Brief history of the infantry fighting vehicles of the Swiss Army
Armoured units need infantry that are able to closely follow the tanks. The infantry fighting vehicle is the transport and combat vehicle of the armored infantrymen, who were first transported as motor dragoons on trucks and from the 1950s on open light ‘universal carrier’ tracked vehicles. In 1963, the American M113 series was procured; of the more than 1400 vehicles, 520 were used until 2004 as armoured personnel carriers proper as SPz 63/73/89 with a 20mm gun in a turret and later with upgraded armour to increase their survivability. The remaining vehicles served as Minnewerfer vehicles, Genie and crane tanks and as command and transmission tanks for the artillery, some of them to this day ,
The M113 is made primarily of aluminum, which, while equal in weight to steel armor of the same thickness, is much thicker and thus more torsionally rigid. Today, the M113 is still in use worldwide in a wide variety of versions.