Poland and Russia race to develop next-gen heavy fighting vehicles

Russia, which for decades built light infantry fighting vehicles, now sees the need to create heavier, more resilient vehicles. After developing the Borsuk, Poland also wants to equip its army with heavy infantry fighting vehicles. Who in the world produces such equipment, and what are its capabilities?

The ambitious plans of the Polish defence sector, which recently declared it would present a "heavy Borsuk" by the end of 2023, turned out to be overly optimistic. Building such equipment from scratch on its own also proved impossible in a short period.

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

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

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

The Russian site publishes this as a curiosity because the analysis is already 30 years old. Still, apart from considering the significance of drones, it hasn't aged at all, according to Russian commentators.

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

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

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

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

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

The Russians are aware of these deficiencies, and attempts to build heavy, well-armoured infantry fighting vehicles have been made in Russia for decades—so far without success—. The most serious and ambitious effort so far was constructing the T-14 Armata tank and the plans to introduce a family of vehicles using its chassis (Armata platform).

This includes, among others, the T-15 – an infantry fighting vehicle with a mass of nearly 50 metric tonnes (more than double that of the BMP-3 and four times that of the BMP-1). Although it was presented at military parades, like the T-14 tank, it remained a "parade" piece of equipment that did not reach front-line units or mass production.

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

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

Israel is the pioneer in building such equipment. In the 1980s, it used captured T-55 tank chassis to create heavy Achzarit transporters. In subsequent years, on the basis of its own Merkava tanks, Israel developed and introduced the Namer, a heavy infantry fighting vehicle with a mass reaching 60 metric tonnes, comparable to heavy Western main battle tanks.

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

Other vehicles, implemented or being implemented in the West, are full-fledged infantry fighting vehicles: the 38 metric tonnes British Ajax, the 42 metric tonnes Turkish Tulpar, the German Schützenpanzer Puma with a mass – depending on the installed modular armour, from 31 to 42 metric tonnes, or the Swedish CV90 Mk V, which over more than three decades of development and refinement has "bulked up" from 23 to 38 metric tonnes.

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

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

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