The United States Has Given Ukraine a Hundred M-2 Bradley Fighting Vehicles in Just Two Weeks
That's enough vehicles to rebuild Ukraine's sole Bradley brigade and also form a second one
In two weeks, the United States has shipped around 100 M-2 Bradley infantry fighting vehicles to Ukraine.
That’s a lot of Bradleys: enough to replace all the 33-ton, 10-person M-2s the Ukrainian army’s 47th Mechanized Brigade—so far Ukraine’s only Bradley-operator—has lost in a year of non-stop combat in southern and eastern Ukraine.
And there should be enough M-2s left over to equip a second brigade with the type.
The U.S. Defense Department has announced two aid packages for Ukraine since the U.S. Congress finally approved $61 billion in fresh financial support for Ukraine on April 23. Russia-friendly Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives managed to delay that vote for six month before caving.
The two aid packages together are worth $1.4 billion and include ammunition, vehicles and air-defense equipment. Both mention fresh shipments of M-2s without specifying how many M-2s Ukraine would get.
But when the Pentagon updated its main Ukraine fact sheet on Friday, the new language described “more than 300” M-2s. The previous version of the fact sheet, dated April 26, mentioned “more than 200” M-2s.
The 47th Brigade equipped three 30-vehicle battalions with Bradleys from the initial consignment of 200 M-2s and deployed the vehicles in combat starting with Ukraine’s southern counteroffensive, which kicked off in early June 2023.
Six months later, the battered brigade sped east to bolster Ukrainian defenses west of Avdiivka. After Avdiivka fell in February, the 47th Brigade fought a rearguard action for a few weeks and, in late April, was preparing to withdraw for its first brigade-wide period of rest and reset in nearly a year.
But then the Russian 30th Motor Rifle Brigade broke through Ukrainian lines east of Ocheretyne and advanced several miles, compelling the 47th Brigade to rush back to the line.
The 47th Brigade’s Bradley crews have been fighting hard. One crew recently scored one of the longest direct tank-kills of the Russia-Ukraine war when it hit a Russian T-80 tank with a wire-guided TOW missile from a mile away under the cover of darkness.
This year of fighting has cost the 47th Brigade nearly 80 Bradleys that the analysts at Oryx have identified: 37 destroyed and dozens more damaged, abandoned or captured. Some of the damaged and abandoned vehicles are recoverable and fixable; some surely are write-offs.
All that is to say, the 47th Brigade was burning though its reserves of M-2s fast—until fresh U.S. aid finally arrived. Now there are enough replacement M-2s in Ukraine, or on the way to Ukraine, to bring the 47th Brigade back up to full strength, make good another year’s worth of losses and also equip a second brigade with the tough IFVs with their powerful 25-millimeter auto-cannons and tank-killing TOW missiles.
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