FAIRBANKS — The commander of Fort Wainwright’s Stryker brigade outlined the goals of the brigade’s upcoming mission during a meeting with Fairbanks media Wednesday morning.

The Department of Defense announced last week that the 1st Stryker Brigade Combat Team, 25th Infantry, will head to Afghanistan for a one-year deployment beginning in May. It will be the third major deployment from Fort Wainwright since 2005.

Even though the department only formally announced the deployment a few days ago, Col. Todd Wood said deployment schedules meant that it had long been assumed the 1-25th would be sent into the field about 20 months after its return to Fort Wainwright in September 2009.

Though the Army will not say exactly where in Afghanistan the brigade is headed until right before the deployment, Wood described the area as lacking much of the infrastructure that soldiers who have been to Iraq are used to seeing.

There are few paved roads or vehicles. Some bases in the area can only be reached by air. Literacy is less than 10 percent in the area, and translators have difficulty understanding the language of nearby villages, Wood said.

Amid all this, the brigade will work to stabilize the country and train the Afghan army and police force. Wood said the Afghan army is independent but the police force needs more work. “We feel very confident we are going to have tremendous success on this deployment,” he said.

Troops will have to deal with terrain that is much more rugged than in Iraq. There will be additional training for troops on how to operate Stryker vehicles in Afghanistan, Wood said. The eight-wheeled armored vehicles are said to be much better-suited for urban environments, such as the cities of Iraq.

“It was a chance to see that the challenges of the terrain are real,” he said of his pre-deployment site survey of the area earlier this month.

The brigade will spend about a month at the National Training Center in Fort Irwin, Calif., before deploying. The post in the Mojave Desert holds a variety of small towns built to appear like Afghan communities. Hundreds of Afghan actors will be on hand to realistically react to soldiers attempting to better understand the culture of the country. Wood estimates that 60 percent of the more than 4,000 troops going on deployment previously served in units outside Fort Wainwright. Many have experience in Afghanistan.

Fort Wainwright’s 172nd Stryker Brigade Combat Team saw an extended 15-month deployment to Iraq in 2005 and 2006. The brigade saw heavy fighting at times, sustaining 26 casualties. Upon returning to Alaska, the brigade was re-flagged the 1-25th and was deployed to Iraq from September 2008 until September 2009.

The 1-25th’s former commander described the second deployment as “less kinetic” than the first mission to Iraq. During the second tour, five soldiers and a bomb-sniffing dog died in combat during the mission in the Diyala Province northeast of Baghdad. There was also one non-combat fatality and one soldier died while home on leave.

Wood said it’s too early to say how much combat the 1-25th will see in Afghanistan, but he noted that insurgents usually plan attacks in the spring, around the time of the brigade’s arrival.

Contact staff writer Chris Freiberg at 459-7545.