Polish Rosomak APC Offered to Slovenia

According to the information published by Slovenian media outlets, such as Dnevnik, five designs were among the competing designs in the previous stage of the Slovenian APC procurement: Stryker Dragoon (USA), Freccia (Italy), Piranha V (offered by Romania, even though the vehicle is manufactured by General Dynamics European Land Systems, while the vehicle has been developed by Mowag, GDELS company), and Rosomak-L (Poland), and also Patria AMV XP (Finland).

All of the above bidders, apart from the US, were qualified to place their final offers. The Polish Rosomak-L platform, derived from the Rosomak APC (a license-manufactured variant of the Finnish AMV) is going to compete against the brand-new Finnish AMV XP design, Piranha V, and Freccia. The vehicles are to be delivered as a wheeled IFV, thus the turret should feature an automatic cannon and an ATGM launcher.

Notably, the original plan made by Slovenia was to procure an entirely different type of APC - the German Boxers. The procurement of these was cancelled after an audit of the order that took place in 2022.

The Slovenians currently operate the AMV APCs - Rosomak is based on that platform. However, only about 30 remain in service, as due to corruption suspicion, the scale of procurement went down from the initial 135 examples. Slovenia also has the Valuk platform in its inventory, based on the Pandur 1 APC (some of these were transferred to Ukraine). Slovenia has been less than lucky in its APC procurement efforts, which (the lack of luck) has been well-exemplified by the AMV procurement, and the Boxer acquisition - unsuccessful. The tracked M-80 IFVs that had been decommissioned were transferred to Ukraine, similarly to the decommissioned M-55S main battle tanks.

Will the Rosomak-L be successful in breaking this vicious cycle? We will learn soon, as Slovenia announced that the APC procurement decision is expected to be taken rapidly, to fulfil the declarations made in front of NATO.