IFV Infantry Fighting Vehicle
An armored vehicle that carries an infantry squad into battle while also fighting alongside them with its own cannon and often an anti-tank missile, unlike a lightly armed troop-carrying APC.
An infantry fighting vehicle carries a small dismount squad, usually six to eight soldiers, to the point of contact and then fights beside them with its own weapons, typically a 20mm to 40mm autocannon and, on many designs, an ATGM launcher.1 The category exists because an older class of vehicle, the armored personnel carrier, was built mainly to move infantry safely to the battlefield and get out of the way, armed at most with a light machine gun.2 An IFV instead expects to stay in the fight, suppressing enemy infantry, other IFVs and even light armor while its squad dismounts.
The shift began with the Soviet BMP-1 in the 1960s, which paired a turret-mounted gun and missile launcher with a firing squad compartment, a doctrine built around infantry advancing under armored cover rather than behind it. Western armies followed later, fielding vehicles like the M2 Bradley that blurred the old line between a taxi and a fighting platform. The tradeoff an IFV designer accepts is armor: to keep the vehicle light enough to carry troops and often to swim, IFV protection is generally thinner than an MBT, which is why IFVs avoid direct tank-on-tank engagements when possible.
What a buyer or analyst actually weighs when comparing IFVs is dismount capacity, autocannon caliber, whether an ATGM is integrated, armor level against the vehicle’s combat weight, and amphibious capability, since these determine whether the vehicle is built for airborne deployment, mechanized offense, or defensive dug-in use.
WeaponSpecs lists these fields directly on the IFV type page, and the Best IFVs of 2026 and Bradley vs BMP-3 vs Puma comparisons apply the same spec set to three of the most widely fielded designs.
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Related on WeaponSpecs