Stryker Air Defense Variant is what the Army got...what they need is the SLAMRAAM on FMTV or JLTV!

The image you see above is what the US Army is proposing for its anti-air system to keep up with its Stryker Brigades (and probably some version for the Bradley too...).

The more I think about it the more I think they came up short.

What they need is the SLAMRAAM.  Mount it on the FMTV truck, the JLTV or use the HUMVEE to tote the thing. 

They're platform centric when they need to be thinking about payloads!  Everything can be a shooter.  We really need to dump the idea of "pure" brigades.  Everything in a Stryker Brigade DOES NOT need to be based on the Stryker if it comes at a price in performance.

The Stryker Air Defense Variant gives up too much in performance to meet threats against even insurgents...we won't even discuss what a peer air force could do to our ground forces.

A dude named "Goon" once told me during the days when I was a full fledged supporter of the F-35 to do two things.  The first was to get out of my normalcy bias.  It was a challenge and I took him up on it. I didn't like what I saw when I did.  The next thing was to follow the money and determine what the real challenges were --- not by press release but where money suddenly was getting tossed to.

We really don't have to do any of that with regard to this subject.  We know that the ground forces of the United States are planning for a fight where the US does NOT have air superiority.  We have heard it stated plainly from many officials.  We see the Army and Marine Corps attempting to slow walk air defense back into their formations.

That's the good.  The bad?  They're doing it too slow. They're wedded to platforms instead of weapon systems that can give us a standoff advantage...a very much needed part of ADA...you have to kill the archer before he releases his quiver of arrows.

SLAMRAAM IS HERE NOW.  The Army and Marines should act poste haste to buy it and get it into service....hell even trial seeing if the Meteor can be ground launched but we need something better than the Stinger or Sidwinder when most air to ground missiles seriously outrange them!