The Ukrainian Army’s Speedy M-113 Ambulances Help It Save More Wounded Troops

The 1960s-vintage M-113 armored personnel carrier is thinly armored and lightly armed. In a serious firefight, it’s a poor substitute for tougher, more modern infantry fighting vehicles such as the M-2.

But the same lightness that makes the M-113 a liability in direct combat also makes it a good front-line ambulance.

The M-113 is roomy, easy to drive and fast. Top speed of 42 miles per hour. As the Ukrainian army is discovering, the classic, American-designed vehicle is just the thing to speed wounded troops to a hospital.

The United States has pledged to Ukraine no fewer than 100 medical-evacuation versions of the 13-ton, two-crew M-113. They’re among the roughly 750 M-113s and variants Kyiv’s foreign allies have donated to the war effort.

Having lost nearly 3,000 vehicles to enemy action since Russia widened its war on Ukraine a year ago, the Ukrainian army is desperate for vehicles capable of carrying infantry into battle and supporting them once they disembark.

So despite its thin armor (just an inch and a half of aluminum alloy) and modest armament (usually a .50-caliber heavy machine gun), the diesel-fueled M-113 has seen service as an IFV in the current war.

Losses have been significant. Analysts have counted around 40 destroyed or captured Ukrainian M-113s. These losses help to explain Kyiv’s urgent requests for better IFVs—requests its allies have honored with pledges of surplus American M-2s, German Marders and Swedish CV90s.

But as an ambulance, the M-113 has excelled in Ukraine. There’s no shortage of videos depicting Ukrainian M-113s evacuating wounded troops as Russian shells land nearby. The M-113’s high speed and maneuverability clearly are on display.

The Ukrainians were quick to recognize the M-113’s strengths, including its automatic transmission. “As a mechanic, I pay attention to the road, to what is being done around me,” one Ukrainian M-113 crew member said last year. “I don’t think about how to turn on a lower gear to go uphill, as I had to do on Soviet analogues.”

The vehicle also is spacious. An M-113 with ambulance modifications has racks for four casualties and space between the racks for a medic.

M-113 ambulances are substitutes for medevac helicopters. Ideally when a soldier gets hit in combat, they evacuate by air. A helicopter, which can land on a crowded battlefield and speed away at more than a hundred miles per hour, stands the best chance of recovering a wounded soldier where they are and getting them to a hospital in that first critical hour before they bleed out.

But the front line in Ukraine is inhospitable to helicopters. Air-defenses are so dense that helicopters from both sides have resorted to long-range ballistic rocket attacks. They approach low, angle up at the last second and lob their rockets at targets that might be miles away. It’s the only way for helicopter crews to survive.

Helicopters cannot safely land in a besieged city such as Bakhmut, the current locus of fighting in eastern Ukraine’s Donbas region. So it’s up to ambulance crews on the ground to transport casualties at least the first few miles. It’s no coincidence that many of the videos of medevac M-113s are from Bakhmut and surrounding settlements.

Which is not to say the Ukrainians always push their M-113 ambulances all the way to the front line. As recently as a few days ago in Bakhmut, Ukrainian troops would carry their casualties across the Bakhmutovka River, which bisects the embattled city along a north-south axis, before loading them into M-113s. In sticking to the river’s west bank, the ambulance crews remained a mile or more from the actual fighting.

So an M-113 is no panacea. Getting wounded in Ukraine still is a dire proposition. That said, injured Ukrainian troops probably are more likely to survive than injured Russian troops are—and Ukraine’s M-113s seem to be one reason why.

It’s reasonable to expect a modern army under normal conditions to suffer three wounded in action for every one killed in action. There’s no reason to believe the Ukrainian army is an exception. But there are hints, albeit subtle ones, that the Russian army is losing nearly as many killed as wounded.

The Russians in Ukraine might wish they had M-113s to help them save more of their wounded.