Carrying the Infantry: Armored Carriers and Scout Cars from the BTR-50 to the CV90

The BTR-50 was developed in 1952 and entered Soviet service in 1954, built on the chassis of the PT-76 light tank. It is a tracked amphibious carrier able to take up to twenty fully equipped infantrymen, and it fought in the Six-Day War and the Yom Kippur War.

Accepted for service in 1957, the BRDM-1 was built on the chassis and drive train of the BTR-40 carrier and gave the Soviets an amphibious scout car, the one thing its parent vehicle lacked. Two pairs of chain-driven auxiliary wheels could be lowered for traction on mud, and about ten thousand entered service before the improved BRDM-2 replaced it.

The M113 reached United States Army Europe in 1961 and first fought in April 1962 with the South Vietnamese army. Its aluminum hull stopped small arms fire yet stayed light enough to be air transportable and moderately amphibious. An estimated 80,000 M113-family vehicles have been used by more than fifty countries.

The BRDM-2 entered service in 1962 and replaced the BRDM-1 with a conical turret carrying a 14.5 millimeter KPVT heavy machine gun and a coaxial 7.62 millimeter gun. A water jet drives it afloat, and about 7,200 were built between 1962 and 1989, mostly for export to at least 38 countries.

Cadillac Gage built the Commando for the United States Military Police Corps as an armed convoy escort in the Vietnam War. It was one of the first vehicles to merge the armored personnel carrier and the armored car, and it came in three marks called the V-100, V-150 and V-200. An unlicensed copy, the Bravia Chaimite, was made in Portugal.

The Marder, formally the Schützenpanzer Marder 1, was designed for the mechanized Panzergrenadiere of the West German army and entered service in 1971. It came out of the rebuilding of West Germany's armored vehicle industry after the Second World War, and it has stayed the main German infantry fighting vehicle since the 1970s.

Accepted into Soviet service on 21 August 1972, the BTR-70 was the eight-wheeled successor to the BTR-60PB. It first saw combat in the Soviet-Afghan War, where its shortcomings showed, and from 1984 the diesel BTR-80 replaced it. Romania license-built it as the TAB-77, and the design was widely exported.

France developed the AMX-10P from 1965 to replace the AMX-VCI, and it served the French Army from 1973 until 2015. Twin waterjets push it through water at up to seven kilometers per hour. It shares transmission and chassis parts with the wheeled AMX-10 RC, and marine variants were built for Singapore and Indonesia.

The first production Transportpanzer Fuchs was handed over in December 1979, the second wheeled armored vehicle to join the Bundeswehr. One chassis serves for troop and engineer transport, bomb disposal, nuclear, biological and chemical reconnaissance and electronic warfare. The makers built 1,236 Fuchs 1 vehicles, and the Fuchs 2, first shown in 2001, remains in production.

The AMX-10 RC has equipped French cavalry units since 1979. Its name means wheels and gun, a six-wheeled chassis carrying a 105 millimeter gun, and officially it is a reconnaissance vehicle, not a tank. It fought in the Gulf War, Kosovo, Afghanistan and Mali, and more than 240 were in French service in 2021 as the EBRC Jaguar began to replace them.

Sweden designed the CV90 from the mid-1980s to the early 1990s, with Hagglund and Soner and Bofors, and it entered Swedish service in 1994. The Swedish infantry version carries a Bofors turret with a 40 millimeter autocannon, and the family has grown from the original Mk 0 to the current Mk IV.