UK keeps 623 Boxer order and adds heavy wheeled recovery vehicle

The British Army will buy a heavy wheeled recovery vehicle to tow and recover damaged Boxer armored vehicles in the field, after the Ministry of Defence dropped plans for a dedicated Boxer repair and recovery variant, Minister for Defence Readiness and Industry Luke Pollard told Parliament, UK Defence Journal reported.

Pollard was answering Conservative lawmaker Ben Obese-Jecty, the member for Huntingdon, who asked how the Army would repair Boxers in the field with no repair and recovery version on order. The minister did not say which vehicle the Army will buy, how many it needs or when the purchase will be made.

“The Army will absolutely have the ability to recover and support Boxer vehicles on the battlefield, such as through the Boxer support variants and the wider force, including the Heavy Wheeled Recovery Vehicle which we will procure,” said Pollard.

The question followed the Army’s decision this month to scrap three planned Boxer variants, armored mortar, repair and recovery, and anti-tank overwatch, as part of work on the Defence Investment Plan. In an answer the day before, Pollard said the ministry had assessed the armored recovery module built by German firm Flensburger Fahrzeugbau Gesellschaft for the role and rejected it, concluding that a generic heavy wheeled recovery vehicle would be more useful and more affordable across the whole force. Until a new vehicle arrives, Boxers recover each other, with backup from the Army’s Support Vehicle (Recovery) trucks and the tracked Challenger Armoured Repair and Recovery Vehicle.

Boxer is an eight-wheeled armored vehicle built around a common drive module that accepts different mission modules, which lets one chassis serve as a troop carrier, ambulance, command post or weapons carrier. A dedicated recovery version would have carried a crane and winch on that same chassis, keeping pace with Boxer units and sharing their protection and spare parts. A wheeled recovery truck can serve every vehicle type in the Army, but generally with less armor than a vehicle built on the Boxer hull.

Pollard said the overall order has not changed.

“There has been no change to our order of 623 Boxer vehicles, of which over 500 are being built here in the UK, and we are buying 72 Boxer RCH Artillery vehicles,” said Pollard.

All 623 Mechanised Infantry Vehicle Boxers are being delivered to a common build standard at two British plants, Rheinmetall BAE Systems Land in Telford and KNDS UK in Stockport, and Team Boxer UK delivered the 100th British-built Boxer in June. Pollard said the work backs more than 1,000 British jobs. Ministers confirmed last week that a planned third batch of Boxers is no longer being pursued through the program.

The 72 artillery vehicles are separate from that total. The RCH 155 pairs a 155 mm remote-controlled howitzer turret developed by Krauss-Maffei Wegmann with the Boxer drive module already in British service, and Britain signed a nearly £1 billion contract for 72 of the guns in May. They will replace the AS90 tracked howitzers in the close support artillery role, a gap the Army has filled with Swedish-built Archer guns since giving its AS90s to Ukraine.