In its struggle to make up for the loss of some 15,000 armored vehicles in its broader war against Ukraine, Russia has begun equipping more strike equipment with reasonable civilian cars. First, Chinese-made off-road cars; that is, golf carts. Then, off-road motorcycles from China and Belarus.
Needless to say, in their original configurations, those smooth cars are incredibly vulnerable to Ukrainian artillery, missiles, and drones. When Russian strike teams on motorcycles were first deployed this spring, they were “hit in the teeth,” Ukraine’s 79th Air Assault said. The brigade joked.
For this reason, the Russians have reinforced the armour of all-terrain vehicles and motorcycles to give them greater cover against the maximum Ukrainian ammunition: explosive drones detected in the first person. Observers have compared the motorcycles to those in the post-apocalyptic Mad Max film series.
The problem, of course, is that a 70-horsepower mountain bike or a 50-horsepower motorcycle can’t withstand a lot of armor without wasting its mobility. This is a lesson that armies learned a century ago, and just after World War I. This is a lesson that the Russian army will learn again today.
The first images and videos showing an armored Russian attack motorcycle gave the impression of being online no later than April. A month later, the armor had grown in length and complexity. Photos have circulated online showing attack motorcycles with sidecars and welded steel cages covering them, and a camouflage net covering the cage, in at least one case.
The Russians “use soft cars such as motorcycles and all-terrain vehicles to temporarily cover the distance between their attack launch positions and the front lines of the Ukrainian Defense Forces,” the Ukrainian Center for Defense Security explained. Upon reaching the Ukrainian lines, the horsemen dismounted and fought. on foot.
Russian war with cage armor.
Ideally for the Russians, ATVs and motorcycles move fast enough through no man’s land to dodge as much as possible from the drones the Ukrainians throw at their attackers. If FPV drones hit the strike groups, the cage armor will have to catch the drones before they affect the vehicles or their crews.
It’s a clever theory: Cage armor is powerful enough for armies around the world to adopt for land vehicles and even docked submarines, apparently. However, it is one thing to add a cage weighing a few tons to a supplied 40-ton tank. with a 1,000 horsepower engine. It’s another thing to rack up armor on a 1. 5-ton ATV or a 200-pound dirt bike, which makes less than a hundred horsepower.
More than one army learned this the hard way in the 1910s and 1920s, arguably a golden age for military motorcycles. Although the fast and agile motorcycles worked wonders for messengers and scouts, they were too vulnerable for troops who could simply deal with heavy loads. enemy fire.
In hopes of expanding coverage to expand the functions of motorcycles, some armies have welded steel plates. Perhaps the most prominent is the Swedish company Landsverk, which developed several armored motorcycles for the German and Danish armies.
They didn’t look very good. Danish tests of the F. P. 3 armored motorcycle “showed that the vehicle’s maximum mass made it difficult to guide and mobility across the country was minimal,” according to Tanks Encyclopedia. “In addition, the 30-horsepower engine was only capable of propelling the vehicle to a top speed of about 50 kilometers per hour,” or 31 miles per hour.
“The armored motorcycle was one of many concepts that disappeared with the interwar period,” Tanks Encyclopedia continued. “Its greater weight and high cost, coupled with limited combat potential, meant that its position in the history of armoured fighting cars was little more than a footnote. “
Until now. The Russians are desperate to lose specially built armored cars sooner than they can upgrade them with other specially built armored cars. So desperate that they are in a position to resurrect a concept – the armored motorcycle – that died a hundred years ago.
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