Half the Swiss army’s M113 armoured vehicles rehabilitated

Half the Swiss army's M113s repaired Keystone-SDA

Half of the Swiss army's 248 M113 grenadier armoured vehicles are back on the road after being temporarily decommisioned. The entire fleet should be repaired by the end of the year.

At the end of 2023, the army suspended the use of these tanks due to a technical defect. “We had to issue a ban after a driveshaft broke and buy new spare parts from the original manufacturer,” says Rolf Siegenthaler in an interview published by the Neue Zürcher Zeitung on Monday. Delivery times have become longer, as such vehicles are also used abroad, he added.

+Get the most important news from Switzerland in your inbox

In the event of war, these tanks, which have been in service in the army for over 50 years, would not be lined up in the front line, notes the officer. These “oldtimers” would be deployed as auxiliary vehicles, he continued, pointing out that, while the technical simplicity of these old vehicles is an advantage, their maintenance is expensive.

“When people say that the army’s capacity is diminishing because of the failure of the M113s, I have to retort that even with these tanks, we no longer have that capacity,” notes Siegenthaler. He ranks the army’s logistics at level 3 on a scale from 1 to 10.

The replacement of the M113s is planned in various armament programs, wrote the defence ministry in December 2023. More than 800 of these vehicles had already been scrapped by that date.

Adapted from French by DeepL/ac

How we work

This news story has been written and carefully fact-checked by an external editorial team. At SWI swissinfo.ch we select the most relevant news for an international audience and use automatic translation tools such as DeepL to translate it into English. Providing you with automatically translated news gives us the time to write more in-depth articles.

If you want to know more about how we work, have a look here, if you want to learn more about how we use technology, click here, and if you have feedback on this news story please write to [e-mail].