Global arms race: Nations shift to heavier infantry fighting vehicles

The ambitious plans of the Polish defense sector, which recently declared it would present a "heavy Borsuk" by the end of 2023, turned out to be overly optimistic. Building such equipment from scratch proved impractical in a short timeframe.

The current plan involves developing a heavy infantry fighting vehicle using a licensed foreign chassis, similar to the approach with the Krab. It will be paired with the Polish ZSSW-30 turret, which will also be equipped with Polish Borsuks and some Rosomaks.

Since the turret with armament and sensors accounts for half or more of the total value of the fighting vehicle, the new plan seems like a good solution. Thanks to this, Polish soldiers will receive the needed heavy infantry fighting vehicle faster (up to 700 units are mentioned), and a significant portion of the funds – despite the foreign chassis – will remain in the country.

The Russians reached similar conclusions as Poland. On the pro-Kremlin site Topwar.ru, an interesting analysis explained the need—or rather the necessity—of having heavy, well-armored, tracked infantry fighting vehicles.

According to Russian commentators, this analysis is already 30 years old but hasn't aged at all apart from considering the significance of drones.

On the one hand, this reflects well on Russian (or rather Soviet) military theorists, but on the other, it reflects poorly on the decision-makers who, despite a clear need for heavy infantry fighting vehicles for over 30 years, have not managed to implement it.

This is especially true since the USSR pioneered the construction of modern infantry fighting vehicles. When the BMP-1 appeared in the Red Army in 1966, it was an innovative vehicle that set the development direction for an entire class of military equipment.

For decades, the USSR built successive generations of its infantry fighting vehicles, maintaining the original principles: heavily armed, highly mobile, amphibious, relatively light, and insufficiently armored vehicles.

A good example is the latest serially produced Russian infantry fighting vehicle – the BMP-3. The vehicle is armed with a 30 mm 2A72 cannon, a 100 mm 2A70 cannon, which also serves as a launcher for 9M117 Bastion guided anti-tank missiles, as well as three machine guns. At the same time, it has a completely impractical troop compartment layout, weak armor, and minimal mine protection.

Russian fighting vehicles are low, making them harder to spot and hit, but also very vulnerable to mines. The blast energy in a vehicle where the crew and troops sit very close to the ground has no space to dissipate.

The Russians are aware of these deficiencies and have attempted to build heavy, well-armored infantry fighting vehicles for decades – so far without success. The most serious and ambitious effort was the construction of the T-14 Armata tank and plans to introduce a family of vehicles using its chassis (Armata platform).

This includes, among others, the T-15 – an infantry fighting vehicle with a mass of nearly 110,000 pounds (more than double that of the BMP-3 and four times that of the BMP-1). Although it was presented at military parades, like the T-14 tank, it remained a "parade" piece of equipment that did not reach front-line units or mass production.

The answer to this problem is a fighting vehicle built on the chassis of the cheaper and serially produced T-90A tank. A prototype, identified with the resurrected, old BTR-U transporter project, was observed in July this year in Nizhny Tagil, near the Uralvagonzavod plant.

New infantry fighting vehicles are generally heavy, non-amphibious, and well-armored. Their survivability on the battlefield is further enhanced by increasingly popular active protection systems – both soft-kill (disrupting missile or drone guidance) and hard-kill (physically destroying the threat).

The pioneer in building such equipment is Israel, which in the 1980s used captured T-55 tank chassis to create heavy Achzarit transporters. In subsequent years, based on their own Merkava tanks, Israel developed and introduced the Namer, a heavy infantry fighting vehicle with a mass reaching 132,000 pounds, comparable to heavy Western main battle tanks.

Due to the specifics of Middle Eastern conflicts, vehicles used by Israel are configured as armored personnel carriers, but there is also a version that is an infantry fighting vehicle with a 30 mm cannon and Spike anti-tank missile launcher.

Other vehicles, implemented or being implemented in the West, are full-fledged infantry fighting vehicles: the 84,000-pound British Ajax, the 93,000-pound Turkish Tulpar, the German Schützenpanzer Puma with a mass – depending on the installed modular armor – ranging from 68,000 to 93,000 pounds, and the Swedish CV90 Mk V, which over more than three decades of development and refinement has "bulked up" from 51,000 to 84,000 pounds.

In Ukraine, a heavy infantry fighting vehicle, the BMP-64, was also designed, although serial production has not started. It is built on the chassis of the T-64 tank. Similarly, Americans, who have been using M2 Bradley infantry fighting vehicles since the 1980s, are looking for a successor, leaning towards heavier, even better-protected designs for the crew and transported troops.

The shift towards heavier vehicles results from rational calculation. In the 1960s, when the concept of the atomic battlefield was first proposed, a soldier's life was "cheap." Today, people are the most valuable elements of a tank or infantry fighting vehicle.

Training crews are expensive and time-consuming, and their availability – unlike the armored shell that can be manufactured in a factory – is increasingly limited in many countries by demographics. This has been understood not only in the West, including Poland – footage from Nizhny Tagil showing the prototype of a new, heavy vehicle shows that the Russians also understand this.