Yet another bites the dust

Yesterday the British government announced that it will use £700 million on new vehicles for the army. According to the BBC, this will include:

"...a new fleet of 400 heavy, medium and light support vehicles - called Wolfhound, Husky and Coyote - to carry out a range of tasks from field ambulances to ammunition supply 

for the Royal Artillery.

More than 100 new, larger and more heavily armoured tracked vehicles, which will be known as Warthog, will be replaced the Viking cross-country vehicle presently used for operations in 

Afghanistan.

The MoD has also pledged to buy a further 100 Jackal all-terrain vehicles.

A new type of specialist route clearance vehicle, called the Buffalo, is being developed to try and reduce the damage and death toll caused by roadside bombs and 

explosives." 

What this essentially means, is that the troubled "Future Rapid Effects System" (FRES) of the British Army is now a goner - it is not official, but there is simply no way that there will be a budget for the FRES program, and its hundreds of new vehicles based on the MOWAG Piranha 5 platform. It is toast. And with that, yet another "transformational program" has gone the way of the dodo, along with its light-wheeled vehicles. Many saw this as the future 

for armies during the 90's, and several countries, such as Canada and Belgium were to replace all their tracked vehicles with smaller, lighter and cheaper wheeled platforms. Canada has since then all but dismissed the idea, and is buying Leopard 2 MBTs again en-masse, what Military Technology last year referred to as "Transformation in Reverse." And now, the UK does the 

same, and is instead buying "more than 100 new, larger and more heavily armoured tracked vehicles."

However, this is no immediate vindication of heavy armour. The current Challenger 2 model being deployed to Iraq weighs close to 80 tons! Instead it is more of a vindication of the medium platform, as many of the vehicles bought under this new program are. One excellent such platform which I believe this program instead confirms the need for a medium platform, such as the ever-young CV90. This platform, the swiss-army-knife of vehicles, made as a fighting vehicles, twin 120 mm mortar carrier, air defence variant, command platform! The platform has performed excellently on deployment, both with Swedish forces in Africa and Norwegian forces in Afghanistan. This is the sort of platform we need more of. Well protected, modular, tracked, giving excellent mobility - this is the sort of platform that needs to be at the heart of future armed forces. 

And if you ever wondered why the Bradley has not had much in terms of export sales, and the CV90 has, the below video should be enlightening.