Boeing and General Dynamics revamps an old system and the internet goes crazy. Amazing!

When you do a blog and you follow this stuff it sometimes amazes me at the things that people go crazy about.

Take the above vehicle.  Yeah.  A Stryker that fires hellfires.  Pretty cool huh? Honestly not really.  First before everyone started flooding my Open Comments section with pics of the vehicle when it had already been covered on the blog.

The next thing that amazes me is that this thing is simply an updating of the old Avenger Air Defense System that has been around forever!

Yeah when the Army was serious about Air Defense Artillery, this system was bought as a stopgap that turned into a long lasting solution.  The war on terror came, predictions of us being involved in that war for 50 years and a hope that we would be the only super power falsely led to the units being sent to the reserves.

A resurgent Russia and a rising China scared the shit out of the powers that be so Boeing updated the concept.

How Boeing knew that the Army was going to go on a Multi-Missile craze is beyond me but they read the tea leaves and developed the setup you see above.

General Dynamics raised their hands and said me too...and they mated the Boeing setup to a Stryker and life is good!

Wrong.

Mark my words.

The Stryker is on it's last legs.  The Army won't keep that vehicle for much longer and I'd bet body parts it's replaced in a decade. That 30mm Dragoon  is just to set the baseline for what the next vehicle should have and establish the basic operating concepts in close to real life situations.

That Boeing setup, if selected, will ride the back of a JLTV.  That's the real news that I didn't take seriously enough.  When the Marine Corps talked about the JLTV being a combat vehicle, I thought they were just blowing smoke.  That video I posted about Marine Corps Future Fires has me thinking differently.

The JLTV is what the Army and Marine Corps is counting on for a wider array of weapons than anyone knows.  Keep a close eye on the numbers for that program.  I think it's gonna be MUCH bigger than we think.