This asshole...I can't even express my contempt for this man enough.
Rumsfeld firmly believed that if you couldn't drive it on to a C130 and drive it off and straight into battle, that the US Army didn't need it.
Lots of nations use wheeled armored fighting vehicles, and they have their area of application. But for reasons that will likely baffle me until I too cross the Jordan, this old prick thought they were the future of all ground combat. The Stryker is an OK wheeled personnel carrier, and is an outgrowth of the old MOWAG 6x6 LAV-25 series. Treating it like that, as an auxiliary personnel carrier for light infantry or Marines is fine, but he wanted it to be the backbone of US fighting forces. His diktat was that it had to be able to drive, fully combat loaded, onto a C130, and drive off ready to go straight into the warzone, so the redesign of the new 8x8 LAV into the Stryker drained resources from a great many other projects. One of the problems was that the LAV 8x8's armor is too heavy for the C130. Okay, so, lighten it up.
That's great...but then the LAV which was going from "administrative vehicle/battle taxi" into front-line IFV/AFV territory was now too lightly armored. It couldn't repel even RPG-7 rounds. So what's the solution? Slat/cage applique armor. So that got approved.
Buuuuuuut...slat/cage armor is too tall and too wide for the cargo bay of a C130 - but hey it's applique so it can be taken off and carried in the same bird...except that makes the load too heavy for the C130 to carry the Stryker + armor kit + full combat load. So don't send it with the full combat load, and send it "nude". The net result was a personnel carrier turned into an IFV that had to have its armor added on and be fueled and loaded in with ammo for the CROWs. Net turn-around time went from "drive it off the plane, into battle" to "roll it off the plane and then cart the armor kits off, then spend fourteen hours bolting the armor on and loading it with fuel and ammunition".
Then there was the M1126 MGS version, aka, let's have a wheeled tank. Like with LAV variants, lots of other countries seem to have L7-variant equipped wheeled vehicles to act as TDs, but in Iraq and Afghanistan the Mobile Gun System choked. The fire control computers got so hot crews suffered from heat stroke, so an external air conditioner had to be bolted on. Oh, not for the crew, the a/c was pumped straight into the electronics bays. Crews, in an old-school Battletech style fashion, had to wear ice pack cooling jackets. And the autoloader cassette for the gun had a tendency to warp under repeated combat stress, and the vehicle could and did assplant if it fired the gun at the 90' and more than a couple of degrees of incline like on a hill. The Army has disbanded the MGS troops and will replace them with upgraded Stryker LAVs with a 30mm gun on a proper turret.
All that (and more) is because of Rumsfeld. The replacement for the M109? Couldn't go by C130. Cancelled. The US Army is now 20+ years behind in artillery tech, with bits and pieces of the M109's replacement's technology being applied to what they currently have. Thank God he never got around to taking the knife and fork to proper armor: I shudder to think about the M1 being replaced with his pie-in-the-sky "Future Combat Vehicle" light tank fantasy. Imagine trying to fight off the Russians in a tank armed with some 100mm "smart gun" all because this fucking fossil wanted a "light, agile" army for some future sci-fi war he fought in his head. Then, as someone else mentioned, there was the issue of body armor...
