In Louisiana, a bid for speedier infantry

"They're at 1 o'clock. Let's go!" Capt. Fred Tanner shouts to his driver, who pivots the Stryker armored vehicle and zooms off.

Tracking forces on a digital screen, the lanky officer navigates as the Stryker weaves through dark pinewoods toward an "enemy" location. Meanwhile, he taps out an e-mail alerting nearby US forces to the chase.

Although he's fighting mock skirmishes in the chigger-infested Louisiana swampland, Captain Tanner is on the front lines of a very real battle. The objective: to transform how the Army fights.

Tanner is a pioneer in the Army's first new armored force in decades - the Stryker brigade. Six of the $1.5 billion brigades are now planned, each with 3,600 soldiers equipped with about 300 medium-armored eight-wheeled Stryker vehicles.

Most immediately, the Strykers are designed to fill what the Army calls a "critical shortfall" between light infantry and heavy-armored units evident in post-cold-war missions from Somalia and Bosnia to Afghanistan and Iraq.

"We have the best heavy forces in the world, but it takes them awhile to get there," says Maj. Harris Morris of the Army's Training and Doctrine Command. Light infantry can drop into the battlefield rapidly by air, but "once they get there, if they face a heavy mechanized threat, they don't have the capability to fight that," he says.

The first Stryker unit - the 3rd Brigade of the 2nd Infantry Division based at Fort Lewis, Wash. - is scheduled to finish several grueling weeks of operational exercises here today. If the evaluation succeeds and the defense secretary certifies to Congress that the brigade is effective, it could be ready to deploy abroad by fall.

Over the next 10 years, Stryker units are also intended to spur innovation and serve as a catalyst in the Army's transition away from cold-war-era "legacy" forces to a Future Combat System that is still in the blueprint phase.

"The importance of the Stryker brigade is to transform the leadership," says Lt. Col. Len McWherter, commanding the new brigade's 1-23 battalion from a backwoods tent here. "You need creative, flexible thinkers," he says, as his staff monitors friendly and enemy forces on digital displays. "These young captains ... have to harness the technology."

Like the future force, the Stryker brigades aim to leverage instant communications and surveillance technology - from the Internet to unmanned drones to computers that track forces in real time - in order to spot the enemy first and strike at will.

Organizationally, the Stryker brigades are prepackaged for combat. They integrate reconnaissance squadrons, military intelligence companies, and other forces year-round that are now normally attached to brigades only for large training exercises or war.

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