalization of agony that not yet language or no longer language, the one by which we are wakened the precariousness of the Other's life, the one that rouses at once the temptation murder and the interdiction against it. (3) There a constant tension between the fear of undergoing violence and the fear of inflicting violence. The fear of one's own death could be overcome by obliterating the Other, but this might require a need to keep obliterating, especially if there are four hundred men behind him, and they all have families and friends, if not a nation or two behind them. (4) THE KILL TEAM PHOTOGRAPHS In early 2011, photographs of U.S. atrocities in Afghanistan, leaked by investigative journalists and freedom of information organizations, dominated public debates about the war on terror (5) and the nature of effective dissent. Inevitably, these revelations evoked those during the Vietnam War and raised questions about responses by artists, writers, and intellectuals--then and now. In May 1971, the New York Review of Books published a letter from Robert Lowell, poet and dissenter, after President Nixon had effectively pardoned Calley. The relevance of Lowell's letter for 2011 could be grounds for melancholy: His atrocity cleared by the President, public, polls, rank and file of the right and left. ... Our nation looks up heaven, and puts her armies above the law. No stumbling on the downward plunge from Hiroshima. Retribution someone somewhere else and we are young. In a century perhaps no one will widen an eye at massacre, and only scattered corpses express a last histrionic concern for death. (6) At the end of March 2011, Naomi Wolf considered the recent scandal surrounding atrocity photographs taken in early 2010 by U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan, which were first published in the German newsmagazine Der Spiegel on March 21, 2011. The magazine reported that it had obtained four thousand photographs and videos taken by a self-styled Kill Team, and reproduced three images, digitally blurring the faces of Afghan victims. (7) Between January and May 2010, members of the 5th Stryker Brigade, [2.sup.nd] Infantry Division, conspired target civilians, kill them, and make their deaths appear be those of insurgents. …

Relationship Between Psychological Skill Profiles and Soldier Physical Fitness Performance

We examine the structure of soldier's psychological skills and assess the relationship between psychological skills profiles and physical performance with data from 427 soldiers from a Stryker Brigade. Exploratory factor analyses results provided empirical support for a three-factor structure that included foundation skills, psychosomatic skills, and cognitive skills. Cluster analysis revealed three emergent psychological skills profile groups: (a) strong skills, (b) weak skills, and (c) fearful focus clusters. Soldiers in the strong psychological skill profile group performed better than their peers in the other profile groups on the Army Physical Fitness Test (APFT) performance measure. We discuss the implications of our findings for theory, research, and practice.

Maneuver analysis methodology to predict vehicle impacts on training lands

Tactical mobility analysis techniques were merged with land management strategies to assess potential impacts of vehicle operations on training areas for rangeland planning and management. A vehicle mobility analysis was performed for a suite of vehicle types using the NATO Reference Mobility Model (NRMM II). Input parameters include terrain information (soil type, slope, vegetation, surface roughness, soil strength), terrain surface condition based on climate (terrain strength, freeze–thaw, moisture content, snow cover), and vehicle specifications (tire, power train, weight on each axle, ground clearance, dimensions, ride). The vehicle performance was spatially mapped over the terrain for different seasons of the year and used to calculate the maneuverable acreage, which was compared to acreage needed for training requirements. This can be related to land capability based on expected training impact (Maneuver Impact Miles, MIM) and Land Condition Curves which link training density to land condition. This methodology can be used to determine the suitability of training lands and the degree of land management or rehabilitation expected. The methodology was applied to the transformation of the Alaska training lands to support a new brigade unit called the Stryker Brigade Combat Team (SBCT3), but is equally useful for other training areas and military units. For summer use, Alaska training lands are capable of supporting four times the projected training requirements. For winter, when the ground is frozen, more than 10 times the area needed was available.

Tread-Heads or Technophiles? Army Officer Attitudes Toward Transformation

The Army has committed itself to the most dramatic change of any of the US military services. In October 1999 General Eric K. Shinseki, then the Army Chief of Staff, announced a goal of reconfiguring the Army from a force mainly composed of heavy formations into a medium-weight force capable of deploying a 5,000-soldier brigade anywhere in the world within 96 hours. The Army is replacing some heavy armored and mechanized units with a force of six Stryker Brigade Combat Teams equipped with light wheeled armored vehicles. By 2010, it will field a networked Future Force equipped with the Future Combat System. (1) This shift away from heavy armor as the main combat element of the Army portends change not only to the Army's organization and systems, but also to its hierarchy, career paths, and organizational culture. The officer corps will play a key role in determining the success or failure of Army transformation. Enthusiastic officers will work hard to make new concepts and organizations a reality. Skeptical officers, by contrast, could undermine such efforts. Unfortunately, to date leaders have had little reliable data upon which to gauge the attitudes of Army officers toward the new combat methods. On the one hand, the Army leadership asserts that the service embraces innovation. As the Army Trans formation Roadmap puts it: The Army recognizes the need to create a culture of innovation, and we are beginning to address this need through the officer professional development system. Initiatives to nurture innovation are emerging from the top down and the bottom up. These provide evidence not only of the Army's commitment to this endeavor, but also of the favorable climate within today's Army towards innovation. (2) On the other hand, in the wake of General Shinseki's initiative there were numerous reports of opposition to transformation from within the ranks of the service. (3) Nearly all such reports, however, are anecdotal, consisting of scattered quotes from unnamed sources. This article presents selected results of the first systematic effort to understand officer attitudes toward transformation in recent years. It is based upon surveys conducted in 2000 and 2002 of more than 4,500 officers--including nearly 1,900 Army officers. It reveals a dramatic shift in Army attitudes toward transformation during that period. In 2000, Army officers as a group were among the more skeptical of the need for change; in late 2002, they were among the most supportive. In 2002 they shared a belief that the spread of long-range precision-strike capabilities would require the Army to become lighter and more capable of dispersing on the battlefield. However, they were uncertain that the Army was on the right path in seeking to replace heavy armored vehicles with formations reliant upon robust information networks. Moreover, many felt that elements of the Army's organizational culture inhibited innovation. Why Study Officer Attitudes? There are four compelling reasons why it is important to understand officer attitudes toward transformation. First, the military services will be the ultimate practitioners of the new ways of war. The extent to which their members are enthusiastic about change may help determine the success or failure of new technologies, operational concepts, and organizations. Second, although very few officers will likely emerge as true innovators, the existence of a climate conducive to innovation within the officer corps may encourage individuals both to generate new ideas and to remain in the service to bring them to fruition. Third, a large percentage of career officers will rise to senior leadership positions within their services in the next 10 to 20 years. In those roles, they will establish command climates that will either support or inhibit risk-taking and innovation. Past research has demonstrated the importance to innovation of senior officers who protect and nurture the careers of young innovators under their command who are willing to take risks: Finally, officers are the recognized experts in military affairs in the United States. …

Hawaiian Literature and Resistance, or How My Ancestors Took on the Stryker Brigade and Joined the Struggle to Demilitarize Hawai'i!

When the United States formally took control of Hawai'i in 1898, the eighty-something years of Americans living among the kanaka maoli, called Hawaiians in English, had already positioned them above the maka'ainana, or commoners. By the end of the nineteenth century 90o percent of all kanaka had died from foreign diseases, and the 40,000 or so still alive were almost completely Christianized. With Christianity came haole (white) notions of literacy, that is, a written alphabet. The consequences of this worked for and against the kanaka, as writing down an extremely complex language also meant applying an arbitrary simplification via the foreigner's perspective. For example, the sounds of K and T were interchangeable from region to region, but in the written version, the letter T was left out of the alphabet. Today kanaka maoli are just over two decades into a cultural renaissance that is premised in large part on recovering '6lelo Hawai'i, or what some call 'olelo makuahine-the mother tongue. As a cultural phenomenon this process is woven into the contemporary sovereignty struggle, a movement that is as much about nationalism as it is about culture. It is not uncommon now and then to see an editorial written by a kanaka maoli that criticizes the missionaries and their descendants, a number of whom were personally responsible for the illegal overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom in 1893. And without missing a beat, the newspaper follows up with a strongly worded letter from a haole person chastising the ungrateful kanaka who wrote the editorial. It usually goes something like this: If it weren't for the missionaries there would be no Hawaiian language because they gave you people an alphabet and taught you how to read. From 1856 onward kanaka maoli wrote and published in their own

Army Digitization: Making it Ready for Prime Time

Today's emerging strategic environment and operational challenges demand that the Army develop a more responsive and mobile force while maintaining the lethality necessary to fight and win our nation's wars. (1) The Army is developing the Future Force as the long-term solution while the structurally-new current force, characterized by the Stryker Brigade Combat Teams, is a near- and mid-term solution for a more responsive, mobile, agile, and versatile medium-weight force. (2) Simultaneously, the current force, starting with the heavy mechanized and armored divisions, is digitizing and undergoing force structure changes to enhance its near-term ability to provide these operational capabilities. (3) Coupled with technical innovations, the structural changes--to include reduced platform density, indirect fire assets, and combat service support footprint--will purportedly allow modernized current forces to have greater capability through superiority and the ability to conduct rapid, decisive operations. (4) The Army's commitment to creating a digitized force elicits some key questions about how the Army will make the transition from an analog force in the face of rapidly changing technology while maintaining the capability to meet key strategic and operational challenges. For example, what are the force structure changes that the Army needs to make to best leverage powerful systems? What is the phasing strategy to keep units interoperable and operationally viable during the transition? How fast should the transition occur given that digitized systems continue to mature? What is the appropriate level of embedding digital systems--is brigade/battalion-level the locus or should every soldier become an node? The current state of Army digitization is immature and not uniformly delivering the promised capability to justify the current changes in the force structure. Despite great expenditures and effort, the current state of the digital system-of-systems and employment concepts makes clear the price of transformation, to accept risk in the near and mid-term, causing turbulence and unexpected change ... [while] freeing up sufficient resources for the Army to invest in new technologies that will enhance its warfighting effectiveness in the future. (5) The Army is accepting this risk, but there is uncertainty whether digitization is fully ready for prime time. This article investigates critical challenges in the Army's current digitization efforts, including force structure implications, and provides recommendations to ensure the increasingly digitized Army maintains its capability and readiness as it moves from an analog to a primarily digitally enabled force. Network-Centric Warfare and Digitization The discussion on the merits and prudence of embracing network-centric warfare continues as a great debate both within the Army and across the Department of Defense. Yet, regardless of its merits, it is safe to say that network-centric warfare, a term with a constantly evolving definition but one firmly rooted in the concept of horizontal and vertical information-sharing using advanced technology, is the chosen path for the transformation of the United States military, and the Army is incorporating its concepts. With network-centric warfare, the Army is shifting power away from an industrial-age focus on mass toward access and flow of as an essential element of combat power. (6) The business world has capitalized on leaps in effectiveness gained from digital communications, including dramatic information-sharing within established networks with real-time collaboration. The Army seeks to infuse these same qualities in its units in order to conduct rapid, decisive operations at the operational and tactical levels by using digital information technologies to acquire, exchange, and employ timely throughout the battlespace. …