It perhaps was inevitable that Ukraine eventually would bolt its 1960s-vintage ZU-23-2 autocannons to its equally aged M-113 armored personnel carriers. The two classic systems practically were meant for each other.
The Soviet-designed ZU-23-2 is a side-by-side pair of manually-aimed 23-millimeter cannons firing six-ounce projectiles a mile or farther at a sustained rate of 400 rounds per minute. It’s a powerful and versatile weapon with air-defense and ground-support applications.
The American-designed M-113 is a 14-ton aluminum box with a 275-horsepower diesel engine and space for two crew and 11 passengers. What the M-113 lacks in armor protection, it makes up for with space, mobility and versatility.
Pile on armor and a turret, and you can transform an M-113 into a crude fighting vehicle. Add a ZU-23-2, and you get a highly-mobile air-defense and infantry-support vehicle. The Egyptian and Lebanese militaries, Hezbollah and the Kurdish YPG militia all have operated their own ZU-23-2-armed M-113s.
The Ukrainians have been bolting their plentiful ZU-23-2s to all sorts of vehicles ever since Russia widened its war on Ukraine 23 months ago. It wasn’t surprising when a video circulated on social media this week depicting a Ukrainian M-113 sporting a ZU-23-2.
What maybe is surprising is that the pairing took so long. Kyiv’s allies have supplied its forces with around a thousand M-113s. In addition to their traditional role as APCs, they also handle medical-evacuation missions. With a ZU-23-2 on top, an M-113 can lay down suppressive fire for infantry and, perhaps more importantly, shoot down drones.
Explosives-laden drones are everywhere all the time in Ukraine, and both sides in Russia’s wider war are scrambling to improvise more drone-defenses. For the territorial air-defense teams that help to protect Ukrainian cities, that has meant dragging all available ZU-23-2s out of storage and deploying them as-is or fixing them to trucks.
The ZU-23-2s work just fine. There’s footage of Ukrainian territorials, positioned along the likeliest approach vectors for Russian Shahed drones, filling the air with machine-gun and cannon fire—and shooting down the passing Shaheds.
In attaching ZU-23-2s to M-113s, the Ukrainians make these simple-but-effective guns even more mobile.
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