One of the more interesting things about this move is that the most recent Military Review has an excerpt from an internal Army survey attacking the rapidly deployable BCT and advocating a focus on soldier survivability over speed. One of the better recent books about military transformation, The Army After Next , covered the travails of the "modular force" in great detail."Two heavy brigade combat teams will vanish by 2013 to make way for two new Stryker brigades, bringing the U.S. Army's number of active Stryker Brigade Combat Teams to eight and taking another bite out of its armor formations. ...The move to convert two heavy brigades to Stryker units signals the Army's shift toward a lighter, more quickly deployable formation that is infantry-focused and proven to be highly mobile in diverse environments. And it further reduces the Army's number of heavy brigades. Defense Secretary Robert Gates had announced in April that the Army would hold the total number of brigade combat teams at 45 rather than the planned 48, and the Army nixed a plan to grow three heavy brigades."
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