A military engineering vehicle is a vehicle built for construction work or for the transportation of combat engineers on the battlefield. These vehicles may be modified civilian equipment or purpose-built military vehicles. The first appearance of such vehicles coincided with the appearance of the first tanks, these vehicles were modified Mark V tanks for bridging and mine clearance. Modern military engineering vehicles are expected to fulfill numerous roles, as such they undertake numerous forms, examples of roles include; bulldozers, cranes, graders, excavators, dump trucks, breaching vehicles, bridging vehicles, military ferries, amphibious crossing vehicles, and combat engineer section carriers.
A land mine, or landmine, is an explosive weapon concealed under or camouflaged on the ground, and designed to destroy or disable enemy targets, ranging from combatants to vehicles and tanks, as they pass over or near it.
A mine plow is a device designed to clear a lane through a minefield, allowing other vehicles to follow. A mine plow is typically mounted to a tank or military engineering vehicle. Buried land mines are plowed up and pushed outside the tank's track path or tipped over. Since modern anti-tank mines rely on a focused explosion to destroy armored vehicles, they are useless when turned upside-down; as the tank runs over the mine, it will expend its blast down instead of upwards, causing insignificant damage, if any.
A combat engineer is a type of soldier who performs military engineering tasks in support of land forces combat operations. Combat engineers perform a variety of military engineering, tunnel and mine warfare tasks, as well as construction and demolition duties in and out of combat zones.
The M728 Combat Engineer Vehicle (CEV) is a full-tracked vehicle used for breaching, obstacle removal, and pioneering operations. Production commenced in 1965 and ceased in 1987. A total of 312 of all variants of these armored engineer vehicles were produced.
In anti-tank warfare, an anti-tank mine is a type of land mine designed to damage or destroy vehicles including tanks and armored fighting vehicles.
Hobart's Funnies is the nickname given to a number of specialist armoured fighting vehicles derived from tanks operated during the Second World War by units of the 79th Armoured Division of the British Army or by specialists from the Royal Engineers.
A mine flail is a vehicle-mounted device that makes a safe path through a minefield by deliberately detonating land mines in front of the vehicle that carries it. They were first used by the British during World War II.
The M4 Sherman tank was produced in several variants, a result of mass production spread across several manufacturers and several years. It was also the basis for a number of related vehicles and Shermans have been modified by several nations, ranging from upgrades to complete hull conversions for another task. Originally designed in 1941, M4 variants were still used by Israel during the 1967 and 1973 wars with its Arab neighbors.
The Giant Viper was a trailer-mounted, vehicle-pulled, mine clearance system, designed to be deployed in areas containing land mines. It was developed for the British Army in the 1950s. It was designed to be towed behind a Centurion gun tank, FV4003, AVRE ; and also the FV432 Armoured personnel carrier.
The L9 bar mine is a large rectangular British anti-tank landmine. The bar mine's principal advantage is its long length, and therefore its trigger length. A typical anti-tank landmine is circular, and a vehicle's wheels or tracks, which make up only a small proportion of its total width, must actually press on the mine to activate it. To increase the probability of a vehicle striking the mine, the mine's effective trigger width must be increased.
An armoured vehicle-launched bridge (AVLB) is a combat support vehicle, sometimes regarded as a subtype of military engineering vehicle, designed to assist militaries in rapidly deploying tanks and other armoured fighting vehicles across gap-type obstacles, such as rivers. The AVLB is usually a tracked vehicle converted from a tank chassis to carry a folding metal bridge instead of weapons. The AVLB's job is to allow armoured or infantry units to cross craters, anti-tank ditches, blown bridges, railroad cuts, canals, rivers and ravines, when a river too deep for vehicles to wade through is reached, and no bridge is conveniently located, or sufficiently sturdy, a substantial concern when moving 60-ton tanks.
Armoured Vehicle Royal Engineers (AVRE), also known as Assault Vehicle Royal Engineers, is the title given to a series of armoured military engineering vehicles operated by the Royal Engineers (RE) for the purpose of protecting engineers during frontline battlefield operations.
The 1st Assault Brigade Royal Engineers was a specialised armoured formation of the British Army active in the Second World War. It was formed in mid-1943 and its structure was three assault regiments of the Royal Engineers. It was assigned to the 79th Armoured Division in preparation for the Normandy invasion of 6 June 1944. The unit comprised armoured vehicles modified for specialist roles, intended to assist with the landing phase of the operation.
A mine-clearing line charge is a device used to create a breach in minefields under combat conditions. While there are many types, the basic design is for many explosive charges connected on a line to be projected onto the minefield and then exploded, detonating any buried mines, thus clearing a path for troops to cross.
More than 50 different modifications and experimental vehicles based on the T-26 light infantry tank chassis were developed in the USSR in the 1930s, with 23 modifications going into series production. The majority were armoured combat vehicles: flame tanks, artillery tractors, radio-controlled tanks (teletanks), military engineering vehicles, self-propelled guns and armoured personnel carriers. They were developed at the Leningrad Factory of Experimental Mechanical Engineering by talented Soviet engineers P.N. Syachentov, S.A. Ginzburg, L.S. Troyanov, N.V. Tseits, B.A. Andryhevich, M.P. Zigel and others. Many Soviet tank engineers were declared "enemies of the nation" and repressed during Stalin's Great Purge from the middle of the 1930s. As a result, work on self-propelled guns and armoured carriers ceased in the USSR during that time. T-26 light tanks were also modified into armoured combat vehicles in the field during wartime.
The Trojan Armoured Engineer Vehicle (AEV) is a combat engineering vehicle of the British Army. It is used to breach minefields and for many other tasks. It is currently in use with the Royal Engineers.
The M1150 Assault Breacher Vehicle (ABV) is a U.S. military mine- and explosives-clearing vehicle, based on the M1 Abrams chassis, equipped with a mine plow and line charges. Its first large scale use by the US Marines (USMC) was in the joint ISAF-Afghan Operation Moshtarak in Southern Afghanistan during the War in Afghanistan in 2010 against the Taliban insurgency.
