Although a lot of attention has been lavished on Ukrainian Forces getting Leopard 2, Challenger 2 and Abrams main battle tanks, we’ve also sent them 109 Bradley Fighting Vehicles. Many of those have been involved in the Zaporizhzhia counter-offensive, and early reports had several being destroyed in early fighting (though crews reportedly escaped). How do Ukrainian crews like the Bradley compared to the Soviet BMP series IFVs they were using before?
As Ukrainian forces continue their counteroffensive against Russia, some soldiers say an American-supplied vehicle is making a key difference in their advances, and more importantly, saving lives.
The U.S. has provided has provided Ukrainian forces with Bradley Fighting Vehicles as part of aid packages since the beginning of the year and they have been heavily used in the counteroffensive Ukraine that launched in early June.
Two Ukrainian soldiers from the 47th brigade, Serhiy and Andriy, told ABC News that they and their crew wouldn’t be alive today if Bradley didn’t protect them from a battle early on in the counteroffensive where they were struck by mines, high caliber guns and attack drones.
“We were hit multiple times,” Andriy, who drove one Bradley, said. “Thanks to it, I am standing here now. If we were using some Soviet armored personnel carrier we would all probably be dead after the first hit. It’s a perfect vehicle.”
The Bradleys are armed with a 25mm automatic cannon, a 7.62mm machine gun, and a TOW missile system that can hit armored targets more than two miles away.
While a Bradley is way undergunned compared to a modern MBT, remember that Bradleys killed T-72s with TOW missiles in the Battle of 73 Easting, even though that’s not the tasked it’s designed for. And while the Bradley’s 25mm autocannon can’t defeat Soviet/Russian tank armor thicknesses with any but lucky shots, consensus is that the tungsten or depleted uranium rounds can penetrate any Russian vehicle below a MBT.
Andriy and Serhiy’s brigade was part of one of the first major assaults using significant amounts of Western-supplied armored, launched against heavily fortified Russian lines in the Zaporizhzhia region in southern Ukraine at the start of June.
As they advanced towards the Russian positions, protected by dense minefields, the Ukrainian troops came almost immediately under heavy fire. The vehicle behind Andriy was struck by an attack drone, killing his unit’s commander.
Andriy’s Bradley was then hit first by a 120mm mortar. Two 150mm shells then struck both sides of the vehicle, he told ABC.
“Almost all of my guys were concussed, and they were really disoriented,” he said. But the squad inside bailed out and managed to safely escape back to cover.
Crew survivability seems to be one of the biggest advantages Bradleys have over their Russian BMP counterparts, as covered in this video:
U.S./NATO doctrine has always placed a much higher value on crew survivability than Soviet/Russian doctrine. Ukrainians crewing Bradleys are keenly grateful for that difference.
Tags: BMP-3, Bradley Fighting Vehicle, BTR-80, Military, Russia, Russo-Ukrainian War, Ukraine, Zaporizhzhia
Western vehicle engineering and manufacture is definitely better at protecting the crews and dismounts, but… I am still dubious of the entire paradigm of the “Infantry Fighting Vehicle”.
I spent my entire career in the Army as a Combat Engineer supporting these guys. Of that career, I spent two years as an Observer/Controller at the National Training Center at Fort Irwin. In that time? Which, by the way, spanned the period from right at the initial fielding of the Bradley family to the Iraqi conflict, I never once saw anything like what they “envisaged” for those things in combat. Ain’t nobody actually using those damn dismounts the way they thought they would, shooting their way onto objectives and dropping the ramps with the guys going in guns akimbo.
Sad fact of life: The place you can best influence the battle with the weapons on the IFV is almost never, ever the same place you want to be dropping the ramp to debark the GIBs, or Guys in Back. Often, the young platoon leader is faced with Hobson’s choice: Do I press the Brads forward, to where the grunts experience minimal exposure to the vicissitudes of armored combat, and expose my critical firepower assets, the vehicles? Or, do I keep them where they’re most effective and best protected, forcing my extremely vulnerable and totally unarmored infantrymen to move several hundred meters forward through fire to get to their objectives?
Sh*t don’t work, yo…
I’ll maintain to my dying day that they need to separate the functions. Infantry carriage does not belong on the fire support vehicle, PERIOD. If you didn’t have to worry about the six grunts you need to haul around, the vehicles carrying the turrets could be a hell of a lot lower, better armored, and carry more ammo. The grunts wouldn’t arrive at the objectives after being stir-fried in the backs of the Brads after they’ve maneuvered up to the debarkation point, and they wouldn’t be at risk every time the Brad commander decided he needed to play Erwin Rommel. I mean, what the hell is the point of a Brad carrying infantry when it goes up against a tank during a meeting engagement? All those six infantrymen in the back are doing to influence the battle is serve as entries driving up the casualty count.
I honestly believe that there’s a better path, one that separates the firepower from the infantry carriage mission. The fire support vehicle needs to be low, heavily armed, sufficiently armored, and carry enough ammo to be able to be sustainable. That just isn’t possible with the additional mission of hauling infantry around being glommed onto the top of it all.
And, if you had a dedicated carriage vehicle, deliberately armed only for minimal local security with maybe a CROWS station or two? That’d inject a note of sanity into the minds of the guys operating and leading them, in that they wouldn’t expose them any more than they had to. Meanwhile, the people with the fire support vehicles could be doing their “take on the tanks and everything else” mission without having to worry about getting six guys killed who never got a chance to do anything to influence the fight…
I’m telling you, until you’ve been one of those folks getting mix-mastered in the back of the Brad while they’re mixing it up with the enemy armor, you have not a clue how helpless and useless you really are in that job. The Bradley is a friggin’ jack-of-all-trades that is truly a master of none. Particularly in that regard…
Of course, the BMP is way, way worse. I know guys who were “portraying” the BMP Motorized Rifle units down at Irwin who actually tried doing it with a couple of real, live BMPs. Did not end well… After one engagement, they wound up taking the carefully hand-picked (for diminutive stature…) crew of “Motorized Riflemen” out of the back of the BMP, and essentially had to have a couple MEDEVAC’d for injuries while the rest of the squad refused to re-embark the vehicle under threat of UCMJ action. That’s how bad it was; they’d have been utterly useless for any sort of combat after that experience. The BMP is that bad; that’s why you see most of the Soviet/Russian crews riding on top of the damn things….
Helpful information Kirk’s, thanks. I wasn’t an armored crewman when I was in but I always wondered what their opinion of the ‘boondoggle’ of “Pentagon Wars” fame actually thought of the vehicle.
My personal take albeit an unprofessional one has always been the number one priority for an armored vehicle is crew survivability. Essentially I’ve always sided with the Israeli take that vehicles are easier to replace and repair than trained crews. If your guys can escape from even a total hull loss it’s just an equipment casualty, and the process to rectify that is 10x easier usually than 4 dead guys who really knew their stuff.
Anecdotes like these about survivability confirm for me at least that maybe the designers were able to make lemonade out of the competing list of requirements that was the Bradley ‘lemon’.
Yeah, don’t get me wrong: The Bradley just works. But, don’t make the mistake of thinking that it is the ideal “best practices” solution to the tactical problem. It’s just the one that happens to have been glommed on to by everyone and their half-witted cousin.
The BMP was envisioned to be a system operating on a nuclear-biological-chemical contaminated battlefield; the troops were never really expected to dismount, except in really exigent circumstances and in “safe areas” that had theoretically never been contaminated or which were rendered safe.
It was a fantasy-land contrivance, really. If you’ve ever spent time “buttoned up” under MOPP-IV, the highest level of NBC protection, inside an armored vehicle for any length of time…? Oh, duuuuuude… You’ll never “get it”. I’ll lay you long odds that in whatever screaming alternate where we fought World War III on the plains of Northern Germany, there were an awful lot of Motorized Riflemen who either shot themselves in the head to end their misery, or who deliberately inhaled some nerve agent in order to make it all stop. It’s bad enough in the back of an M113 or a Bradley; you do that NBC warfare thing in the back of a BMP…? Dear God, the horror of it all. I really doubt that it would have worked; from what I understand from my conversations with real, live former Soviet line grunts, the majority of their NBC exercises were set-piece bits where they never really tried staying in their protective gear or in their masks. The look of sheer horror on the face of one of those guys, when I told him we were going to do a 24-hour training session in MOPP-IV was enlightening. Apparently, the entire time he’d been in the Soviet Army as a motorized rifleman, they’d never once attempted such a feat, and he couldn’t imagine actually doing it. When he found out we weren’t joking about 24 hours in a mask, he thought we were all trying to kill him, or that it was some form of sick practical joke.
He did conclude that it was barely survivable with US-style gear, after the fact, but when I asked him about doing it with the stuff he’d been issued by the Soviet Army? I wish I could adequately describe the expression on his face, because it was epic.
@Kirk
LMAO. Great story. I remember our CSgtMaj at Bragg had a been a CBRN and had this to say about full MOPP level, “That kit will save your life and in the end you’ll wish it hadn’t.”
In the case of soviet gear if shooting myself wasn’t an option I probably would’ve scrounged for some dfac trash bags and called it good rather than wear that muscovite fetish leather haha.
One the subject of the M242 25mm lethality vs Soviet/Russian tanks:
I was an infantry platoon leader in 1st Armored Division in Germany in the late 90s. Most of the senior NCOs in my company were Desert Storm vets. They all said the 25mm DU sabot rounds would penetrate Soviet-supplied Iraqi tanks, including the T-72 (although the export T-72 isn’t as well armored as the version kept for Red Army use.) It just wouldn’t do it from the front, or to the turret. If you would get shots at the side of the hull, you could put holes in a tank.
They also said that the BMPs and BTRs were so lightly armored that gunners would often use 25mm HE instead of sabot rounds, because unless the sabot rounds hit something flammable, they would often go right through the vehicle with little effect. (I also recall being told, at the Benning School for Boys, that the BTR was so lightly armored that you could put holes in them with 7.62 NATO AP ammo.)
@Dave L.,
Some of the guys I played Observer/Controller for came back down through Kuwait to redeploy after the initial invasion was over. I had the opportunity to talk to them, and dear God… It was eye-opening.
What’d happened to them was that they were tasked as the infantry component of a tank-heavy task force. The tankers didn’t really know what to do with them, and so at one point the Armor guys just waved at a nearby palm orchard and said “Yeah, go clear that and pull security while we resupply and maintain before the next push north…”
They rolled up on the palm orchard to discover that their platoon was now engaging an entire company-plus of dug-in Iraqi tanks that were getting ready to light up the tank platoons as they did their resupply. The four Bradleys proceeded to conduct the most frenzied and chaotic attack ever in the history of that unit, and somehow managed to destroy the entire Iraqi element with their 25mm chain guns. It probably didn’t hurt that they were firing down into the tops of the dug-in tanks, but the whole thing was basically a knife-fight.
All four Bradleys survived the encounter; there were maybe a dozen Iraqi survivors who were on foot after the engagement, and zero Iraqi vehicles. The tankers never even noticed the firefight, and didn’t believe the LT when he was finally able to report it.
It got very little attention because the tankers were embarrassed, and because it was going on in the midst of that whole Jessica Lynch deal where everyone was focused on finding her. Also, no media embeds…
Throughout, precisely zero of the “Guys in Back” did squat, besides get out and vomit before trying to render first aid to prisoners after it was all over. The majority of them were so mix-mastered from being thrown around in the Brads that they’d have been useless for combat action. None of them had any idea at all what had been going on during the engagement, either…
Bradley Fighting Barn? Not the vehicle it should be, in my opinion. That nickname, BTW, is the ones that the Cav Scouts gave it…
Such an interesting discussion re: Bradley FV. It’s easy to rake on the Brad, yet does anyone really prefer the old M113 to it?
I note that the Israelis don’t even bother with the “fighting vehicle” approach and basically build a tank hull with tank-level armor and no big turret but space for a full squad.
Nobody is saying the M113 is the better vehicle, just that the IFV concept is freakin’ insane on the face of it.
It forces you to go to war with general-purpose vehicles that can’t do any particular mission well. Due to the size constraints, it cuts down on the manpower you have available, which isn’t insignificant, and it’s a crazy concept when you start trying to fight the damn things in real combat. The grunts contribute nothing to the vehicle fight besides adding to the casualty count, and their presence on the platform means that it has to be bigger, less well-armored, and unable to carry significant amounts of ammo.
Six-man dismount teams? WTF? Have they somehow magically decreased the number of bodies it takes to do jobs like security and clearing buildings?
No, they have not… All through the Iraqi situation, we were running into problems with trying to do missions without enough people, mostly due to the fact that the squads had been downsized so much.
And, this whole thing is part and parcel of the idiotic ideas about manning that came in during the 1980s.
Here’s how it worked for Combat Engineers: When I was a corporal acting as a squad leader in a corps-level wheeled Engineer battalion, the MTOE gave me 11 men. I dismounted with 9 bodies to do the mission, and had one to pull maintenance on the vehicle and provide a bit of security while we worked. A platoon had 27 dismounts and change, with which we could accomplish an awful lot of work, laying minefields and putting up wire across kilometers of front.
In 1998, when I was O/C at the NTC, it was extremely uncommon for an entire mech Engineer platoon to show up with 9 total dismounts for doing Engineer things. The paper MTOE had them at 7 men per squad, which were never up to strength, and inside that squad, you had a driver, a TC, and three NCO positions. The platoon leaders I evaluated rarely had as many worker-bees as I’d had as a corporal squad leader, but they had a surfeit of supervisors. Even though everyone worked, to include the PL, a lot of the missions that I’d done as a Corporal simply weren’t accomplishable by the new MTOE mech platoons, which were platoons in name only. My best night on a German General Defense Plan exercise? I laid over 1200 mines. I don’t think I had a platoon to lay that many mines over the entire course of their rotation at the NTC the entire time I was there…
The entire IFV concept stripped manpower out of combat formations. You need men, period: There isn’t a single mission performed back in the old days by the next echelon down in the unit that can be done by the next one up. Basically, we’ve effectively turned our platoons into heavily-armed and over-equipped squads, due to the lack of manpower.
The Marines had the good sense to retain their traditional 13-man squads, with three fire teams. You can do a lot of good with that many bodies, as a squad leader. The third fire team is a godsend, because you can run one-up, two-back when you’re expecting contact, two-up and one-back when you’re looking for trouble, and you can actually manage your tactics the traditional way when you do find the enemy, which is to fix the bastard with one team while you flank with the other two…
I do not like the way they organize our infantry in the Army, with only two fire teams per squad. Not one damn bit, because by the end of the first day of combat, you’re almost always down to one big fire team…
Isn’t that why they’re going to 6-Bradley platoons? Also, without infantry support, what exactly are tankers supposed to do with trenches and complex fortifications that they can’t just shoot up or drive through? I’m not sure that NTC is the best environment for training tank-infantry cooperation; it seems to encourage rapid (i.e., mounted) maneuver about all else.
The iron laws of logistics, as pertains to physics, say that you can only support X amount of armor weight against your theater input capacities. We ran right up against those in Iraq, there at the end: You could not support a war with more than two armored divisions through Kuwait’s port, which was why we needed Turkey. The occupation had much lower requirements than the war, so we were able to run that through Kuwait, and then the whole Turkish “no pasaran” thing evaporated under a hail of money to be made…
Raw issue is that you really cannot support the number of Brads you would need to put the number of infantry dismounts on the ground that you really ought to have, which is why we are where we are. I doubt that a six-Brad platoon will ever eventuate.
It’d make a hell of a lot more sense to have a four-vehicle platoon with two Infantry Fire Support Vehicles and two or three Infantry Carriers that actually hauled a full squad around. I’d lay you long odds that the fuel efficiencies would be higher, since both types of vehicles could be lighter. Hell, make the carriers be able to haul around a squad-and-a-half, say 15 dismounts…? You’d still be within the same number of vehicles you have today.
I’d also say that putting the odd dismount or two for security/scouting into the Infantry Fire Support Vehicle wouldn’t be a terrible idea… That’s a lot like what the Israeli Defense Force has done in the Merkava. Hell, I’d base the Fire Support Vehicle on the Merkava basic concept, TBH. Arm the hell out of it, and let those guys do the fire support mission for the grunts… Way more intelligent than the Swiss Army Knife approach of the IFV.
At least, in my opinion. I’d at least run the experiment…
This is NOT the first time I’ve heard this. In fact, I’ve seen this come up often.
I’m wondering if the Ops side of the Army is coming to the same conclusions about mechanized infantry, watching what’s happening in Ukraine. Ukraine is THE hunting ground for mechanized troops, and all the big Russian mechanized fights have been failures: open, flat terrain designed for mechanized warfare. As far as I can tell, none of the fights happened as designed by the Russian high command.
I noticed lately in the heavy combined arms MTOEs, Americans seem to be treating the mech platoons like fire support vehicles for tanks and not infantry. Maybe they don’t know how to tell Congress “Uh, we didn’t need these things”.
I’ve heard this before: IFV’s remind me of Tank Destroyers in World War 2: very successful and very useful because everyone needs big guns, but they don’t really…you know. Destroy tanks. The very reason for their existence. They’re fire support. Or they became fire support. Because who doesn’t need a big gun in war?
Except we had the sense to get rid of the TD’s when the war ended.
I also suspect the same thing is going to happen to the Booker: it doesn’t matter what you name it. Just like the IFV, it will get used for what it’s useful for, doctrine be damned. Except the M-10 won’t have bits sitting around doing nothing like the IFV does.
By the way Kirk: thanks for the time you took out. Your writing is as enjoyable as Person’s and quite on topic.