Ukraine’s New M-2 Fighting Vehicles Know A High-Tech Trick—Each Can See What The Others See

At least some of the autocannon- and missile-armed M-2 Bradley fighting vehicles that the United States is donating to Ukraine are the third-most-capable version of the classic vehicle.

Photos that the U.S. Transportation Command released on Wednesday depict the M-2A2 Operation Desert Storm Situational Awareness Bradleys loading onto a transport ship in Charleston, South Carolina.

“More than 60 Bradleys were shipped by U.S. Transportation Command as part of the U.S. military aid package to Ukraine,” the command stated.

The administration of Pres. Joe Biden has pledged to Ukraine an initial 109 M-2s plus 31 M-1A2 Abrams tanks—enough vehicles for a small-ish mechanized brigade. The Ukrainian army’s 47th Assault Brigade already has sent troopers to Germany to begin training to use the M-2. A Bradley transports, protects and supports up to seven infantry.

The M-2A2 ODS SA, which first entered service in 2003, boasts several major improvements over older versions of the 1980s-vintage M-2. The U.S. Army based the improvements on lessons it learned in the 1991 war with Iraq.

Most importantly, the three-person crew of an ODS SA Bradley has, as its name implies, superior situational awareness. That comes courtesy of the driver’s new thermal sight as well as a digital map system that connects, via encrypted radio, all nearby M-2s and other vehicles so they can share their own positions—and the locations of enemy forces.

This so-called “Blue Force Tracker” won’t be the first battlefield networking system in Ukrainian military service. The Ukrainians have cobbled together their own network they call “Kropyva,” which runs on computer tablets and displays a digital map of Ukraine, onto which users can plot the locations of any Russian forces they spot.

Kropyva famously helps Ukrainian air-defense crews warn each other about approaching Russian warplanes. It’s unclear whether the Ukrainian network works at the much more granular tactical level, accurately plotting individual ground vehicles.

With Blue Force Tracker, every crew in a platoon, battalion or brigade sees what every other BFT-equipped crew in the same unit also sees. One M-2 or M-1 gunner spots, through his thermal sight, a Russian tank. The vehicle commander taps his digital map, adding to the unit-wide network a red icon that tells all the other crews there’s a bad guy there.

It’s a conceptually simple but technologically complex system that helps to mitigate an age-old problem in combat: knowing where everyone is. Given a choice, many soldiers would choose better situational awareness over any other battlefield advantage. After all, it doesn’t matter how heavily armed and armored a battalion is if it has no idea where the enemy is—but the enemy does know where it is.

All that is to say, the M-2s Ukraine is getting are really good fighting vehicles—perhaps the best on either side in Russia’s 11-month-old wider war on Ukraine.

There are better Bradleys. The later M-2A3 adds a “commander’s independent viewer” that allows the vehicle’s commander and gunner separately to scan for targets. The even newer M-2A4 upgrades the Bradley’s engine and suspension.

But the M-2 ODS SA has the advantage of being available. The U.S. Army is buying hundreds of A3s and A4s to re-equip its heavy brigades. Each new Bradley it acquires displaces an older, but still highly capable, M-2A2 ODS SA that the Americans could pass along to the Ukrainians.

Those initial 109 Bradleys might be just the start. Imagine entire Ukrainian brigades with hundreds of fighting vehicles and tanks, each crew constantly and wordlessly showing every other crew what it sees.