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Wikipedia: Stryker
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The following section is an excerpt from Wikipedia's Stryker page on 1 August 2020, text available via the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
The ICV (Infantry Carrier Vehicle) Stryker is a family of eight-wheeled armored fighting vehicles derived from the Canadian LAV III. Stryker vehicles are produced by General Dynamics Land Systems for the United States Army. It has 4-wheel drive (8×4) and can be switched to all-wheel drive (8×8).
The vehicle is named for two unrelated U.S. soldiers who posthumously received the Medal of Honor: Private First Class Stuart S. Stryker, who died in World War II, and Specialist Four Robert F. Stryker, who died in the Vietnam War.
In October 1999, General Eric Shinseki, then U.S. Army Chief of Staff, outlined a transformation plan for the army that would allow it to adapt to post-Cold War conditions. The plan, named "Objective Force", would have the army adopt a flexible doctrine that would allow it to deploy quickly, and be equipped for a variety of operations. An early phase of the plan called for the introduction of an 'Interim Armored Vehicle', which was intended to fill the capability gap between heavier and heavily armed, but not easily deployable, vehicles, such as the M2 Bradley, and easily deployable vehicles that are lightly armed and protected, such as the Humvee. It was called the "Interim" Armored Vehicle because it was initially supposed to be a temporary measure until light air-mobile vehicles from the Future Combat Systems Manned Ground Vehicles program came online, none of which did before the program was canceled. Nearly a year and a half behind schedule, the General Motors–General Dynamics team was awarded the $8 billion contract in November 2000 to produce 2,131 vehicles of a variant of the Canadian LAV III for equipping six rapid deployment Brigade Combat Teams by 2008. United Defense protested the contract award in December, saying their proposal cost less than half that of General Motors–General Dynamics. The General Accounting Office rejected the protest in April 2001.
U.S. Assistant Secretary of the Army Paul J. Hoeper called the IAV "the best off-the-shelf equipment available in the world in this class", though many in the Army openly wondered whether the vehicles were underclassed compared to the vehicles they might face in battle. On 27 February 2002, the Army formally renamed the Interim Armored Vehicle the Stryker.
| Date | Article | Author/Source |
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| 2 June 2002 | MTMC begins shipment of Stryker to Army field units | Military Traffic Management Command |