From TransFormaTion To CombaT The First stryker brigade at War

General Ham (left) and a senior Iraqi Army officer
during an inspection flight over Mosul
When the 101st Airborne Division formally ceded its responsibilities
at Mosul to TF olympIa on 5 February 2004, 9,000 American soldiers
replaced 23,000. Focusing on their mission, the newcomers began immediately
to conduct daily mounted and dismounted patrols to reassure
local inhabitants, to develop relationships with Iraqi security forces, to
protect critical installations, to foster reconstruction efforts, and to search
out insurgents and weapons caches. Portions of the force encountered the
enemy frequently; others had little contact. Day by day, however, enemy
attempts to identify the Stryker Brigade’s vulnerabilities grew bolder.
Whether the unit could maintain the restless calm in northern Iraq that
the much larger 101st had enforced remained to be seen.
Initial Operations
Although the Strykers began to encounter RPG attacks almost immediately,
their ill-trained enemy failed to score a telling hit with that
weapon until early February, when a Stryker belonging to Capt. Anthony
J. Newtson’s Company C, 2d Battalion, 3d Infantry, took one in Mosul.
Newtson had considered asking permission to remove the slat armor from
his vehicles because of the difficulty the big machines encountered when
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