MICVs (mechanized infantry combat vehicles) are armoured, usually tracked, vehicles designed to transport infantry soldiers, either to deploy on the battlefield or to provide a protected environment from which to fight. There are those who regard them as a monstrous hybrid, akin to Fisher's battlecruisers, with the difference that they do not even have a heavy punch to compensate for their extreme vulnerability to anti-armour weapons. The scandal surrounding over-elaboration and cost inflation for the Bradley MICV in the USA may have been merely one of many examples of western arms procurement ‘gold-plating’, but it also reflected a shift in doctrine while it was being developed.
During WW II, particularly on the eastern front, the Germans possessed motorized infantry that was able to advance with the fast tank forces, but for most of the war the Soviets did not. They found that tanks were vulnerable whenever they outstripped their infantry and developed the APC to enable them to keep up. When they went a step further and created armoured vehicles from which the infantry could fight without having to dismount and expose themselves to enemy fire, the MICV was born.
In the years after WW II, nations increasingly mechanized their armed forces, with the USSR taking the lead. Unlike the WW II armoured formations, these new units had tanks, APCs, and self-propelled (SP) artillery. At their heart, these formations had the concept of close infantry support for tanks, and by the 1970s these vehicles were deployed in large numbers. But there remained the drawback that under many tactical circumstances, APCs would be likely to disgorge their infantry straight into enemy fire. Returning to the WW II Soviet experiment, MICVs were introduced in the 1980s to enable the infantry to fire from within the vehicle, which acquired many of the characteristics of a light tank. An example is the British Warrior, a tracked vehicle armed with a 30 mm cannon and a 7.62 mm machine gun. It carries a section of eight soldiers and has a maximum road speed of 47 mph (75 km/h).
MICVs have not been universally well received by soldiers on the grounds that they are neither fish nor fowl, too lightly armed and armoured to be deployed alongside tanks, yet carrying too few infantry for an individual vehicle to make a sufficient impact on its own. Traditionalists argue that the use of MICVs diminishes the combat effectiveness of the troops thus deployed. But they are much lighter than main battle tanks, hence easier to airlift and deployable in areas where tanks may be too heavy: a Warrior weighs 54, 022 lb (24, 500 kg) loaded compared to 13, 781 lb (62, 500 kg) for a Challenger tank. This means MICVs have been used extensively in peacekeeping operations against comparatively lightly armed opposition, limiting the possibility of attrition by the traditional tactics of irregular forces.
— Robert Foley
