Re: The new US Army APC the "Stinger"

At 9:18 PM -0500 6/30/02, Scott Siebold wrote:
>I saw a broadcast on CNN about the new wheeled APC the US
>Army was pushing called the Stinger. It costs about 2 million (US $)
>apiece and the Army plans on buying about 2100 (4 billion dollar
>purchase). Since an Abrams tank costs about 3 million the new
>light APC costs 2/3 the price of a battle tank.

Shooting from the hip on this, I'd say it's likely due to scope 
creep. The US development programs have that because no one wants the 
system to bomb out, so they put some much time in testing and 
development and committees redesigning the thing that it ends up 
being a white elephant of a system. Look at the Bradly. "oh no, 
medium caliber weapons will penetrate it, it needs to be 'fixed'. It 
needs more Armor!!!" Well, duh, its a lightly armored vehicle, medium 
caliber weapons will go through. If you want an MBT protected APC, 
use a tank as your basis.

>About 22 years ago the US Army and Marines were look for a
>common wheeled APC. After about 5 years of games the US Marines
>got sick of the games and started their own program. They took a
>Canadian Grizzly (basic model: 6 wheeled, .50 cal HMG) and had it

The basic family of vehicle that the Canadian Grizzly/Couger/Huskey 
are based on is a Swiss MOWAG product. 8 Wheels is one of the 
standard types. The newest ones are pretty nice from what I've read.

>modified so as to meet its requirements (basic model: 8 wheeled,
>25mm Auto Cannon, transportable by heavy lift helicopter and it can
>REALLY swim) and had about 450 of them built as the LAV25 + variants.

I suspect they didn't deviate much from the original design. That 
probably kept R&D costs down

>If you watched the news during the Golf War you probably saw them.

Gulf War. Tiger Woods wasn't beating people over the head.

>I assume that this new APC is the completion of the program
>that the US Army started about 22 years ago. To sum it up
>it costs too much, it arrived too late and I trust the US Army
>will find some way to make it not quite right so a couple more
>billion can be sunk into it.

Can't argue about that. It seems to happen with amazing regularity.
-- 
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Ryan Gill		  rmgill@mindspring.com
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