The CV90 is a great vehicle, so why doesn't the US buy it?
It is no wonder that whenever we cover the topic of U.S. vehicles on our YouTube channel, the comments are flooded with the same question: 'Why doesn't the U.S. just buy the CV90?'
That is a valid query. The CV90 is a proven infantry fighting vehicle used by several NATO allies. It is modular, combat-tested and recently underwent a significant upgrade. So why can't the Pentagon stop with the seemingly endless programs that never actually produce a viable vehicle and just buy the Swedish CV90?
The answer has little to do with whether the vehicle is any good and a lot to do with how the U.S. buys weapons, what it prioritizes in doctrine, and how the military-industrial complex operates.
The CV90 was developed in the 1980s by Sweden's Hägglunds, now part of BAE Systems. It was designed with fighting the Soviet Union in mind to be fast, survivable and capable in a variety of terrains. Since entering service in 1994, it's become one of the most widely adopted infantry fighting vehicles in NATO.
It comes in multiple variants, ranging from the traditional infantry fighting vehicle with an autocannon on it to command and control, mortar carrier, reconnaissance models, and many more, depending on the customer's requirements. The CV90 even comes with a variety of main weapons, starting at 30mm and going all the way up to 120mm. On paper, it checks a lot of boxes on the Pentagon's wishlist for an armored vehicle. So why not just buy it and move on?
The most unsexy answer: money and politics. The Pentagon doesn't just buy vehicles, it buys programs. Those multi-billion dollar contracts aren't just for tanks or jets, they are for replacement parts, depot maintenance, technical manuals, training curriculum, simulators, everything necessary to keep a weapon functioning. This translates into jobs and decades of sustainment work.
Buying the CV90 off the shelf would mean outsourcing production and all those program benefits to Europe. The U.S. could license the design to be built here in the United States, like we do with the UH-72 Lakota helicopters, but that would require significant investment into a weapon we don't have control over.
Doctrine must also be considered. When the Pentagon buys a new weapon, it usually builds the vehicle around current doctrine, not the other way around. For instance, U.S. armored formations are built around combined arms maneuver. Bradleys are designed to fight alongside Abrams tanks, supported by artillery, drones and airpower, all feeding into a massive command-and-control network. That network assumes certain levels of system cooperation, speed, and firepower that aren't always a perfect match with off-the-shelf foreign vehicles, no matter how good they are.
This brings us to the issue of interoperability with U.S. systems. The CV90 is built around NATO standards, but the U.S. military often takes that a step further with its own encrypted communications suites, battlefield management systems, Blue Force Tracker integration, electronic warfare and signals intelligence kits, and remote weapon stations that are all custom-fitted to American platforms. Retrofitting those systems into a CV90 isn't impossible — it's just time-consuming, expensive, and requires creating a new U.S.-only variant. At that point, you might as well be developing a new vehicle from scratch.
Finally, we can't forget that the Bradley does exist and its capabilities overlap heavily with the CV90. Military planners aren't going to buy a foreign system that is very similar to the domestic one they already have hundreds of.
In the latest YouTube video, we go over these reasons and many more that apply not just to the CV90, but other foreign weapon platforms that we admire, but will never purchase.
Sergeant Major of the Marine Corps learns an old lesson: Don't mess with Audie Murphy
A breakdown of safety procedures 'directly contributed' to an 82nd Airborne paratrooper's death
WWII Marine Raider who fought at Iwo Jima, Guadalcanal wants cards for 100th birthday
Navy identifies special warfare sailor killed while parachuting
Pentagon appears to pause renaming of Navy ships
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Motor Trend
9 minutes ago
- Motor Trend
The Future Of Porsche's Racing Tech Transfer to Street Cars? Software.
On April 12, 2025, Porsche made history, becoming the first automaker to win three classes of professional motorsports with three different powertrains on the same day. In California, a 963 hybrid won the LMDh class and took the overall win at the IMSA Long Beach Grand Prix while a 911 GT3 R won the GTD Pro class in the same race with pure combustion engine. Across the country, the 99X Electric won the Miami e-prix in Formula E on pure battery power. Different as they may be, each shares a common link with the Porsche road cars you can buy today and in the future. Porsche uses motorsport to drive tech innovation, focusing on software as the key to improving road cars. Software impacts drivability and efficiency, with lessons from racing series shared across projects. This approach is cost-effective and enhances both performance and development. This summary was generated by AI using content from this MotorTrend article Read Next Racing Technology for the Street 'We have a philosophy that, yes, motorsport is part of our DNA,' Porsche vice president of motorsport, Thomas Laudenbach, told MotorTrend , 'and I cannot imagine Porsche without motorsport, but we are not doing motorsport for the sake of its own. We do motorsport to give a contribution to the company, and this is exactly what we are talking about.' In the past, tech transfer from racing to the road consisted mostly of more power and better aerodynamics, but as everything on a car has become linked and controlled by computers, the next frontier is in the software that controls them. Hard parts like engines, suspension, and aerodynamics are fairly mature technologies, but automotive software is still in its relative infancy. 'It is still a very steep curve,' Laudenbach said. 'It's growing so fast, it's changing so fast…I mean, if you look at the combustion engine, obviously development [today] is slower like this because you know, it is more and more difficult to make the [next] step. If you look at the software, not only software itself, how we approach it, the tools…I would say [it is] still very steep, the curve, how fast it changes.' It's All in the Software In all three racing series, physical parts on the cars are heavily regulated, particularly when it comes to batteries and electric motors. Software, though, isn't and has become the most important factor in improving lap times and efficiency. 'Everything you can do on the software has a much bigger impact and a much bigger effect in the drivability,' Porsche Formula E driver and reigning champion, Pascal Wehrlein, told MotorTrend , 'because yeah, there's also software things in in a combustion engine, but the effect is just smaller than an electric car. We pay a lot of attention to the software and I would say that is our biggest toolbox for setting up the car and getting quicker and so on. And there's just so many more things you can do on the software compared to a combustion engine. 'How much we are going into the details,' he continued, 'into the smallest details, I would say on the software side is even more than what I did when I was in Formula One, just because there are so many different options on, you know, the four-wheel drive, how to set up the four-wheel drive. How much work do you want to have at the front? At which point in time in the corner you want to have more front torque or less? What you can do on the braking side, on the [energy] recuperation, setting it up for different corners? In certain corners, where it's high speed, you need something different than in the low-speed corner, but then also when the track is bumpy, or not bumpy. We are going so much into the details.' Lauderbach agrees. 'It's absolutely right. We always love about talking about hardware. And I did develop combustion engines for 18 years, so I'm a real mechanical guy, and it's absolutely right, probably the bigger part is software. And but this is the good thing about it because some things [physical] we are not allowed to touch [under the regulations]. But we have a big freedom of software, and I think that's good because racing should give freedom where it is beneficial also for your brand. And that's certainly in software and I think this is probably also the biggest change between the projects.' Because the applications are so different, it's not as simple as just sharing code between teams in different series or with the engineers working on the road cars. Instead, it's the exchange of knowledge and ideas which brings this tech to cars like the 911 GTS T-hybrid. 'It's for sure not a carryover part,' Laudenbach said, 'but it's from learning about the difficulties, about the weak points, about the solutions, for sure they benefit from each other. 'When you have more than one project,' he said, 'you just work it on in a wider range and then you always find synergy. These two programs (Formula E and LMDh) benefit from each other in various areas. And at the same time, this is linked so close to our road car development. We work a lot on road cars as well in the motorsport department and do benefit from each other. If you tell your engineers, oh, please sit together with these guys from this program, then you know what they do? They sit together for an hour, they chat, and they go to it. If you sit side by side, if you meet each other with a coffee, this is the best way to benefit from each other. These two programs benefit, but also this is very beneficial to what we do on road cars, even inside the motorsport department.' It's not just about making the cars faster, either. Power makes heat, and heat needs to be dealt with before it breaks things, on a race car or a road car. Efficiency matters in racing because using less fuel or electricity allows you to go farther between pit stops, and it matters for the same reason on the street. 'Look at Formula E,' Laudenbach said. 'It's not our battery, but we control the thermal system [and] energy management. That's a lot of control systems. That's a lot of software. I mean, if we work with AI in the meantime and there you can learn a lot of the one side and transfer it to the other. Sometimes then you figure out that, okay, I can only take this because this [other technology] is not allowed. It's never carry over one to one. 'But you still learn a lot about how to handle it. It's software functions, it's control systems, it's sometimes also just the tools that we use, the approach that you take is not always [about] the final product. In the end, you have the product, there, no matter if it's software, hardware, but it's also, how do you approach it, because you're always looking for being most efficient. Especially Formula E, [where] we have a cost cap. It's a factor to say, okay, can I reach a certain goal with the smallest amount of money? These kind of things we always exchange because it's in the background.' Cheaper and Easier Not only are software learnings easier to transfer between programs, software is also easier to iterate on and less expensive to develop. 'Compared to hardware,' he said, 'it's not that cost intensive. Yes, you have you have the labor. But you know, you' not always having to change your bits and pieces. And don't forget, if you talk about bits and pieces, you always have to stop and throw parts away. So it's a lot more, let's say, cost efficient.' Whether in the office or trackside, the way data is managed and analyzed has changed a lot in the past decade. 'If we would do it like 10 years ago,' Lauderbach said, 'where the engineer himself goes through all the raw data, that doesn't work anymore. You got to feed your data through automatic analysis. It's just more [a question of], how do you analyze? How do you get something out in order to make the car quicker? This is a lot more or this is high sophisticated, a lot more automation and algorithms, than 10 years ago. 'It's a software basically to calculate what the car's doing because you got sensors. Obviously, you want to calculate some figures, you see what the car's doing in order to feature simulations. The simulation then gives you back again in which direction you have to go.'
Motor Trend
10 minutes ago
- Motor Trend
Rivian Is Integrating Google Maps Into Its Native Navigation Software
Fresh off major upgrades to its R1S SUV and R1T pickup, Rivian is now set to launch a software update of its onboard navigation system to include Google Maps data—both for the new vehicles it's producing and its existing customer cars. This isn't simply Google Maps like the app on your phone, however. Leveraging Google's Automotive SDK, Rivian has, in effect, overlaid its existing navigation experience over that of Google Maps, taking advantage of the internet giant's superior "routing, estimated time of arrivals, traffic updates, search capabilities, and satellite imagery," as Rivian put it, in order to further augment its own in-house "EV-friendly navigation features." Rivian is updating its R1S SUV and R1T pickup navigation systems to integrate Google Maps, blending Google's routing, traffic, and imagery with Rivian's EV-specific features. The update includes a new interface and extends to the Rivian Mobile App, rolling out starting tomorrow. This summary was generated by AI using content from this MotorTrend article Read Next In other words, Rivian's navigation system will now blend Google's superior mapping capabilities with its proprietary charging information, including estimated range and battery capacity remaining at your destination, route planning, real-time charging info, and more. In addition, Rivian skins the whole interface in its own design, a new version of which will also debut with the Google Maps update. Even better, Rivian says the update will extend to its Rivian Mobile App (a 2025 MotorTrend Best Tech award winner), which benefits from Google-like photos and descriptions of searched destinations, as well as satellite map views and real-time traffic data. As before, users can send trips and navigation destinations from the app to their Rivians, and now they'll be able to use the "share" function via Google Maps to do the same. The rollout of the new Google-augmented system is imminent—Rivian says it'll begin doing so as soon as tomorrow via an over-the-air update for every all-electric R1S SUV and R1T pickup it has sold to date, and it will come already equipped with every new model it sells.
New York Times
12 minutes ago
- New York Times
Rising Inflation Underscores Risks in Trump's New Tariff Threats
President Trump's steep tariffs have started to weigh on consumers' wallets, sending prices higher as the White House readies a more drastic — and potentially costly — expansion of its global trade war. The risks in Mr. Trump's economic strategy began to show on Tuesday, with the release of data that found inflation had accelerated in June. Prices rose noticeably on appliances, clothing and furniture, products that are all heavily exposed to the president's taxes on imports from Canada, China and other major trading partners. The inflation report undercut Mr. Trump's continued assertions that Americans would not face financial repercussions from his increasingly aggressive trade brinkmanship. Since taking office, the president has imposed withering duties on allies and adversaries alike, with additional taxes on a range of products such as cars and steel. The latest reading of the Consumer Price Index recorded the first signs of what economists had predicted all along, with U.S. businesses and consumers shouldering a growing share of the burden from the taxes Mr. Trump has imposed on imports. The data also carried perhaps a new warning for the president as he prepares another round of tariffs on dozens of countries in about two weeks, including a 30 percent tax on the European Union. Some experts said that an uptick in inflation could foreshadow more significant price increases later, especially if Mr. Trump proceeds as planned. 'Up until this report, you could have argued that inflation is on a journey lower,' said Padhraic Garvey, who leads ING's research team for the Americas. 'Now we are on a journey higher.' Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
