From TransFormaTion To CombaT The First stryker brigade at War

and to establish protocols for refueling and the employment of forward
logistics elements.
On 1 July the brigade and its new vehicle became permanently linked
when the Army renamed the Interim Brigade Combat Team the Stryker
Brigade Combat Team. Using the acronym SBCT, the troops and their
officers would occasionally refer to interim brigades by their order of
founding rather than their full military designation. In this shorthand,
the 3d Brigade, 2d Infantry Division, became SBCT 1.
A congressionally mandated, Joint Forces Command–sponsored
mIllennIum challenge 2002 exercise at Fort Irwin provided the first
major opportunity for the Stryker Brigade to demonstrate its new vehicle
and the operational concepts it employed to the greater military community
and the general public. In doing so, the unit deployed a complete
company and various support attachments to accomplish brigade-level
tasks involving both simulated and actual units.
By any measure the event was a milestone in both the Stryker program
and the brigade’s progress toward operational readiness. As a joint
warfighting experiment, it allowed the unit to refine emerging concepts,
doctrine, tactics, techniques, and procedures in a joint operational environment.
It also gave the brigade’s troops an opportunity to apply experience
they had gained during a late June rehearsal exercise. Finally, in
perhaps its most challenging aspect, it also provided the brigade with a
high-profile opportunity to offload Strykers from aircraft and to configure
them for combat under simulated wartime conditions.
The offloading occurred on 31 July 2002, when the 5th Battalion,
20th Infantry, successfully delivered four Strykers from Company A to
Fort Irwin’s Bicycle Lake airfield. Each vehicle emerged from its C–130
transport aircraft in roughly three minutes. Raising the Strykers’ remote
weapons stations into position and remounting their smoke-grenade
launchers, antennas, and other equipment added eleven to seventeen
minutes. The battalion deployed additional Strykers to Fort Irwin on
subsequent C–17 flights. When the exercise ended, the unit returned
fourteen of the vehicles from Port Hueneme, California, to the Port of
Tacoma aboard HSV–XI Joint Venture, an experimental High Speed
Sealift Catamaran.
Although mIllennIum challenge 2002 demonstrated the brigade’s
capabilities on only a small scale and minor problems with equipment
occurred, the units that deployed did well in the exercise. After the
first simulated mission, the soldiers of the National Training Center’s
permanent Opposing Force, the 11th Armored Cavalry, noted that the
Stryker went places at greater speeds and with less noise and more agility
13