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Mission 18 - Tactical Considerations
al Qaeda: The Battle for Mosul
Tactical

From an interview with US Army Staff Sgt. Dan Snyder

The Stryker brigades are designed to be the door-kickers. They come in right behind the recon forces but before regular infantry. Because they’re medium assault forces, they have more firepower than light infantry but are quicker to deploy than heavy armor because they carry their own "cover" with them. With a regular infantry squad, the armored personnel carrier drops the troops off at the FEBA, the Forward Edge of the Battle, and they walk into the fray. The Stryker uses its auto-guns to lay down a hail of suppressive fire and then drops the 10-man squad right in the middle of the battle.

While the squad moves into position, the commander back in the vehicle has all kinds of communications and locating equipment to keep tabs on each man - almost like the kinds of sci-fi gadgets you saw in the movie Aliens. They can position and reposition the vehicles and the men to put fire where they want it. And the squad can carry a lot of ammunition to feed their M249 Squad Automatic Weapons. This machine gun, a descendant of the BAR, can be used to lay down fire cover in precise spots so the men can move around the enemy, even if they’re in a politically charged situation like fighting insurgents holed up in a mosque. They can also bring LAW rockets for bunker busting or an AT4 if they run into anything with a little more armor.

Heavier ground forces have limited utility in a war that is contained within two city blocks. But Stryker squads backed up by Stryker vehicles can rapidly move to any point to respond to the enemy, surrounding them and trapping them or slicing them off from reinforcements and waiting them out. Plus, the brigades are backed up by different kinds of support vehicles -- reconnaissance vehicles, mortar carriers, command vehicles, and fire support vehicles that can laser target the enemy for air strikes. The Stryker brigades give us a microtactical advantage when fighting block to block.