Struggling to make good the loss of around 15,000 armored vehicles in its wider war on Ukraine, Russia has begun equipping more assault groups with inexpensive civilian vehicles. First, Chinese-made all-terrain vehicles—that’s right, golf carts. Later, dirt bikes from China and Belarus.
It should go without saying that, in their original configurations, these lightweight vehicles are extremely vulnerable to Ukrainian artillery, missiles and drones. When Russian motorbike assault groups first deployed this spring, they were “beaten in the teeth,” the Ukrainian 79th Air Assault Brigade quipped.
So the Russians have been up-armoring the ATVs and bikes to give them additional protection against the most numerous Ukrainian munition—explosive first-person-view drones. Observers have compared the bikes to those in the Mad Max series of post-apocalyptic movies.
The problem, of course, is that a 70-horsepower ATV or a 50-horsepower bike can’t handle much armor without losing mobility. This is a lesson armies learned a century ago, during and right after World War I. It’s a lesson the Russian army surely will relearn today.
The first photos and videos depicting up-armored Russian assault bike appeared online no later than April. A month later, the armor had grown in scale and complexity. Photos circulated online depicting assault bikes with sidecars and welded-on metal cages covering them—and camouflage netting covering the cage, in at least one case.
The Russians are “employing light vehicles such as motorcycles and ATVs to quickly traverse the distance from their attack launch positions to the front lines of the Ukrainian defense forces,” the Ukrainian Center for Defense Security explained. Reaching Ukrainian lines, the riders dismount—and fight on foot.
Ideally for the Russians, the ATVs and bikes move fast enough across the no man’s land to dodge most of the drones the Ukrainians fling at their attackers. Any if any FPV drones do catch up to the assault groups, cage armor should catch the drones before they impact the vehicles or their crews.
It’s a good theory: cage armor is effective enough that armies all over the world are adopting it for ground vehicles—and even docked submarines, apparently. It’s one thing to add a cage weighing a couple of tons to a 40-ton tank with a 1,000-horsepower engine, however. It’s another to pile armor onto a 1.5-ton ATV or a 200-pound dirt bike, each producing less than a hundred horsepower.
More than one army learned this the hard way in the 1910s and ’20s, arguably a golden era for military motorcycles. While the fast, nimble bikes worked great for couriers and scouts, they were too vulnerable for troops who might face heavy enemy fire.
Hoping to add protection in order to widen the bikes’ roles, some armies welded on metal plates. Perhaps most famously, Swedish firm Landsverk developed several types of armored bike on behalf of the German and later Danish armies.
They didn’t work very well. Danish trials of the F.P.3 armored bike “showed that the high mass of the vehicle made steering difficult and that cross-country mobility was minimal,” according to Tanks Encyclopedia. “In addition, the 30-horsepower engine was reportedly only capable of propelling the vehicle to a maximum speed of roughly 50 kilometers per hour,” or 31 miles per hour.
“The armored motorcycle was one of the many concepts that died with the interwar era,” Tanks Encyclopedia continued. “Their increased weight and relatively high cost, coupled with limited combat potential, meant that their place in armored fighting vehicle history resulted in little more than a footnote.”
Until now. Losing purpose-made armored vehicles faster than they can replace them with other purpose-made armored vehicles, the Russians are desperate. So desperate that they’re willing to resurrect an idea—the armored bike—that died a hundred years ago.
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