The Air Force has too few C-130s to do this with other tasks at a higher priority; the Air Force doesn't like to use C-130s for strategic movement from America since they aren't designed for it anyway and strategic airlift is equally short; and last, the Stryker is getting too big for C-130s anyway. So:
After years of confronting all these problems, it became pretty clear to Pentagon planners that any use of Stryker would involve moving nearly all of them by ship. There might be a few extreme cases where a small number of Strykers would be moved by air, either within a theater or across an ocean. Recently, the idea that large numbers of Strykers, would ever be moved by air, has been heard much less. The cumulative problems with the concept has pretty much removed it from the Pentagon playbook.
Good. The idea that these vehicles should be capable of coming down the ramp with guns blazing always seemed rather silly anyway. And I've noted that the time to get a brigade from Washington to South Korea is about the same for ship or air--and the ships will be there while the air won't so this is purely a theoretical comparison. We'd have to be pretty committed to speed even if the sea route is blocked (like maybe Taiwan scenario where PLAN units make moving to Taiwan by sea early on too risky) to commit so much air power to one ground unit. See here (scroll down to "More on Stryker Brigades" (Posted September 23, 2003) and "Strykers to Iraq" (Posted September 15, 2003)) for early thoughts on Stryker. Plus my old Defense Issues page (scroll down to “Transformation” (Posted December 12, 2002)).
So while Stryker units have many advantages in some circumstances over either heavy mechanized infantry or leg infantry, these Stryker-armed units are no longer a compromise unit better protected than light infantry and faster to deploy than heavy armor units.
