“The effect is marginal. I think the other customers will get vehicles earlier,” Tommy Gustafsson-Rask, general manager of BAE Systems Hägglunds, said during a media visit to its Ornskoldsvik site.
Defense Minister Hanno said that, given the diminishing battlefield utility of heavy equipment, it is not “reasonable to replace” CV90s over the next decade.
Breaking Defense Europe will launch May 4 with Tim Martin and Elisabeth Gosselin-Malo as co-editors.
Speaking to Breaking Defense, Pål Jonson signaled that defense cooperation between Sweden and the US has not been impacted by recent political tensions.
"We are ready to step into the supply line … to fill some of the gaps that Hägglunds has," Hanno Pevkur, Estonia's defense minister, told Breaking Defense.
In one of the largest Swedish weapons deals in the post-Cold War era, the government has announced a $1.97 billion contract on purchasing 44 new Leopard 2 A8 tanks and upgrading its 66 existing older Leopard 2 tanks.
"We’re aiming for cross-development, cross-buying and cross-use basically, because we need to align and ease up the supply chains and be able to sustain the vehicles," Maj. Gen. Jonny Lindfors, Commander of the Swedish Army, told Breaking Defense.
Government can’t stop to update systems, so modernization has to happen without interruptions.
The agreement between FMV and BAE Systems Hägglunds signals the “implementation of a preliminary contractual design,” representing the “first step to defining the configuration and program of the combat vehicles that will replace the Combat Vehicle 9040C donated to Ukraine."
The Czech Republic recently announced the finalization of a plan to buy 246 MkIV CV90s, while separately sources told Breaking Defense that other CV90s are on their way to the front lines in Ukraine.
Getting nations to develop interchangeable weapons is "about leadership. And it's also about having a narrative that for me, in many ways, these are low-hanging fruits that will empower the West to fight better together," Maj. Gen. Karl Engelbrektson tells Breaking Defense.
“We are, politically, open to support with all types of capabilities but tanks have not yet been on the plate," said a senior Swedish military official.
As “dirty” RF and contested environments proliferate, autonomy increasingly depends on resilient positioning.
Major General Karel Řehka, Chief of the General Staff of the Czech Republic Army, said Russia's invasion of Ukraine has showed the criticality of urgent modernization, starting with five key priorities.
BAE System's CV90 Mark IV is the latest upgrade of a 25-year-old vehicle widely used in Europe; the Rheinmetall-Raytheon Lynx is an all-new design, although individual components have a good track record; but the General Dynamics Griffin III is in the middle, combining a new gun and new electronics with the time-tested chassis from the European ASCOD family.
AUSA: In a promising sign for the US Army’s Big Six modernization plan, not one but three different companies have invested their own money in full-up working vehicles for the Army’s Next Generation Combat Vehicle (NGCV) project: Now, these aren’t prototypes, but the military equivalent of concept cars, designed to show off their manufacturers’ technology […]
ARLINGTON: The US Army wants its Next Generation Combat Vehicle to serve as pack master to a swarm of crawling and flying robots. It wants lighter weapons with heavier firepower, able to aim almost straight up to shoot drones out of the sky and hit rooftop snipers. It wants miniaturized missile defenses to shoot down incoming anti-tank […]