A CV90 of the Swedish Army.
Wikimedia Commons
The Swedish government announced on Thursday that it would donate up to 50 CV90 infantry fighting vehicles and some of Sweden’s Archer mobile howitzers to Ukraine.
It is the latest in a spate of arms packages from Ukraine’s NATO allies. Sweden, along with Finland, began the slow process of joining the transatlantic alliance last year.
The weapons Ukraine’s allies have pledged in recent months do not include many tanks – although that could change soon. But they contain many heavily armed infantry fighting vehicles that, while not tanks, still have significant anti-tank capabilities.
The United States is sending a first batch of 50 M-2 combat vehicles to Ukraine, which are long-range battle-hardened tank killers. In contrast, the Swedish CV90s are adept at destroying armored vehicles at close range – and especially in the forest.
Built by Swedish firms Hägglunds and Bofors, the three-crew tracked CV90 weighs up to 37 tons. In its standard version, it carries up to eight infantrymen and packs a 40mm autocannon in an armored turret. “It’s one of Sweden’s best combat vehicles,” said Swedish Energy and Industry Minister Ebba Busch.
The CV90 is popular in Northern Europe. The Swedish Army has 500 CV90s in several variants. The armies of Switzerland, Norway, the Netherlands, Finland, Estonia and Denmark also operate CV90s.
It’s not difficult to understand why. The designers of the CV90 have optimized the vehicle for use in the forests of Scandinavia. It so happens that in eastern Ukraine, where there is a lot of fighting, there are also a lot of trees.
Consider the CV90’s main weapon – its 40mm L/70 autocannon. The L/70 is not new. It first entered service as an anti-aircraft gun a few years after World War II. But it has proven to be extremely durable and versatile. An L/70 can fire two-pound shells at up to five rounds per second with an initial velocity of a thousand yards per second.
That’s a lot of metal moving really fast. Up close, the L/70 is like a chainsaw – especially when firing armor-piercing fin-stabilized sabot or APFSDS-T rounds.
And that’s the key to the CV90’s anti-tank capability. True, the CV90 does not have a turret-mounted launcher for long-range anti-tank missiles like the American M-2 and Russian BMP combat vehicles. But it doesn’t need one when fighting in wooded terrain.
Yes, the M-2 can fire a 50-pound TOW anti-tank missile up to two miles away. But only under the right conditions. The missile requires a clear line of sight between the launcher and the target – both to allow the gunner to steer the missile via an unwinding wire and to prevent the missile from hitting an obstacle and prematurely detonating.
The BMP-3’s 60-pound Kornet anti-tank missile flies even further — up to five miles — but it’s a beam weapon that also requires a clear line of sight for its guidance laser.
All in all, anti-tank missiles like TOW and Kornet don’t work very well in the forests, where there are a lot of obstacles. The L/70, on the other hand, doesn’t mind the forest at all. Not when it’s spewing out Sabot rounds at a rate of several per second.
In 2011, Swedish Army Major Magnus Frykvall conducted a simulation pitting a reinforced Swedish army battalion with CV90 and Leopard 2 tanks against a Russian brigade with BMP-3 combat vehicles and T-90 tanks.
The wooded battlefield was bad for tanks and both sides lost 10 or a dozen Leopard 2s or T-90s. But when both sides’ infantry fighting vehicles clashed in the woods, the CV90s proved vastly superior to the BMPs.
“Red side IFVs had difficulty using their anti-tank missiles effectively, while blue side’s CV90 40mm automatic cannon with APFSDS-T ammunition is highly efficient in this terrain,” Frykvall wrote. The Swedish force wrote off 48 CV90s. But the Russian force lost a staggering 81 BMPs.
The implication is clear. To get the most out of their ex-Swedish CV90s, the Ukrainian army should deploy them to the east, where they can hunt down Russian vehicles in the forests.
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