Pollywog Poli-blog

Another miserable failure turns into a smashing success

I remember one of my first awakenings to the inaccuracy of the MainStream Media was a report on 60 Minutes on the then-new M2 Bradley Infantry Fighting Vehicle. They were absolutely sure this thing was a death-trap and was going to get hundreds of soldiers killed if it ever went into combat.

Why? Because it looked like a tank, but wasn't armored like a tank.

I was working in a hobby store at the time and doing a lot of reading whilst being bored out of my skull waiting on customers. At this store, we had a series of books on modern armour, and I had read a lot about the Bradley IFV, the tactical doctrine behind it, and what it could and could not do. And one thing I understood from even this brief introduction is that the Bradley wasn't a tank, but rather an updated American version on the Russian BMP IFV's. It was meant to accompany tanks to battle, but definitely not meant to slug it out toe-to-toe with the latest Soviet tanks.

Did 60 Minutes explain this? Nooooooo.

Now we come to the Stryker Medium Assault Vehicle, the latest APC (Armored Personnel Carrier) in U.S. service. It's critics complained it was too light, too fragile and would be a deathtrap for any soldiers inside.

And once again, they're wrong.

Would it hurt the media to actually interview the soldiers who use the darn thing before they write how it's deathtrap? Apparently so.

Military, Army, stryker

posted by Kevin Creighton @ 10:13 PM