Soviet Generals Called Bradley "Taxi" — Until Its 25mm Bushmaster Shredded BMPs

Описание: Soviet military doctrine called it a taxi. Intelligence assessments from the 1980s classified the M2 Bradley Fighting Vehicle primarily as an infantry transport—fast, lightly armored, useful for moving troops but not a primary threat to Soviet armor. Then February 1991 happened and Bradley crews destroyed over 100 Iraqi BMPs in engagements where Soviet-trained crews following Soviet tactics died in vehicles that couldn't stop American 25mm depleted uranium rounds.
This is the story of a doctrinal miscalculation that killed hundreds of soldiers. The Bradley's 25mm M242 Bushmaster cannon wasn't designed to suppress enemy positions—it was designed to punch through Soviet aluminum armor at ranges where BMP cannons couldn't effectively return fire. Soviet intelligence knew the technical specifications. They had the ballistics data. They understood the threat. But institutional inertia and doctrinal assumptions about how mechanized warfare worked meant that revised threat assessments moved slower than the technology they were evaluating.
Desert Storm gun camera footage shows the result: BMP-2s engaging Bradleys at exactly the wrong ranges, using tactics designed for fighting peer threats, dying in vehicles whose aluminum armor failed catastrophically against supersonic kinetic penetrators. Soviet military analysts obtained the after-action reports and revised their assessments—cautiously, incompletely, years too late for the Iraqi crews who trusted the doctrine they'd been taught.
Cold War military history. American combined arms doctrine versus Soviet mechanized theory. Bradley Fighting Vehicle combat performance. Desert Storm armor engagements. The story of how battlefield reality rewrites institutional assumptions one gun camera tape at a time.

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PRIMARY SOURCES
Books:

The Whirlwind War: The United States Army in Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm (1995) - CMH Pub 70-30-1, US Army Center of Military History
Certain Victory: The US Army in the Gulf War (1993) - Brigadier General Robert H. Scales Jr.
Armored Cav: A Guided Tour of an Armored Cavalry Regiment (1994) - Tom Clancy
The Iron Triangle: The Carlyle Group, the Defense Industry, and the Politics of the Bradley Fighting Vehicle (1991) - James G. Burton

Military Documents & Reports:

Congressional Budget Office, "Procurement of the M2/M3 Bradley Fighting Vehicle System" (1982)
Department of Defense, "Conduct of the Persian Gulf War: Final Report to Congress" (1992)
US Army Armor School, "Operation Desert Storm: Armor in the Attack" (1991)
Foreign Broadcast Information Service translations of Russian military journals (1991-1993)

Journal Articles:

"Analysis of American Armored Vehicle Performance in Desert Storm," Voyennaya Mysl (Military Thought), March 1992
Various after-action reports published in Armor magazine (1991-1992)
Jane's Defence Weekly coverage of Russian military assessments (1993)

Archives:

National Archives and Records Administration - Gulf War Records (partial access)
CIA declassified documents via CREST database - Soviet technical intelligence assessments
Parallel History Project on NATO-Warsaw Pact Relations - Soviet ballistics studies
Defense Technical Information Center - Bradley development and testing documentation