This week, the Strykers of the 4th Battalion, 9th Infantry Regiment, 2nd Infantry Division officially return home from a 15-month deployment to Iraq—a deployment that cost the lives of 37 of the battalion’s soldiers.
But there’s a larger story to tell in the 4/9’s possibly historic deployment to war. It was the first unit to use the Army’s General Dynamics-made Land Warrior suite of communications and positioning gear in combat.
Photo: U.S. Army
In February 2007—despite a cumulative $500 million price tag—the program had its funding cut, despite the fact that the 4/9 has been training with the gear and was about to start its deployment. The 4/9 deployed with the equipment anyway, and more than a year later, it looks like Land Warrior might have been saved from the dustbin of history.
According to Mark Showah, General Dynamics’ director of the Integrated Systems Group, the feedback that the company has received from soldiers has been largely positive, and the company is currently working to secure a contract to supply 1,000 Land Warrior systems to the Strykers of the 5/2, which is slated to deploy to Iraq some time early next year. This is a sharp increase from the 440 units that went to war with the 4/9.
So what changed? First off, one of the big complaints about the system was that it was too bulky—when initially delivered, it clocked in at 17 pounds—which is way too much for an individual soldier to add on to an already overloaded battle rattle. The problem began to be rectified almost immediately. Showah says that program managers “essentially took all the equipment, laid it on the counter, disconnected it all, said ‘here’s some IBA, go ahead and put the equipment where you want it and we’ll figure out how to make it a more permanent solution’… and they came back with a design that was much better than we could have ever produced.” This brought the weight down from 17 unwieldy pounds to ten, and the system has been further shaved down to its current weight of a little over seven pounds, which the Army and General Dynamics hopes to make even lighter by time the 5/2 deploys.
Despite having its funding cut, the funds for the 4/9’s deployment remained in place, and General Dynamics continued to make tweaks to the system throughout the unit’s deployment, which included weekly feedback sessions with the unit’s leadership in Iraq.
One of the biggest surprises about how soldiers used the system in combat, Showah says, was the amount of text messaging the soldiers were doing. In areas where voice communication might be spotty, text messages would still get though where voice wouldn’t. There were a couple of missions in particular, Showah says, where the unit had recon platoons out and the platoon was in place and had no voice comms, and they were getting ready to scrap the mission, but “the leaders decided to continue with the mission because these soldiers are so adept at text messaging that they were able to continue.”
Initially, the text system was designed so that soldiers could hunt and peck on a virtual keyboard that they saw on their helmet mounted display using a mouse. The soldiers weren’t happy with this method, so the company provided them with several options, and “they liked one that was similar to a Blackberry style keyboard, about the same size, that had a USB interface that plugged right into the system. We provided that to them in theater as a separate box. That’s one of the things we did off program, we took a keyboard and integrated it into the system so that it is actually part of the Soldier Control Unit. Now not only does he have a mouse, but he can pull that off, flip open a small cover and have a keyboard.”
When originally designed, the plan was to equip each individual soldier with a Land Warrior system, but in practice, it’s only the platoon team leaders that carry the extra weight, unburdening their teams of the 7 pounds of extra gear. Moving forward, Showah says, “priorities for the 5/2 are driving down the size, weight, and cost of the system,” and program managers are currently focusing on usability issues, things that will reduce the soldiers’ overall cognitive overload, and make it easier for soldiers to operate the system in the field. Program managers and General Dynamics officials are conducing interviews with 4/9 soldiers this week at Ft. Lewis, Washington, to find out what further tweaks they can make to the system. In other words, it looks like Land Warrior may be back in action.
