Infantry Fighting Vehicles in Ukraine - losses, lessons & will Western IFVs matter?

In the dramatic opening weeks of the war in Ukraine it sometimes seemed like every outside observer was racing to identify lessons and to pass judgement on entire weapon systems. As the Russian offensive towards Kyiv broke down for example, there were a lot of articles out there suggesting the era of the tank was over. And while most sober commentary came to the conclusion that, yes, tanks were vulnerable, but properly utilised they are still utterly indispensable on the modern battlefiel

d. There is still a little bit of that whole "death of the tank" thing going on now. For my part, I made a video suggesting the ATGM threat was real, but that that didn't mean the end of the tank. And you could argue the focus on the tank was sort of unfair from the beginning. I've talked before about helicopters and the threats they were facing, but tanks weren't even the most destroyed vehicles on the ground. No, that distinction goes to the more lightly protected infantry fighting vehi

cles. With the single most destroyed vehicle of the Ukraine War to date being the BMP-2. Which Russia is visually confirmed to have lost 686 of at time of recording. And to an extent that makes sense: if heavily armoured tanks were vulnerable, well, what chance did these more lightly armoured vehicles have? But before you go consigning tens of thousands of armoured vehicles to obsolescence, remember that just as we established with the tank and the helicopter, it's not just about the vulne

rability of a system, it's about what it can do for you. And the war in Ukraine so far seems to suggest that these thinly-armoured metal boxes, despite all their vulnerabilities, are absolutely essential tools on the modern battlefield. That by providing the infantry with mobility, firepower and a degree of protection, they've enabled many of the offensive successes achieved by both sides. And while it's usually the tanks or the artillery that dominates the headlines, with the recent annou

ncement by the US and Germany that they'd be sending infantry fighting vehicles to Ukraine, these vehicles are finally in the spotlight. And so here I am today to ask some simple questions. What are these vehicles? What impact have they had on the war so far? And what do announcements like this one mean for the war in 2023? To do that I'm going to give a brief history of armoured personnel carriers and infantry fighting vehicles. Talk a little bit about the pre-war forces that Russia and

Ukraine had at their disposal. Talk a little bit about how they have been employed, and what experiences have been gained in the war so far based on the best information available. And then I'm going to pivot to looking at losses, and the implications of those losses. That should give us a pretty good handle on the war so far, so then we're going to pivot to be more forward-looking. What are the opportunities for both sides to secure more of these vehicles? What sort of vehicles are they

likely to bring into service, and what impact are they likely to have? But before I jump into the story of the tank's less famous little brother, a word from a returning sponsor. Now if you follow major international events, you'll understand it's often difficult to find the truth in a complex online media environment that's often dominated by echo chambers. Ground News is a news comparison platform that helps you do just that. It's a combination of an app and a website that allows you to

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e of you who use the link, so make sure you navigate through that way. So before we jump into talking about Ukraine, let's give a quick crash course in the development of infantry fighting vehicles. What are these things, and how are they used? And like most systems, IFVs and APCs exist because there was a problem out there to be solved. In particular the combined arms problem. While the invention of the tank as a major innovation in warfare, people figured out pretty quickly that tanks w

ere reasonably useless without close supporting infantry. Particularly in the early years, a person inside a tank was likely to be half-blind and deaf. Buttoned up, a commander would have limited situational awareness. And there'd be lots of opportunities for opposing infantry or anti-tank guns to ambush, or get in close, or otherwise knock out a tank. A gun that can reach out to the horizon isn't much good if a bazooka team can crawl to within a few dozen metres of your vehicle and put a

rocket into its side armour. So you want the infantry and the tanks to be working together, but that runs into a few problems. Firstly, humans have a pretty strict upper speed limit, particularly over long distances. You're not going to get a human to march at 20, 30 or 40 kilometres an hour, which is the sort of speeds tanks were getting to pretty quickly once they begin to develop. The other is that infantry are, annoyingly, not very bulletproof. Tanks are. And so tanks might be able to

move through a bit of terrain potentially dominated by mortars or machine guns. The accompanying infantry, being squishy humans, not so much. So from late World War One onward a number of military thinkers become preoccupied with the idea of, "How do you keep the infantry up and moving with the tanks? And preferably, how do you keep the infantry alive while doing it?" There were a variety of responses to this particular problem during the inter-war years and World War Two, not all of the

m were particularly good. The Soviets for example make extensive use of desant tactics, which is where you have infantry ride on the tanks to the battle. Now this keeps the infantry up with the tanks, but the problem is the tank has a lot of armour intended to make it survivable, and the infantry are on the wrong side of that armour. Putting the infantry in trucks, so motorising the units, has a similar problem. The trucks enable them to keep up with the tanks to a limited extent, but tru

cks are not all-terrain vehicles and they're also, again, very squishy. Or you could go with some bright British inter-war thinking, which is instead of speeding up the infantry, just slow down the tanks. I've got a Matilda I tank on the screen there, which had the advantages of being very cheap and quite well armoured. But the idea was that the tank was there to support the infantry, so it didn't need to be able to move much faster than the average infantryman. That thing had a 70 horsep

ower engine and could manage 9 kilometres an hour off-road. For the Americans in the audience, that is a dazzling 5.6 miles an hour. Truly an inspirational example of out of the box thinking. Seeing as mobility was one of the tank's primary advantages however, most designers moved in the direction of instead trying to find a way to keep the infantry up with a relatively fast and speedy tank. And so most nations focused on the obvious choice, if you want the infantry to keep up with the a

rmoured vehicles, well then give the infantry armoured vehicles of their own. For many nations in World War Two that means the half-track, which is a hybrid vehicle with forward drive wheels and tracks at the back. The major production examples: the M3 half-track for the Americans is one key one, and the elegantly named German Sonderkraftfahrzeug zweihunderteinundfünfzig. Having the forward wheels simplifies driver training, but it limits your all-terrain capabilities because even if the t

rack can handle all terrain, sometimes the forward wheels can't. And so towards the latter stages of World War Two and post-World War Two you see the evolution towards the fully-tracked APC, the Armoured Personnel Carrier. The classic Western example here that I've got on the bottom right there, is the M113. It's basically an armoured box with tracks that is designed to function as an armoured battle taxi. To carry infantry close to the battle space protected from artillery and shell frag

ments, unload the infantry, and then after the battle is won, pick the infantry up and move them to their next location, or do things like casualty evacuation. Notably APCs are generally not designed to fight alongside their infantry at the front itself. They tend to be fairly lightly armoured and fairly lightly armed. The task of actually supporting the infantry during an assault or a defence, well, that's meant to belong to other vehicles. Or at least that was how it worked until the So

viets asked, "Why? Why can't we just build a vehicle that can both transport and support the infantry element? The result was an incredibly innovative little vehicle called the BMP-1 that arrived in service in the mid-1960s. This was an armoured personnel carrier in some senses, it carried a troop section of up to 8 passengers. It was mobile, it was fully tracked, it was fully amphibious. But it also carried a 73mm low-pressure gun, an anti-tank missile system (the Sagger ATGM, which is 9M

14 Malyutka), and a 7.62mm machine gun. This wasn't a battle taxi that would just drop troops off and then retreat. This was a vehicle that would move the infantry into the battle area and then support them once they were there. Now to be fair, the ideas that went into the BMP didn't come from nowhere. During World War Two the idea of an armoured personnel carrier existed. The Canadians for example had the Kangaroo, which is basically a tank chassis with the turret ripped off and infantry

hiding inside. Many nations had support vehicles designed to provide close range fire support to the infantry with low velocity guns. But the difference with the BMP is now these things were the same vehicle, and they were tightly bonded with the infantry section. Now the BMP-1 wasn't a perfect vehicle, in some ways it had poor internal ergonomics. The mine protection was pretty terrible. The anti-tank guided missile was hard to reload and use from inside the turret. There were issues wi

th air conditioning in hot environments, namely it didn't have an air conditioning unit. The fuel tank placement was vulnerable, it was in the rear door section. There was very little in the way of sensors, visibility issues, gun depression, the list of issues go on. But at the same time it was the 1960s, this was something new. It was mobility and firepower on the 1960s nuclear/biological/chemical battlefield. Because inside the hull of a BMP-1 infantry could actually expect to have some

degree of chance to survive the battlefield, even if there were radiation threats from detonating nuclear weapons, or chemical and biological weapons deployed in theatre. Plus if you're trying to change the world, well, quantity does have a quality all of its own. The Soviet leadership were essentially asked when the BMP-1 was invented, "How many of these things do you want?" They said, "Yes." And the Soviets would produce more than 20,000 of these things. At the time BMP-1 comes around,

Western forces really have no equivalent. So there's a scramble, albeit at the speed of conventional military development, to build an equivalent and deploy it in Western forces. For Germany this is the Marder. For France it's the AMX-10P. The USA takes a while, a long while, to replace the M113 with an infantry fighting vehicle concept, but eventually comes up with the Bradley. The UK has Warrior. And by the time the US has Bradley, the USSR is already onto BMP-2. And while all these des

igns are unique in their own way, there was a bit of convergence around similar features. A 20 to 30mm auto-cannon became the primary weapon system. And then the vehicle was always going to be fully tracked, armoured, and designed to carry an infantry section. By the end of the Cold War, most major nations have solidly adopted this infantry fighting vehicle concept. It's worth noting that the hulls used for infantry fighting vehicles and APCs are often used as the base for other designs

as well, for specialist vehicles. Command vehicles, engineering vehicles, weapons carriers, you name it. Because it doesn't make sense to produce a different version of "metal box with tracks and some armour" for every given battlefield task. You can just adapt the one you have, and have commonality of spare parts and supply lines. I won't be talking about these vehicles too much in this video, but I'd like to note their existence. Development in the IFV and APC space continues even after

the end of the Cold War, with new generations of IFVs and APCs entering into service. The US for example brings in Stryker, other nations have also come up with their own modern designs. Germany has the Puma, Poland is working on the development of Borsuk, and we'll talk about some of these vehicles over the course of the presentation. But that's the concept of the IFV and the APC in a nutshell. The APC is essentially an armoured battlefield taxi. Whereas the IFV is able to transport inf

antry as well, but also supports them when it gets to the battle space. Which brings us to Russia, Ukraine, and their pre-war collection of heavy metal. Now just as with its tanks and its artillery systems, Russia has a very large collection of IFVs, APCs, armoured reconnaissance vehicles and everything in between, mostly inherited from the Soviet Union. In 2021 Military Balance estimated the Russian ground forces alone, so not counting the Airborne Forces or the Naval Infantry, had 1,700

armoured reconnaissance vehicles with 1,000 in mothballs, 5,200 IFVs with 8,500 in deep reserve, and 6,100 APCs with another 6,000 stored out in the Siberian wastes somewhere. Now for those of you who aren't familiar with the dizzying array of Russian and Soviet armoured vehicles as we go through them, never fear, there is a cheat code. Unlike the Americans who put "M" in front of bloody everything, there's a clue in the letter code for each Russian vehicle. For the ones we're talking ab

out today the usual clue is BTR means a wheeled transport vehicle of some type. BMP, those are your tracked infantry fighting vehicles. And BMD, well, those are your airborne infantry fighting vehicles. So if you want to take a rough guess at what a vehicle does, just look at that three letter code at the start. Certainly a lot easier than the American example where the following statement, while unusual, would make sense during World War Two, "An M1, towing an M1, is ambushed by a unit

of German infantry. And as a result the escorting American infantry move to engage. The Sergeant's life is saved when shrapnel pings off his M1, so he yells at the squad to fix M1s to their M1s, while they fire on the Germans using M1s, M1s and M1s. They are confident taking the engagement, because if the Germans turn out to have a tank the squad has an M1 standing by. And if any enemy aircraft appear, well here is a known battery of M1s nearby. The engagement finally ends when they call

over the radio for fire support from nearby M1s." As you can probably imagine, parts are seldom compatible between different M1s. Moving on. Just as with tanks and artillery systems, Russian industry has been able to design some quite modern, cutting edge systems. The Kurganets-25 IFV is to the IFVs what the T-14 Armata is meant to be to the Russian tank force, an entirely Russian built, post-Soviet design with a series of modern features. And the Russian media (I've got an article there f

rom TASS in 2015) were constantly telling us that these modern vehicles will be operating alongside modernised versions of old Soviet materiel. So there are more than 620 BMP-3s of various types in Russian service, and more than 1,100 BTR-82As. Those are essentially late Soviet designs that have undergone a little bit of tweaking and upgrading. The problem with most of Russia's most modern designs, well, it's common whether it's a tank, an artillery piece or an aircraft. Most top tier Rus

sian systems have really long development and procurement timelines. They are subject to cost and time overruns. If they are procured at all, they're procured in very small numbers, and the focus is usually on the export market. You saw in that previous article that Kurganets-25 was meant to enter service in 2016. It's 2023, Russia is at war, and we are still waiting. Meanwhile, I imagine many of you would have seen the flurry of stories when Russia finally deployed its BMPT "Terminators

" into Ukraine. This is essentially a tank chassis with a weapon station on top mounting some 30mm cannons, grenade launchers and anti-tank missiles. It's intended to be a support vehicle for the tanks. And these things were built up to be the best things since sliced bread. And they've been exported by their hundreds to foreign countries. But as far as we can tell, the Russian army hasn't received these vehicles in anything like those numbers. Just as in so many other areas of the Russi

an Armed Forces, the old adage holds true: "The Russian army is a large modern army, but the large part ain't modern, and the modern part ain't large. At the other extreme, a lot of Russia's AFV strength in APCs and IFVs is made up of vehicles from the 1950s, the 1960s, and 1970s. Of their 8,500 reserve IFVs on paper, 7,000 of those are BMP-1s which as we talked about before, is a vehicle that came into service in the 1960s. They've got 5,800 active and reserve vehicles called MT-LBs. MT-L

B came into service in the 1950s, it's essentially an artillery tractor/utility vehicle that can be pushed into service as an APC. Which is exactly what has happened in Ukraine. I mention this not to suggest that you couldn't design good equipment in the 1960s or the 1970s, but rather because the fact this equipment is so old raises questions about reliability, the service life of these systems, and what conditions that they have been stored in. How reliable are they're going to be if they

are brought back into service? It's always a bit of an open question trying to figure out how many of the vehicles that Russia has on paper can actually run if brought back from reserve. As opposed to those that have been worn down by corruption, poor storage, or the simple passage of time. ... One approach adopted by another YouTuber, Covert Cabal, was simply to buy satellite footage of Russia's various tank storage depots and physically count the vehicles to figure out how many there w

ere approximately. And to visually inspect what sort of condition they were in. I'd encourage you to check out his videos, but it does highlight the fact that a number of the vehicles that are supposed to be in storage in Russia may not really be in serviceable condition. Many of them no doubt are, because we're seeing them surface in Ukraine. But even satellite imagery reveals at least some of them have been broken down by time and neglect. Now it's easy to say that Soviet vehicles were

intended to be rugged and to endure rough conditions, but open field storage during the 1990s, well that was a high threat environment. So if you leave aside the very modern vehicles that aren't always available in large numbers, and also a lot of the very, very old vehicles in deep storage that may or may not be serviceable in all cases, you're left with the backbone of the primary active duty Russian APC and IFV force in February 2022. Which is overwhelmingly the BMP-2, which is an IFV t

hat comes into service in ... I think 1980 exactly. That's a much improved vehicle in many ways over the original BMP-1. The one-man turret is gone, now there's a two-man turret which makes much more sense. The low-accuracy low-pressure 73mm gun has been replaced with a 30mm auto-cannon. There's a much upgraded anti-tank guided missile launcher. And yes, there's a loss in some troop carrying capacity, but there's also a slight increase in armour protection. And all in all, it's a more fig

htable vehicle. In terms of wheeled vehicles, there are almost 3,000 BTR-80/82As in service according to Military Balance 2021. The 82A is an upgraded BTR-80, I've got one pictured in the lower right hand corner there, where essentially they give the vehicle a lot more bang by putting a 30mm cannon in place of the original machine gun, as well as a number of other upgrades. Now there are many other vehicle types to be sure, but those are some of the big name entries in the Russian order o

f battle as the Russian ground forces go into Ukraine in February 2022. Now the Ukrainian APC and IFV park looks pretty much like what the Russian park would look like if Russia was much, much poorer. There are more limited reserves, a lot less materiel in boneyards, and there's a greater focus on relatively older kit in the active force rather than just sitting in reserve. In 2021 Military Balance estimated that Ukraine had 547 armoured reconnaissance vehicles, 1,184 IFVs (a number which

I do object to, but I use for consistency with my other sources), and 622 APCs (again a number I object to). And I'll put some of my objections in the commentary so that we don't get lost here. The point is that by European standards that's actually a lot of armoured vehicles, certainly more than many continental European armies have at their disposal. The problem for Ukraine of course was that Russia had even more vehicles, and a decent collection of more modern ones. The majority of Ukr

aine's vehicles have Soviet origins. The workhorse types in terms of IFVs was the BMP-2, with about 890 active, supported by 213 of the older BMP-1s. Ukraine also had a substantial collection of wheeled APCs and scout vehicles, including, frankly, some pretty old and under-armoured stuff. Now like Russia, Ukraine did have a small collection of experimental or short-run, modern, post-Soviet production vehicles, and it had won some export success with them. I've got the BTR-4 on screen there

, and this had achieved export success to I think Nigeria, Iraq and Indonesia, as well as going into service in Ukraine itself. The BTR-4 is notable because of that remote-controlled 30mm cannon weapon station on the top of the vehicle. Which means in the early stages of the war in particular, you saw some combat footage coming out of Ukraine that looked like it was a video of someone playing a particularly morbid video game. In fact it was the weapons officer controlling that remote wea

pon station on these things as they were used at places like Mariupol. There they performed well, but again numbers are a critical issue. And for the most part the Ukrainian APC and IFV force was both much smaller and much older than its Russian opponent. At least if you only count the age of the systems that Russia was actively deploying, as opposed to those that they had in deep storage. For completeness I'll also note here that after the invasion in February the West does agree to begi

n introducing some older Western systems into Ukrainian service. I'll talk about these later on, but I want to flag them up front. Generally speaking, the systems that go during 2022 are older and more lightly armed than many of the vehicles that Ukraine already has in service. Things like M113, which is the famous box with tracks. The FV103 Spartan from the UK, VABs from France. And ACSVs, relatively good vehicles from Canada that went in small numbers in December. There's a longer list

of course, but the key to keep in mind as we talk about the opening year of the war is that most of these vehicles are relatively lightly armed and armoured compared to a lot of what Ukraine already had in service. If you're talking about heavier Western materiel, that's a very recent development. Alright, so now we've set the scene. Russia had a much larger number of vehicles, and a much better supply of modern vehicles compared to its Ukrainian opponent. To put it in video game terms, Ru

ssia has the tech advantage and the mass advantage. So if you're either the average video gamer or Vladimir Putin, you probably only think there's one way this is going to go. The theory says this should be a very one-sided affair. But once war breaks out and vehicles start catching fire left, right and centre, well practice has a way of beating up theory and stealing its lunch money. To that end let's have a look at the visually confirmed losses both sides have [suffered], and also talk

about why I'm not making this as an "End of the IFV" video, despite the stupendous number of vehicles that have been destroyed. Now when we're talking about losses, the usual caveats obviously apply. It's very hard to get accurate loss data out of an active war zone. There are propaganda figures flying around on both sides. And I've noticed particularly lately a big push from pro-Russian sources to try and suggest that they're actually inflicting disproportionate casualties on the Ukraini

ans and putting a lot more focus on that attritional angle. And while I do make sure to listen to General Konashenkov as he explains how they've managed to destroy every Ukrainian aircraft more than once, for this analysis I'm relying on visually confirmed loss data, particularly the Oryx database. Now there are obviously limitations with this approach. Not every piece of destroyed equipment, first and foremost, is likely to be photographed. And while the team does audit entries and perio

dically tries to remove duplicates, there is a risk of duplication or misidentification. But overall, I think visually confirmed loss data is probably the best source we have for determining a rough approximate floor of how much equipment has been lost. Up front looking at the data, a few overall trends stand out. The first is that Ukrainian losses actually exceeded Russian losses in the first few days, the first three or four days of the war saw Russia inflict more visually confirmed dama

ge on the Ukrainians than vice versa. Then that relationship pretty quickly inverted. As Russian electronic warfare broke down, Ukrainian ground-based air defence came back online. The Ukrainian military found its feet, and Pavel and his mates started grabbing AKs and NLAWs and going hunting Russian tanks in the woods outside Sumy. Well, the loss ratio started to suggest that, to put it in technical terms, the Russian military had stuffed up pretty badly. Since that point visually confir

med Russian losses have consistently trended well above Ukrainian losses. Although the ratio between those two has varied significantly depending on the phase of the war in question. Losses have tended to spike following major movements in the front. For example when we start looking at graphs in a moment, you'll see big spikes around things like the Kharkiv and Kherson offensives. Overall in most categories, the Ukrainians have lost a greater percentage of what they started with than the

Russians have, simply because they started with so much less. That is a sobering statistic that is often forgotten, and highlights why Ukraine is reliant on foreign resupply. Including resupply from Russia, because the capture rates for Russian equipment have also always been higher than the Ukrainian equivalents. Just looking at IFVs for example, like BMPs, any given IFV that is lost for Russia is 50% more likely to be captured than its Ukrainian equivalent. Ukrainian equipment is far m

ore likely to be destroyed than Russian equipment. And that ratio again has fluctuated over time. During the retreat from Kyiv for example, or the Kharkiv counter-offensive capture rates for Russian equipment went through the roof. During artillery duels in the Donbas capture rates go down, because artillery shells aren't very good at taking prisoners. The graph in front of you illustrates the aggregate visually confirmed lost data for Russian IFVs and Ukrainian IFVs over time. You will no

tice there are occasionally little dips where the number goes down, that's where the team behind the database identify duplicates or misidentifications and remove them from the count. It's part of the constant auditing and data control process. And I think the graph there tracks relatively well with what we might expect from the war to date. You can see that initial surge in losses during the chaotic attempt to sort of take Kyiv and Sumy and Chernihiv, and then the retreat that happens from

those areas. Things level out during the attritional fighting in the Donbas where Russia is using its artillery as opposed to mobile warfare. Russian losses then spike dramatically during the Kherson offensive. You can see that up-tick, ... a lot of that is captured equipment as well. And then Ukrainian losses start to tick up, as do Russian ones, during the Kherson offensive and also the recent fighting in the east. It's notable that the better part of half of Russian IFV losses occurred

from September onwards. And I think that highlights just how devastating Kharkiv was for the Russian army. That "orderly regrouping" away from places like Lyman and Izium apparently involved the abandonment or destruction of hundreds of Russian armoured vehicles. And really helped dramatically reverse some of the trends towards more even loss rates that we'd been seeing in the months leading up to it. The data for APCs and IFVs follows broadly the same sort of pattern. Although the small

er numbers and the less frequent periods at which the Oryx team removed duplicates makes the data just a little bit more lumpy. The ratio between lost Ukrainian APCs and Russian APCs is also much closer than for many other vehicle categories. Which is something we'll dig into in a moment. Overall though, these loss trends sort of match with the phases of the war as we've observed them so far. Russia makes a play at Kyiv, it gets its teeth kicked in as a result. It starts to even out the l

oss ratio as it stages an attritional fight in the Donbas. Then the losses spike dramatically as Ukraine goes on the offensive at Kharkiv and Kherson. Although Kherson does correlate with losses of Ukrainian equipment as well, particularly certain classes of imported Western equipment. And then again we see a return to attritional artillery-based fighting around places like Bakhmut, where Russian equipment losses continue to be disproportionate to Ukrainian ones in terms of visually confi

rmed losses. But - it's not like the days of the Kharkiv counter-offensive where every Ukrainian unit went in a draw to win a free T-80. It's also worth noting that while these losses might not be perfect, if you assume that these represent a reliable baseline for the losses of the Russian side, then it becomes almost logically impossible to accept the idea that Ukraine has lost more equipment than the Russians have. If the Ukrainians had lost more IFVs than the Russians had, Ukraine woul

dn't have BMP-2s or BMP-1s any more, and they do, we see them all the time. So with the data available to us, I'm reasonably comfortable suggesting that Russian equipment losses have been disproportionate to Ukrainian ones. What we'll only find out later is how disproportionate. In any case, let's move on from general trends to a little bit more of a deep dive. Looking at Russian losses in detail throws up some pretty interesting patterns. The first is that the loss data, even more than i

t did in the early stages of the war, actively seems to rebut the idea that Russia has been sending old and crap equipment in first and holding all of its good troops in reserve. Because apparently that's something that you would do for 11 months. Instead losses have generally been disproportionately weighted towards more modern materiel. If you look at Russia's BTRs for example, 35% of the BTR-82As that they started the war with have become losses, abandoned, captured, damaged or destroy

ed. But only 9.7% of the non-upgraded BTR-80s. Looking at BMPs, well, 29% of the much more modern BMP-3s have become losses, compared to only 23% of the BMP-2s. And that's even more interesting, because I'm only counting the percentage of the active duty force there. There were no BMP-3s in reserve, there were 1,500 BMP-2s. So the actual number of BMP-2s in service should be even higher, which would make that 23% even lower. There is an anomaly when talking about the BMP-1 specifically fo

r both Ukraine and Russia, but I'll talk about that one in a future slide. I also note that generally speaking, Russian losses tend to trend more heavily towards their tracked platforms as opposed to their wheeled platforms. There's also a huge discrepancy specifically on the point of command vehicles, as Oryx classifies them. Russia is visually confirmed to have lost 221 command stations/vehicles. Including 94 of those captured, 74 R-149MA1s, 36 R-149MA3s and 23 R-166-05s. These are comma

nd, staff, and signals vehicles. The R-149s are essentially BTR-80s with someone important and a whole bunch of additional fancy equipment inside. Now I'll leave it to the audience to figure out what it says, that Russia keeps leaving behind or losing its command and communication vehicles. For comparison, the equivalent Ukrainian figure is 8. My point is that even amongst the 8,000+ units of heavy equipment Russia has lost, that 221 figure really stands out. Ukrainian losses meanwhile se

em to follow relatively different patterns. Losses amongst their wheeled systems are generally in many cases heavier than among their tracked systems. And a lot of the times, the losses in percentage terms are slanted towards older materiel rather than the newer stuff. The BMP-2, which was their frontline primary IFV, actually has a relatively low loss rate of 10%. Whereas the BRDM-2, which practically hasn't appeared on the Russian side's loss data, (it's old, lightly armed, and lightly

armoured) well 24% of the Ukrainian stock is now accounted for lost. The place where that relationship between new and old doesn't hold however, is in their very latest wheeled heavy systems, things like BTR-4. Those were available in relatively small numbers at the start of the war and have suffered horrendous losses. I have some theories as to why Ukrainian losses might look this way, but until I can get those checked and confirmed with Ukrainians and play them back in a future video,

I won't speculate for the moment. The point is that as a general rule the Ukrainian loss profile, even accounting for the difference in numbers, looks very different to the Russian one. Which makes it very hard to just come out and suggest something like "BMP-2 is a hopelessly vulnerable vehicle", because it's one of the most destroyed vehicles on the Russian side, and one of the least destroyed on the Ukrainian side. So feel free to make a joke about it not mattering so much how heavily a

rmoured it is, but rather how you use it. While also noting that it's clear the Russian Ministry of Defence has hired some sort of supernatural agent to curse everything in Ukraine that runs on wheels. It could be pointed out that a lot of these wheeled vehicles are not particularly heavily armoured, but an anti-tank guided missile is going to whack you whether you're a BMP or a BTR. The difference likely comes down to how they are being employed by what units and in what way. That said, i

t's always important not to read too much into data and to highlight strange anomalies when they appear. Generally speaking, if you're interpreting data and you see something a bit weird, you should probably interrogate it a little bit before jumping to conclusions. And I thought I'd give you a couple of examples of oddities in the data now. For example, I could very easily conclude that every army in the world needs to get rid of its ... BMP-1s right now, before they all spontaneously c

ombust and kill their crews. And to be fair, like that may be true to some extent, it's a vehicle from the 1960s. And the last time I climbed inside one I was in civvies, being driven around in the thing. And I could not imagine being taken onto a battlefield in full kit in the cramped interior of that thing. Especially knowing that the bloody bulge to one side of me was the fuel tank. And the loss data in Ukraine seems to suggest maybe there's something wrong with the good old BMP-1. Russ

ia has lost 57% percent of its active force of BMP-1s. On paper, Ukraine has actually managed to go further and lose all of its active BMPs more than once. Note in both cases, those figures assume that a portion of the horribly burnt out wrecks of BMPs that are completely unidentifiable between -1s and -2s, that some of those are BMP-1s. So now yes, the BMP-1 is not a fantastic vehicle, but 115% losses is a pretty impressive feat. And someone one junior and not particularly experienced lo

oking at that data may, as I said, run off to senior leadership and try and divest the BMP-1s really quickly. Or I don't know, drop them out of the back of planes as improvised explosives or something. The reality is that there's additional context that explains those numbers. Russia only had 500 BMP-1s active according to Military Balance 2021, but like we said earlier, they had 7,000 in storage. So it's likely what is happening, ... and we've seen this happening with mobilised units, Rus

sia is pulling hundreds and hundreds of BMP-1s out of storage, giving them to mobilised personnel or as replacements to other units and then they are being destroyed, which drives up that loss rate. The number active is no longer 500, it's probably much larger than that. Ukraine likewise. They have captured a bunch of BMP-1s from the Russians and received hundreds ... in terms of resupply from European powers. Looking at the best data I had available, Ukraine has increased its number of B

MP-1s with a resupply equal to like 160% of the original number. Ukraine started the war with around 200 BMP-1s, and has received more than 300 in terms of captures and resupply. So it's not so much that all of the BMPs have been destroyed more than once, it's that some unfortunate vehicles were captured from the Russians, only to be destroyed by their former masters. I bring this up less as a statement about the future of the IFV or the APC and more as a warning of the sort of traps tha

t exist in data analysis. And that's a nice segue into dealing with three common misconceptions around the loss data when it comes to IFVs and APCs, but also the loss data in general. The first is the trap of saying either that Russia is running out of equipment and has nothing left, and on the other side that Russia has infinite equipment. The second is just because Ukraine is asking for a lot more equipment from their Western backers, that means the loss data must be wrong and Ukraine mu

st have secretly lost all of their armoured vehicles and desperately be trying to reconstitute. I'll deal with those two arguments later on. The one I can quickly deal with now is the idea that Ukraine has captured so many systems from the Russians that it clearly has more equipment now than before the war began. I did do a video on that topic which I'll link in the description, but a quick refresher while I've got the data in front of me. This graph shows the net IFV losses for both side

s, according to the Oryx data. Net losses being all the vehicles you lost - destroyed, abandoned or captured, minus the vehicles that you captured from the opponent. So as you can see Russia's losses are less damaging, but still very, very high. Something like 1,700 IFVs lost on net. Whereas Ukraine losses are indeed negative, they have captured more IFVs visually confirmed than they're confirmed to have lost. The problem I have with this is both that loss data may be understated, so they

may have lost more than is suggested here. But secondly you can't assume that every piece of captured equipment is in good enough condition that it can be restored to service easily or quickly, or even at all. If you look at the images of the vehicles that are captured, some of them are fine, some of them are even running in the video or image associated. And some of them look like they're going to require a little bit of work, they're a bit of a fixer-upper before it goes back into serv

ice. I know it's anecdotal, but having talked to some Ukrainian troops in the past, the impression I got was the stuff they captured from the Russians was sometimes in pretty crappy condition, often old, sometimes poorly maintained. So not always super easy to immediately put back into service. So while it's verifiably true that Ukraine is capturing a boatload of equipment from the Russians, I would be incredibly surprised if it was enough to totally offset their losses, incredibly surpris

ed. And on that second point of Russia running out of equipment entirely, well I've included a screen grab here from a recent video by Colonel Reisner of the Austrian Bundesheer, not because his statistics exactly match my own, but because it illustrates the concept involved. And also of course because the Colonel strikes me as a consummate professional, and I couldn't recommend his presentations enough. If you look at the numbers of soldiers, tanks, armoured vehicles and artillery system

s the trend holds true, Russia in every category except for manpower has fewer systems at its disposal than it did at the start of the war. Ukraine has more armoured vehicles, more tanks, than it did at the start of the war, which means the gap between it and the Russians has narrowed, but Russia still enjoys a materiel superiority in those categories. Russian materiel losses were likely very disproportionate, but they also had a lot more to lose. Still it's worth dwelling on the sobering

thought that in less than a year of war, Russia has lost enough tanks and armoured vehicles to equip several European armies. It is likely a joint testament to the fighting qualities of the Ukrainians and the deadliness of modern weapons. But given the mind-boggling quantity of losses involved, I would forgive some of you for going basically, "Perun, are you sure this isn't a 'death of the IFV or APC' video? Like these things seem like death traps, they've been blown up by the thousands,

do we really need the things?" But as I said rather clumsily in my "End of the Tank?" video, the tank may be vulnerable but as long as it still has a role to play on the battlefield that nothing else can do, it's likely to remain around. As The Chieftain put it rather more elegantly, "Ask not what you can do to the tank, but what the tank can do for you." And similar logic applies to the infantry fighting vehicle and the APC. So let's talk a little bit about how they've been used in Ukr

aine, and what lessons we might draw from it. And I'll note up front that in making these observations I'm compositing a number of sources. So videos by people like Colonel Reisner, work by the Royal United Services Institute which I'll link in the description, the Oryx loss data, and commentary from people who are on the ground in Ukraine. And one of the first themes that was highlighted by many of those sources, and which I explored previously in the video "All Metal, No Manpower" many, m

any months ago, is that IFVs don't do very well without the "I". That is: a shortage of infantry makes armoured vehicles incredibly vulnerable. And in the early stages of the war before Russian mobilisation when they couldn't deploy conscripts and they hadn't mobilised reservists, The Russian army went into action in a configuration it wasn't prepared for. Short on infantry relative to the number of vehicles it had. So vehicles like BTRs and BMPs were going into action with less dismounte

d infantry available to support them, and as a result losses were heavy. A lot of the videos of Ukrainian teams destroying Russian tanks with ATGMs, or tank hunting teams of civilian militia going out into the woods and hunting Russian armoured vehicles, date back to that era where Russia was short on capable, motivated infantry. As a lesson this shouldn't be that surprising, but it's important to understand Russian losses and Russian failures in the early stage of the war, so I include it

here up front. So while there might occasionally be a little bit of elitism in the armoured vehicle crews, and I discovered recently that some IFV crews affectionately referred to their infantry complement as "crunchies". The Ukrainian experience seems to suggest that if you're going to send armoured vehicles into action the infantry usually aren't optional. Because, and I don't want to be accused of glossing over this, IFVs, APCs, armoured vehicles of this type are very vulnerable to a w

hole bunch of stuff on the modern battlefield. There's a lot of stuff out there that wants to kill IFVs and APCs, and a lot of stuff out there that can do exactly that. Mines for example, have continued to illustrate themselves as a threat. And as a result, we do have videos of Russian and Ukrainian infantry riding into battle on the tops of their old BMP-1s, just as Soviet troops did in Afghanistan or US troops did in Vietnam on their M113s back in the day. Artillery is also a major thre

at once a vehicle stops moving. RUSI points out that a scrape shelter for a tank or an APC doesn't realistically provide that much protection against drone-enabled artillery. And then sometimes the drones just remove the middleman entirely, and you see cases of them dropping anti-tank grenades onto the lightly-armoured upper sections of older armoured vehicles. Or infantry breaking out the Javelin, or the NLAW, or the Stugna, or any other ATGM system and generally ruining the day of what

ever armoured vehicle they fire at. The point is there's a lot of ways to see an armoured vehicle on the modern battlefield, and a lot of systems out there that can kill any armoured vehicle that they can see. And you saw the result in the loss data, with literally thousands of these armoured vehicles destroyed. But while it's probably cold comfort to the guy who just escaped a burning BMP, I'd argue that doesn't mean the vehicles are failing. And to understand that statement, let's just s

tep back for a moment and understand something. I've talked before about the combination of drones with precision weapons making the modern battlefield an incredibly deadly place. And looking at this problem RUSI (so the Royal [United] Services Institute), has come up with three broad techniques for surviving in that environment where you have drones everywhere and deadly weapon systems. You can disperse your forces, you can spread out so much that it's not actually economical to fire a

PGM at you. If some idiot has concentrated 600 personnel in one building in order to watch Putin's speech, well that's inviting something like a Gimler strike. Whereas it's going to sound cold, but if it's just Private Conscriptovic and Sergeant Bicepsky hanging around in a fighting position by themselves, it's not worth tasking munitions to eliminate that position. So dispersing becomes a viable option, not because you can't be seen, but because it's too expensive to kill you. The second

option is to be moving very, very quickly. The Russians in particular seem to have difficulty tasking weapon systems to destroy moving targets, given the communication lag and limitations of the systems involved. You need a drone to identify a moving target, then you need to task a weapon system to that moving target, and guide it in without that system for example, moving out of range if you're using something like Lancet. This is part of the secret to the survivability of the HIMARS

system. And also to some of Ukraine's offensives in places like Kharkiv, where speed and audacity sort of became a protection for some of the advancing forces. And the third option is to go 1915 on the situation and dig in deep. Preferably into fortified structures or deeply fortified positions. Based on their observations of the first few months of the war, RUSI concludes that basic entrenchments probably aren't enough. Now because fortified buildings and trenches are not particularly mo

bile this provides a challenge when you are going to attack, because there you need the ability to move quickly during the assaults in order to be survivable during it. And then you need speed to enable you to re-disperse before the enemy can attack you again, because you're not instantly going to be entrenched. So infantry and military units need to be able to rapidly spread out but also rapidly come together. RUSI observes for example, the average Ukrainian infantry company, so roughly

200 individuals, can be spread out along a 3 kilometre frontage. Now breaking up along that sort of frontage makes you less vulnerable to artillery. But it also means you're at risk of being overwhelmed by an opponent who concentrates, because they can bring lots of forces together and attack a particular point on your line. When they concentrate, yes, they're going to take more losses from artillery, but they can also gain ground on you. So if Russia is concentrating against a particular

part of the line, then the Ukrainians are going to need to concentrate in order to deal with that threat. And likewise on the attack there needs to be a vehicle that concentrates the infantry together, moves into the attack, and then disperses those forces rapidly so they don't get destroyed by Russian artillery in turn. And IFVs just make that process so much simpler. The mobility of the vehicle compared to moving on foot or vehicles that don't have all-terrain capability, lets you conce

ntrate your forces quicker. The armour on the vehicle means that as you're moving, unless there's a direct hit, you're less likely to suffer major casualties from enemy shelling during that concentration and assault process. The big guns sitting on your IFV, whether that be a 30mm or otherwise, that extra firepower is going to help you achieve a breakthrough through whatever position you're targeting. A platoon of BMP-2s adds four 30mm cannons to the infantry group that is trying to make a

breakthrough, and that's a lot of extra bang to have on hand. Because you've then made the breakthrough more quickly because you had more firepower, mobility and armour, you've got more time to disperse or dig in before the opposing side can get their act together and start shelling you. And you can use that time and the mobility afforded by your IFVs to re-disperse your infantry in their newly taken positions so that you don't get destroyed by enemy fires in response. The quote there fr

om the RUSI report is, "If the period of concentration is sufficiently short and the target is sufficiently mobile, it's difficult for the enemy to bring effective fires to bear on the right location." An IFV is one of the tools that makes that rapid concentration and mobility possible. And it's why when IFVs and APCs are in short supply, you'll see Ukrainians using units like MRAPs and Humvees for want of anything else. Because the speed of concentration and speed of the assault affords

a degree of survivability over for example, doing an assault on foot. So, yes, IFVs and APCs are likely to, and have, lost a lot of vehicles doing these sort of attack and defence operations. But until someone comes up with a better way of doing them, they're likely to remain a critical tool. Ask not what Javelin can do to the BMP, because that's not pretty and not worth dwelling on, instead ask, "What would the infantry do if the BMP wasn't there?" And maybe you'd be forgiven for thinking

that that usefulness is only applicable to mobile warfare. If you're talking about trenches, if you're talking about Bakhmut and static fighting, then surely the AFV and the IFV, then they're just death traps, right? Well, I put this question to some who have been fighting in Ukraine, and their argument is that even in static fighting, armoured vehicles for them still have a very key role. You still need to be able to evacuate and rotate troops. You need to be able to bring in reinforcem

ents, you need to bring in supplies. And in those missions some armour and mobility is very, very welcome. A supply truck will be destroyed by any near miss, an armoured vehicle not so much. And particularly notable here is the fact that America has sent a reasonably large number of M113 ambulances specifically for this sort of armoured casualty evacuation work. Fire support is apparently also still a very much desired feature, and no unit is going to say no to having more organic integrat

ed 30mm cannons available to it. But for me, one of the biggest points in favour of the IFV and APC is despite the very large losses, both sides seem to always be asking for more of them. In recent footage of Wagner troops talking about how hard it is to take Bakhmut, what do they ask for? They ask for more BMP-3s and more 100mm shells. When Zaluzhnyi outlines what he thinks the Ukrainian military needs in order to enable its next offensives, he asked for 300 tanks and 700 IFVs. And in Rus

sia industry is being pushed to accelerate production. The people making these calls know how many of these vehicles are being lost, and are asking for more regardless. I think it's safe to work under the assumption that they know what they're doing, and that despite their vulnerability these vehicles are in fact vital. So looking at Russian sources, Ukrainian sources, and foreign sources observing the conflict, it seems that, yes, most armoured fighting vehicles, including IFVs and APCs,

are definitely vulnerable on the modern battlefield. They need infantry cooperation to protect them or they are even more vulnerable. But their role is absolutely essential. Losses are part of peer warfare, and without these sensors, the weapon systems, the mobility and the armour that these vehicles provide, mobile offensive and defensive operations would just be that much harder. So if these vehicles are both vital and also extremely vulnerable, what is the plan that both sides have fo

r replenishing their stocks in 2023? Because both sides are going to clearly need additional vehicles in 2023 to build up their frontline strength for a variety of reasons. You need to make up for combat losses, the vehicles that have exploded for instance. These are no longer particularly useful in combat and should be replaced by unexploded vehicles. There's also non-combat attrition to account for. Equipment isn't just lost because it's destroyed by the enemy, it's lost because machiner

y wears out. I've repeatedly heard that as rugged as these Soviet designs are meant to be, a lot of this stuff is many, many decades old, so very prone to break down and wearing out. And there's no accounting for stupidity either, if someone drives something off a bridge and into a river for example, well, the vehicle is gone. And then finally the big reason is to enable both sides to build up new units. Both sides have now undergone mobilisations, their armies are now much larger than th

ey were at the start of the war and those new units preferably need armoured vehicles. This is why I always get confused by the argument of people asking, "Why is Ukraine asking for more materiel? What happened to all the previous materiel they were given?" And one of the answers obviously is they have all this additional manpower, and they would very much like to be able to equip those units with something more than AKs and RPG-7s. If you're talking about where Russia will get its additi

onal IFVs and APCs from, there are two primary sources of resupply. There's new production - so stuff fresh from the factories, and there's the restoration of the stuff that is in deep storage. And looking at the questions around new production is actually really interesting. The big producer of IFVs in Russia is Kurganmashzavod, KMZ. And they don't actually produce that many brand new vehicles every year. They upgrade a lot of vehicles, but they don't produce that many brand new ones. Th

e last run of BMP-2, if we're talking about BMPs, was in 2005-2006 roughly. And BMP-3 production is ongoing, but that maxed out at about 250 per year. And in most years was actually lower than that, for both domestic market and for export. And there was recently a very public debate that ran in TASS where the executive director of KMZ said that the company had been asked to consider reconstituting production of BMP-2 rather than focusing on BMP-3. And the company pushed back and said, "We

ll, we have a production line for BMP-3, it would be much less expensive to focus on just producing as many BMP-3s as possible." Now that's interesting for two reasons. Firstly, why are they being asked, "Hey, can you restart production of BMP-2?" Rather than just scaling BMP-3 as far as it'll possibly go. And secondly because it suggests there might be serious barriers to Russia in terms of restarting or expanding its production of new built vehicles, as opposed to just repairing and refu

rbishing old ones. Even assuming a significant production on the lines as they stand, that's nowhere near enough to make up for the losses that have been suffered over the last 11 months. Which means an increasing focus on vehicles pulled out of storage. And we'll talk more about the implications of that in a moment. But say it all together: "Russia is not the Soviet Union, and their ability to produce 2,000 IFVs a month is long in the past." Looking at the Ukrainian side, there's not muc

h in the way of domestic new production, so the focus is on Western resupply. And if you look at what they received in 2022 it's thousands of vehicles, but it's mostly very light stuff that falls into a couple of categories. About half that number were infantry mobility vehicles. So Humvees from the United States. And then about a thousand of them, so that's a lot of the balance, were MRAPs, Mine Resistant Ambush Protected vehicles. Now with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan over, and with

America looking to replace a lot of its Humvees with Joint Light Tactical Vehicles, a lot of those vehicles are just surplus. And they help make up numbers, but they're not exactly long on firepower or armoured protection. In terms of IFVs, the overwhelming majority of vehicles that were sent in 2022 were different versions or permutations of the BMP-1. Vehicles so similar that I included them in my BMP-1 loss statistics. Now upgrade packages or not, that's still a vehicle from the 1960s

. And then when you look at the APC category most of them were M113s, which is the middle Cold War lightly armoured box with tracks. Not much in the way of firepower, not much in the way of survivability. And not always great on Ukrainian terrain. In other words there's a lot of leftovers in this collection, and not very much that would be willing to go up against even a BMP-2. Actually that's not fair, we've got videos of Ukrainians rushing positions in Humvees and then firing AT4s out

of the roof. And while charging a fortified position in a Humvee might sound suicidal, remember that during the First World War units like the Australian Light Horse and Indian Lancers were sometimes able to successfully charge machine guns on horseback. That said, just because it's possible doesn't mean it's a good idea, or something you want to be attempting all the time. Given the choice, the Ukrainians would probably prefer to have some armour on their vehicles, rather than having to r

ely on tactics that would make the Winged Hussars blush. And that's where recent announcements represent such a serious change. In short order we've had the US pledge the delivery of Bradleys, probably the M2 ODS model. The Germans pledged the delivery of Marders, and the French pledged the delivery of AMX-10 RCs, all in rapid succession. Compared to the vehicles that have gone previously, these are better armoured, have a lot more firepower, and are just more suited to the mission at han

d. All have so far been pledged in very small quantities, I think it's 40 Marders and 50 Bradleys, but they are the sort of vehicle that go to the Ukrainian requirements. An M113 will look at a BMP-2 and see a dire threat. A Bradley is going to look at a BMP-2 and see a target. And because I'm sure there'll be some interest in knowing whether or not the West generally has enough good quality IFVs to meet Ukraine's stated need, which is for 700 modern Western IFVs, I thought about doing a

detailed study on this, the same way I did for artillery ammunition. Then I decided it was a waste of time, unlike with artillery shells the answer here is less ambiguous, the vehicles exist. But again the question is political and who is willing to give up what. If we talk just about the United States, I'm not perfectly comfortable with Military Balance's figures here, but they estimate about 2,800 Bradleys in storage, both M2s and M3s. Many of which will be older versions, but I doubt U

kraine cares. The Stryker mobile gun system is being retired entirely, so those vehicles are available. And if you look at Europe, there are a variety of Marders and AMX-10s available if required. Also if Ukraine decides they want more M113s, they can have them. There are a lot of M113s around, MB 2021 says 8,000 in the United States. And I doubt the US is ever going to take them into combat again if they can help it. And while, yes, they would show up as dollars spent when the White House

reports how much is spent on Ukrainian aid, again it's a sunk cost on equipment that is eventually going to be retired anyway. You cannot pay your teachers in armoured personnel carriers. And even if you could I'd recommend against it, unless you want the next teacher's strike to be that much more interesting. So to quickly close out, what are these Western vehicles that might now be sent to Ukraine? The Marder is Germany's Cold War IFV that has gone through several upgrade packages, and

belongs roughly in the same family as BMP-2. That is, it's an infantry fighting vehicle with an auto-cannon based armament. Compared to the BMP-2 it's a much heavier system, it's better protected, it's got superior sensors. The vehicles that are going to Ukraine probably have thermal imagers for example. While its comparative weaknesses are that the 20mm cannon is lighter than the 30mm used by the BMP-2, and it doesn't have amphibious capability, unlike the BMP series. Although I'd like t

o stress only a very well maintained BMP with all of the seals in good condition can actually swim across a river, and we just haven't seen it happening in Ukraine. All in all, compared to BMP-1 or M113, Marder is likely to be a welcome addition to the Ukrainian arsenal. And one Ukrainian soldier I spoke to said that these basically sound like exactly what they need. Then there's the American Bradley, and this comes along later than the Marder and the M113. It even post-dates the BMP-2. An

d it's developed both as an infantry fighting vehicle and also as a cavalry vehicle. There's a version of the Bradley, the M3, where most of the troops are replaced with just more ammo for the primary weapons systems. Which is a 25mm chain gun cannon, and also an anti-tank guided missile system, a TOW 2 system. Now while details vary from version to version, and it sounds like the versions that are going to Ukraine are the M2 Operation Desert Storm, so ODS, versions. This is a vehicle that

compared to, for example, BMP-2 is going to have a much better sensor and optical suite, a very, very strong armament and quite good armouring as well. More than just transporting infantry, this is a vehicle with a lot of fight in it as well. I'll also note there was a film made about the Bradley's development called "The Pentagon Wars". It's a funny film, and it's also terribly wrong. I don't want to get distracted right now, but it basically tries to paint the Bradley as a terrible veh

icle, it's not, it is in fact excellent. Specifically the Bradley has a very good record against Soviet equipment, including Soviet tanks and BMPs. As I often do, I went through a number of documents in preparing for this episode, and one was a GAO report on the performance of the Bradley and the Abrams during Operation Desert Storm. That report noted a number of things, including very high mission readiness for the Bradleys, that is, it was a relatively reliable vehicle. That there were

fewer Bradleys deployed with units in Desert Storm than M1 Abrams tanks. And yet if you look at many of the sources out there it seems like the Bradleys killed more opposing armour than the tanks did. The report notes that the Bradley demonstrated a high level of lethality against opposing tanks and IFVs. And while the common excuse goes that the Iraqis were not using the latest and greatest version of Soviet technology, at the point where the Russian army is pulling BMP-1s out of deep s

torage, I'd suggest neither are they. Bradley in Ukraine is likely to fight a whole bunch of BMP-1s, BMP-2s, BTRs and older tanks. And against those, its record is beyond reproach. Talking to The Chieftain before this episode went up, he highlighted this may in fact create a little bit of a dilemma for the Ukrainians. Because the Bradley is both capable of transporting infantry and then supporting infantry at the forward engagement, but it's also got a missile system on it capable of enga

ging enemy tanks from 4 kilometres away. So on one hand the Ukrainians might want the Bradleys up with the infantry, and on the other hand they might want them hanging back and hunting enemy tank threats. With only 50 vehicles initially, there's not going to be enough to go around. A vehicle with good mobility, thermals, good optics, stabilised cannon armament and an anti-tank guided missile system is always going to be in high demand. Another type of vehicle that might be in contention is

the Stryker and the related Mobile Gun System. Stryker is much lighter than Bradley, it's wheeled rather than tracked, it is intended more for use as an APC. But it was also accompanied by the so-called "Mobile Gun System". This is a Stryker with an auto-loaded 105mm gun on an automated turret on top. Those vehicles have been divested, the US army doesn't want them anymore, so perhaps they may find their way to Ukraine to see out their final days. That would show up as their full value on

an aid package, but in reality the only realised cost to the American taxpayer would likely be transport, logistics and training. And in terms of how Russia is likely to respond to these announcements and the delivery of IFVs and eventually the delivery of Western MBTs, well, I think by now we've identified something of a pattern. You can call this bias if you want, but in reality I just think it's an observed pattern of behaviour. And if you don't believe me, look back at any system whe

ther it be HIMARS, M777, or any new weapon system that's been introduced into Ukraine. In phase one Russian media makes very clear that the provision of this system would be a gross escalation of the conflict, that it would be totally unacceptable, that it would be a danger to all involved. You might have Medvedev standing up and saying they might strike these targets as priorities as soon as they're supplied. You'll have individuals on state media threatening potential nuclear attacks on

the countries that are supplying them. Recently for example, you had people on state media and Russian TV talking about whether there should be nuclear strikes on France if they actually supply the AMX-10 RC. Once it becomes clear a system will be delivered, they begin arguing that the system is trash and doesn't matter. This has already started with the Bradley where TASS recently ran an article wherein a so-called "expert" basically argues that the Bradley is going to be useless in Ukra

ine because it's too heavy for the terrain involved. Also apparently it's a problem that the Bradley isn't very good at swimming rivers. Which is funny, because from what we've seen so far even amphibious Russian BMPs are not particularly good at swimming rivers unless they have been very carefully maintained and prepared to do exactly that. The final stage is to just claim that all the systems brought into the country were destroyed. That new Slovakian S-300? That was claimed destroyed s

oon after it was supplied. HIMARS? Well, they have all been destroyed by now. M777 artillery pieces? Yep, most of those are claimed destroyed. And despite not even being in the country yet, Konashenkov assures me that they have already destroyed 4 Bradleys - in September. That is not a joke, I will link the video, and it is yet another other example of why I don't think you should base serious analysis on Russian MOD kill claims. Unless of course you believe American equipment is endowed

with the magical ability to reconstitute itself after destruction and carry on the fight with a zombie crew. So once these vehicles start arriving in Ukraine in earnest, what happens next? The first thing to say is that new systems on both sides, including Western IFVs like Marder and Bradley, will be destroyed and lost in significant numbers. These systems are not invulnerable, they're relatively lightly armoured, and the battlefield is full of things that will kill them. So they will be

killed and more will be required. There will be significant political and logistical effort required in order to keep up with those losses and keep building up the Ukrainian forces on one hand. And on the Russian side, mobilising industry and the restoration of old vehicles to again make up for losses and to generate new units. For the Ukrainians the arrival of systems like Bradley will be useful across the board, but most critical in enabling them to undertake offensive actions. Modern t

anks, modern IFVs, good ground-based air defences and enough artillery ammunition are the components that will go into enabling Ukrainian offensive actions (or at least, some of the most critical). Now assuming 2023 is kind of like 2022, and based on the data we have, if you look at the way Russia's force is likely to evolve in terms of the IFVs and APCs it's using, you're likely to see an increasingly polarised force. Most of their active duty equipment, things like BMP-2s, those things

weren't in active production, but there's also not an infinite supply of them in storage. So the two sources of resupply are going to be increasingly older materiel like BMP-1 and MT-LB ... pulled out of storage on one hand, and new built things like BMP-3 on the other. Which means if the war goes on over a sufficiently large period, you're going to see an increasing divide between Russian have and have-not units. Those that get T-90 tanks and BMP-3s fresh from the production line, and t

hose that get junk from the 1960s and '70s pulled out of the graveyard. When people talk about the death of the middle class in Russia, I'm not sure this is what they had in mind. Depending on what technology Ukraine receives, that opens up an opportunity for Ukraine to achieve a technological overmatch against at least part of the Russian force, but again only if attrition continues. There's still an awful lot of BMP-2s out there yet. So far as Ukraine goes, well there are a lot of opti

ons on the table and most of them come down to political will in the West. In the absence of further shipments, you'll see a devolving force where Ukraine is forced to rely more on infantry and light vehicles to make up for an absence of armour. If the West provides just enough to allow Ukraine to limp by, you'll see a Ukrainian military that looks mostly like what it did in 2022. And if the West steps up and provides IFVs in the numbers the Ukrainians are asking for, well then you see an

evolving force that is able to deploy new tools and a technological advantage to gain an advantage over its opponent, all else being equal. I know I must sound like a broken record by this point, but the challenge is primarily political and to a lesser extent logistical. There's a lot of equipment there if the West wants to provide it. So in summary: casualties for IFVs and APCs, the metal boxes of both sides, have been very heavy in the war to date. And the vulnerabilities to various thr

eats, be they ATGMs, artillery, mines, all those threats and vulnerabilities are very, very real. But it's become clear these vehicles are critical enablers at the tactical and operational level. Russia for its part likely retains a very large supply of vehicles. But the quality of that force will polarise over time as new builds are high quality, and vehicles pulled out from storage are increasingly old and decrepit. On the Ukrainian side the West possesses enough vehicles to make a signi

ficant difference to Ukraine's capabilities in terms of the provision of IFVs in particular. But political and logistical issues very much remain. And while many of the vehicles that get sent are likely to be destroyed eventually, I'm sure the Ukrainian crunchies everywhere will be very appreciative for the work they do before they go. Alright, quick channel update to close out. This video took quite a while to bring together as you can probably imagine, because it combines loss data anal

ysis with interviews of those in Ukraine, review of documents going all the way back to Desert Storm and the Soviet war in Afghanistan. There was quite a lot to bring together, so I hope it was appreciated. Certainly I think I must be doing something right, because the growth of channel subscribers continues to be dramatic - and I cannot thank you all enough. I've enjoyed having a little bit of a break, although there has been a lot going on. My hope is that will change in the near future

and I'd like to move on to doing more support work for the channel. With the first goal being to clear a Patreon message and email backlog that goes back to late 2022. If you have contacted me I thank you for your patience, I will get to you when I can. Thank you all for your continuous and ongoing support, and I will see you all again next week.