Australia’s Bad Choice in Infantry Fighting Vehicles
by David Archibald
3 April 2026
Back in the 1960s, Australia bought some 800 of the M113 armoured personnel carrier for battlefield transport of our infantry. That was when we had a population of 12 million. In 2004 a project was started to replace them with 1,100 infantry fighting vehicles that would have thicker armour and heavier armament. I attended a briefing on this acquisition 20 years ago, at which it was apparent that the Army was set upon having its own special vehicle instead of buying something that was already in production and already proven to work. Many years passed and the Redback infantry fighting vehicle from the Korean company Hanwha was eventually selected. Hanwha designed the Redback to meet the conditions of the Australian Army tender. That is not a trite observation; it means that shortcomings were baked in at inception.
Hanwha Redback
Then in 2023 the incoming Labor Government used the excuse of a strategic review to delay production and cut the order to just 129. This works out to one infantry fighting vehicle for every 209,302 Australians. This is not enough. We need at least ten times that number, as per the original intent in 2004.
On 30th March, the Australian National Audit Office released a report on how the Redback acquisition is going. The report is 94 pages of gobbledygook and doesn’t even tell us what the unit cost of a Redback is. It does tell us that the selection process was structured to effectively ignore existing types of infantry fighting vehicles.
From other sources, the unit cost of a Redback is $29 million for 40 tonnes of vehicle. The best alternative would have been the CV90 made by BAE — with the same capability, 30 years of operating experience, and a unit cost of $15.6 million. The Koreans aren’t bothering to make the Redback themselves. They think it is too heavy and Hanwha’s alternative weighs 28 tonnes. The Redback is an orphan class which no other country will ever buy. Only 129 of them might ever be built. After that contract is completed, we will still need another thousand or more infantry fighting vehicles to have an army with some substance to it. We would be better off switching to the CV90 and giving the Redbacks that do get built to an Army Reserve unit.
CV90 of the Czech Army
The audit report does also tell us that Hanwha is having intractable difficulties in fitting the remote weapons system specified (the R400 electro-optical system) to the Redback turret, but without telling us why. Once rectified, the Redback should easily handle the drone threat. The 30 mm cannon can start interdicting drones two kilometres out and then any that get past that will be handled by the Iron Fist active protection system. Israel developed two active protection systems, Iron Fist and Trophy, in response to their tank losses in the 2006 invasion of Lebanon and haven’t been bothered by antitank guided missiles or drones since. A system designed to handle antitank guided missiles travelling at 200 metres per second can easily handle fragile plastic structures travelling at a fraction of that speed.
This brings up the subject of drones in land warfare. The current Ukraine War started without either side having active protection systems on their tanks and infantry fighting vehicles. Both sides lost a lot of vehicles to antitank guided missiles. Russia has now lost 11,826 tanks and 24,324 armoured fighting vehicles. The Russian rate of tank losses has fallen from about 350 per month in late 2023 to the current rate of about 100 per month, simply because they have run out of tanks. They are now pulling T-55s (designed in 1955) out of storage.
On average, it takes about six drones to achieve a kill on a Russian soldier and 15 on a Russian armoured vehicle. There is one video of a Russian soldier surviving 11 near-misses by Ukrainian first-person-viewer drones before the twelfth drone hits him.
Eventually, the money spent on anti-drone systems will equal the money spent on drones. The anti-drone systems already exist –- active protection systems such us Trophy and remote weapons systems. Hanwha’s contract with EOS for the supply of R400 remote weapons systems is $108 million for 129 weapons, for a per unit cost of $0.83 million. Adding Iron Fist would take the cost of protecting a vehicle up to $1.5 million. It is the price of entry to the battlefield these days. So protected, tanks still have a role in demolishing the enemy’s concrete structures even if they don’t get to meet many enemy tanks.
K-9 Howitzer
In another defence acquisition that has been overtaken by the evolution of the battlefield, Australia bought a handful of Korean K9 self-propelled howitzers. What the Ukraine War has shown is that wheeled howitzers are more survivable than tracked ones. Ukraine has found that Russian counter-battery radar can detect the firing positions of artillery and have drones swarming on that location within three minutes of firing. Wheeled howitzers can move off far more rapidly than tracked ones. Ukrainian FPV drones, carried by a mother drone, have recently hit Russian fuel tankers 60 km behind the front line.
The Department of Defence hasn’t had adult supervision for decades. That needs to change soon if we are to survive as a nation.
David Archibald is the author of American Gripen: The Solution to the F-35 Nightmare