U.S. Army buys 50 more Stryker A1 armored vehicles

General Dynamics Land Systems has secured a $229.6 million contract to produce 50 Stryker Double V-Hull (DVH) A1 armored vehicles for the U.S. Army, continuing a production line that has delivered one of the service’s most combat-proven wheeled infantry platforms through more than two decades of operational use across multiple theaters.

Army Contracting Command at Detroit Arsenal, Michigan, issued the fixed-price-incentive contract on May 15, 2026, to General Dynamics Land Systems, headquartered in Sterling Heights, Michigan, the ground combat vehicle subsidiary of General Dynamics Corporation, one of America’s largest defense contractors.

The award covers procurement of 50 Stryker Double V-Hull A1 vehicles in support of Product Manager Stryker Brigade Combat Team, with work locations and funding to be determined with each individual order and an estimated completion date of June 30, 2028.

The Stryker is an eight-wheeled armored infantry carrier that forms the backbone of the Army’s Stryker Brigade Combat Teams, a force structure designed to provide greater strategic mobility than heavy armored formations while delivering more firepower and protection than light infantry. A Stryker brigade can deploy faster than an Abrams tank brigade because its vehicles can be transported by C-17 and C-130 aircraft without the heavy-lift requirements that tracked armored vehicles demand, giving theater commanders a rapidly deployable combined arms capability that sits between the Army’s heavy and light force packages. The Army currently fields multiple Stryker Brigade Combat Teams, which have served in Iraq, Afghanistan, Europe, and across multiple other operational theaters since the platform entered service in 2002.

The Double V-Hull variant, which this contract specifically covers, represents a significant protection upgrade over earlier Stryker configurations. The original Stryker used a flat-bottomed hull that proved vulnerable to improvised explosive devices during operations in Iraq, where insurgents employed increasingly sophisticated buried bombs capable of defeating the vehicle’s baseline armor. The Double V-Hull redesign channels blast energy away from the vehicle’s occupants by angling the hull floor in a V-shape on both sides, deflecting the upward force of an underbelly explosion rather than absorbing it directly into the passenger compartment. The Army fielded Double V-Hull Strykers in Iraq beginning around 2011, and the A1 designation indicates a further refinement of that baseline protection package combined with updated automotive and systems components.

The A1 configuration incorporates improvements to the vehicle’s drivetrain, electrical architecture, and crew systems that extend the platform’s service life and improve its reliability in demanding operational conditions, according to General Dynamics program documentation. Stryker vehicles accumulate significant mileage across training cycles and deployments, and the A1 upgrade package is designed to address the wear patterns and system obsolescence issues that emerge in a platform that has been in continuous production and operational use for more than two decades. Keeping the Stryker fleet current through incremental upgrades rather than wholesale replacement is a deliberate Army strategy that balances modernization investment against the cost of fielding an entirely new wheeled vehicle platform.

General Dynamics Land Systems has produced Stryker variants across a wide range of mission configurations beyond the basic infantry carrier, including mobile gun systems armed with 105mm cannons, anti-tank guided missile carriers, command vehicles, engineering squad vehicles, medical evacuation variants, and, more recently, the Stryker 30mm Double V-Hull equipped with a 30mm cannon turret to address the lethality gap that emerged as the Army assessed Stryker’s survivability against near-peer adversary capabilities. That lethality upgrade program, which has been fielding to Stryker brigades in Europe, reflects the broader modernization context in which this 50-vehicle procurement sits: the Army is simultaneously sustaining its existing Stryker fleet, upgrading it with new weapons and protection systems, and evaluating what comes after Stryker in the wheeled vehicle domain.