00:00I recently got to drive in this.
00:02I've ridden in quite a number of armored cars over the years,
00:04but until now, I'd never driven one.
00:06And instead of rattling my bones,
00:08this infantry fighting vehicle rode like a Cadillac.
00:11The CB90 is made by BAE Systems Haglunds in Sweden.
00:15That's the country that brought us the boxy, sensible Volvo
00:18so popular with safety-conscious parents in the 1970s.
00:21The CB90 is used in Ukraine,
00:23where it's loved for the same reason as those Volvo station wagons.
00:27They're safer.
00:27No Ukrainian soldier is known to have been killed while inside,
00:31despite taking direct hits.
00:32But the safety isn't what makes this vehicle interesting now.
00:35It's that the company seems to have found a way
00:38to solve a long-standing conundrum in Europe.
00:40How to reduce waste and duplication in making and buying weapons.
00:44Even when countries can agree to build weapons together,
00:47they've tended to pile on their own specifications,
00:49which means more testing and more delays,
00:52and fewer of the economies that joint procurement is supposed to achieve.
00:55So when four countries came knocking in 2024 wanting hundreds of CB90s fast,
01:00they were told they could have them if they took the current Dutch production model
01:03as an off-the-shelf design.
01:05Because business was booming and the factory's order books were already full.
01:09Output is up 400% in five years,
01:11and revenue is up over a billion from just 200 million.
01:14The bad news is that drones are now so dominant on the battlefields of Ukraine
01:18that no armored vehicle can move close to the front line without getting blown up.
01:22Tommy Gustafsson-Rask, the company's managing director,
01:25acknowledges the scale of the threat.
01:26He's confident it will get solved,
01:28because if you want to break through and take territory,
01:30you still need the mobility that armored vehicles bring.
01:33Even so, one member of the six-nation CB90 consortium, Estonia,
01:37has already pulled out,
01:38saying that until a solution is found,
01:40it made more sense to spend money on drones and air defense.
01:43Both of them are probably right,
01:44but it's not clear to me that the rest of Europe
01:47can afford to build lots of tanks and infantry fighting vehicles now,
01:50in the hope that a fix is found later to protect them from drones.
01:54In fact, the old question of how to consolidate spending
01:57among dozens of countries
01:58to turn a $580 billion collective defense budget
02:01into commensurate combat power
02:03may be less important than a new one.
02:05That is, what should Europe spend on
02:07to deal with the new threat from drones,
02:09and what should it drop?
02:10It's not something you do every day.
02:12No, no, it's something I probably will never do again,
02:16but it was wonderful.
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