Land vehicles & armor

Recent conflicts have challenged assumptions about armour survivability. Top-attack munitions and cheap drones have destroyed vehicles designed to withstand frontal threats, pushing active protection systems, overhead cover and electronic countermeasures from optional extras toward baseline requirements. The result is that vehicle upgrade programmes now carry as much value as new-build ones.

European land forces are in a recapitalisation cycle after decades of fleet reductions, with orders for infantry fighting vehicles, artillery systems and support vehicles running well above the levels of the 2010s. Production is constrained less by design than by supply chain depth: armour steel, transmissions, optics and specialised castings all have limited qualified sources, and several manufacturers have moved to internalise them.

Coverage clusters around national procurement decisions, export orders, active protection and counter-drone integration on vehicles, and joint programmes where industrial workshare is negotiated between governments. Watch the gap between framework agreements and firm orders — the two are frequently reported interchangeably but mean very different things.