GazB do you have a source on this? I haven't been keeping up with the latest developments yet I heard you make this claim before.
Why do you think they are talking about heavy brigades, medium brigades, and light brigades?
Why do you think they will ignore experience in Chechnia where the IFVs were picked off because of their lighter armour leaving MBTs that were much better protected but with weapons unable to elevate to hit targets above or below them except with the external 50 cal with 300 rounds?
The purpose of the heavy brigades is to have a brigade with the same or very similar levels of protection and mobility. To further improve mobility using all the same vehicle types you greatly reduce the logistics tail because you only need parts for one vehicle family instead of 10 or more.
They don't call heavy brigades armata brigades by accident.
There would not be much revolutionary if they just made an Armata MBT, a Kurganets BMP and a Boomerang BTR and a Typhoon BRDM... in fact there would be little to no change at all.
It just seems a little wasteful and extreme if every damn combat vehicle in a heavy brigade will be based on the Armata chassis
It would be if every brigade was a heavy brigade.
Heavy brigades will be for use in urban areas or areas or situations where an enemy is very well equipped to deal with armour. They will be mobile but also the least mobile of the new Russian brigades.
I mean how many technicians and support personnel in the US Army follow around each M1 Abrams for each 100km that it runs? How many gallons of fuel does it consume in that time and how much maintenance is required on one on average for each such distance covered?
Can you imagine the logistical nightmare of an entire brigade made up of M1 Abrams equivalents?
We are talking about diesel engined vehicles that will move large distances via train or aircraft and will make up only a small percentage of a force.
The new chassis will be universal, but there is no chance it will be used for all platforms in a brigade.
The icecream only comes in chocolate, but there is no chance it will be chocolate iceream that we get.
The new chassis will be universal, heavy chassis for heavy brigades and medium wheeled and tracked chassis for medium brigades and light chassis for light brigades... that is the plan.
If... at the end of this, they end up mixing armata MBTs and Kurganets BMPs and Boomerang BTRs then they have wasted their time... they might as well have just upgraded the T-90s, BMP-3s, and BTR-82s and kept the same structures.
When fighting in urban areas the light vehicles will all be picked off and the heavy vehicles "sieged" and destroyed later at their leisure.
With an Armata brigade the BMP/IFV will be as difficult to defeat as the MBTs and most likely the MBTs will have high elevation guns anyway and will be able to defend themselves.
That's true, a lot of such vehicles already use tank chassis, and the Armata will likely be more efficient, reliable and certainly a lot lighter than the M1 Abrams series.
The MSTA 152mm artillery vehicle and several engineer and recovery vehicles already use MBT chassis... they could easily have been designed with lighter chassis.
But still even just the basic chassis without APS/UAVs/Weapons is a very complex, expensive, next-gen chassis with a protected crew compartment, new diesel engine, optics and cameras for full situational awareness of the crew.
No it isn't. All the electronics and sensors and weapons will be largely standardised... all the crew positions will be standardised across the different vehicle families so the screen a Typhoon driver uses will be the same as the commander of that vehicle and the gunner and the driver, commander and gunner of an Armata recon vehicle. All positions will allow each crewman to do everyone elses job if needed.
The difference might be that the Typhoon MBT will have a 45mm cannon and Kornet-EM missiles rather than a 125mm gun but the sensors and systems will be the same as the armata MBT or the kurganets MBT or boomerang MBT.
But still it's a tank chassis, it would require constant maintenance and support - a brigade full of such vehicles would be very demanding.
One set of spare parts, one design to master... don't you think the support tail for a current brigade would be the demanding one... a vehicle has broken down... is it a BMP or a BTR or a MBT or an ACRV or a Tunguska or SA-13 or OSA or TOR or MSTA... how many of them have the same engine? How many of them have related sensors or related electronics? What a nightmare!
I suppose that's why they are going for the wheeled and medium-traced brigades mostly, as opposed to the heavy.
The vast majority of forces will be medium and light and also wheeled because they are cheaper and more mobile and very well armed and equipped. Mixing up the forces only makes things worse because you are adding new designs with different engines and running gear.