Soldiers from 3rd Armored Brigade Combat Team, 1st Cavalry Division, prepare to test fire their M2A3 Bradley Fighting Vehicle for the first time since arriving in Poland in September 2022.
(US Army photo by Pfc. David Dumas)
The Bradley Fighting Vehicle has been an integral part of the United States Army’s armoured tactics since the early 1980s. It was developed in response to the Soviet BMP Infantry Fighting Vehicle (IFV). The IFV concept was markedly different to the ‘battle taxis’ or armoured personnel carriers (APCs) of the earlier Cold War (the Soviet BTR series, the American M113 and the British FV432). These were simply designed to provide transport for infantry to the frontline in a protected vehicle designed to follow the armoured spearhead. The IFV concept called for fully armoured and tracked vehicles that could both keep pace with the main battle tanks and carry sufficient lethal firepower to engage lightly armoured vehicles (with its main gun) and MBTs (with Anti-Tank Guided Missiles (ATGMs)). The Bradley was designed to keep pace with the M1 Abrams MBT and for almost four decades the two vehicles have provided the teeth of the armoured formations of the US Army. Initially designed as part of the fast-paced manoeuvre warfare first envisaged as the way to engage and defeat the Warsaw Pact in the mid- 1980s, the Bradley saw its combat debut in the First Gulf War in 1991 and then played an important role in the invasion of Iraq in 2003. As the low intensity wars in Iraq and Afghanistan after 2003 reshaped US armoured doctrine, the future of the heavily armoured Bradley and Abrams again seemed in doubt. Yet the Russian war against Ukraine from 2014 has changed that and the Bradley remains at the forefront of the US’s and NATO’s defences.