whoa, whoa, whoa, whoaaaaaaaa, whoa
This whole damn thing has been about a typo??? versatile for universal???
LMAO
So all that has really happenned is that the two of you are much closer to having "corporal" under your names instead of "private"? I feel cheated.
I did some searching through the Government Accounting Office, (that is an independent Federal government auditing office for the US. They are considered to be the official source of what the government spends for those of you who didn't know.) My suspicion about the Stryker cost was that it really didn't cost $2 million and I was right. It cost $2 million in accounting terms. I'll explain:
Let's say the government buys 9 hammers and 1 torpedo inspection machine. (My mother worked for Gould in the 1980's, when that infamous $4,000 hammer came out and it was her company that was involved.) The total cost of this order is $40,000. In reality, the torpedo inspection machine costs $39,900 and the hammers $100. But for accounting purposes, the items are all treated as having the same cost in order to make the paperwork easier to track (pause for snort). The result to the casual observer is that you paid $4,000 for a hammer and $4,000 for an inspection machine.
Okay, why am I boring you with this? That $2 mil for the Stryker includes the price of the vehicle, simulators and other training material, and the transition costs for the 1st Stryker Brigade.
Source:
http://searching.gao.gov/cs.html?cha...ext&n=28&la=en
Here is another interesting .pdf doc, It's the GAO's audit of the Army's Stryker / M113A3 comparison. I didn't read it, but since you guys seem to be motivated....
http://searching.gao.gov/cs.html?cha...ol=&n=13&la=en
Someone mentioned that hundreds (thousands?) of M113 were deployed in Kuwait, but not being used for political reasons. Well not quite. The M113 is an integral part of US Heavy Divisions. The M113 is deployed but in it's different variants (ambulance, self-propelled mortar, etc.) It's being used as it was intended, one can't just start putting them on the road to haul cargo, mainly for the simple reason that you can't drop a pallet of MRE's or ammo into an M113 like you can a truck. The time required to load all this stuff by hand would by a nightmare.
As far as how the troops feel about the Stryker:
http://www.globalsecurity.org/org/ne...23-stryker.htm
There are also a number of other links to information. This story was from the Baltimore Sun. There are other articles praising the Stryker but they were written by military journalists and I didn't want to get into a "bias" debate with anyone. The key thing you should pull from this article is that no one has died from an IED / RPG hit to a Stryker.