July 16, 2025:
There once was a time, twenty years ago, when the U.S. Army had a crazy idea. It was the Grizzly, a new US Army combat engineer vehicle, just beginning its testing program. The first battalion to get the Grizzly was to receive 35 of them in 2004. This didn’t happen as the project was cancelled in 2001 because it was too expensive and did not serve an essential need.
The Grizzly was built on an M1 tank chassis but doesn't have the armor of a real tank. Even so, the armor protected the vehicles from anything short of a tank shell or anti-tank missiles. Grizzly had a full-width dozer blade able to grade roads, clear obstacles, fill in ditches, or in a pinch to plow its way through a minefield.
The best part of the Grizzly, however, was a remotely operated bucket arm mounted on the right front corner of the vehicle. This device could reach out about seven meters and pull items as heavy as 1,200 kg. This could allow the Grizzly to dig up enemy bunkers, pull apart barbed wire fences, dig up concrete dragons’ teeth, or even pull a wrecked truck out of a road. The two-man crew of Grizzly remained inside the vehicle, viewing the battlefield through seven video cameras and various periscopes and view ports. The vehicle's 12.7mm machinegun could be fired by remote control from inside the vehicle. Grizzly never entered service because it cost too much to produce. Only the Grizzly prototype was completed.
The M1 Grizzly was the US military's short-lived Combat Engineering Vehicle/CEV replacement, based on the M1 Abrams Main Battle Tank/MBT chassis rather than the M-60 tank chassis of the older CEV. The new one was developed in the early 1990s to play the role of a Breacher system for the modern battlefield. In fact, the product was originally named Breacher.
A prototype appeared in 1995, but the program was scrapped in 2001 due to Army budget constraints. The U.S. Army planned to procure about 366 Grizzly vehicles as part of its program to replace outdated Abrams tanks. This provided some degree of logistics assistance in terms of parts commonality.
Grizzly retained most of the Abrams' general shape and performance, including amphibious capabilities, by eliminating the powered main turret. Grizzly's defining features are its bow-mounted dozer blade and trainable telescoping Arm, with dozer bucket in the rear. The onboard Auxiliary Power Unit/APU powered the system when the engine was off. The Grizzly retained the Abrams' Nuclear, Biological, Chemical/NBC and fire suppression kit for basic crew survivability and was moderately armed via a Remote Weapon Station/RWS with a 1 x 12.7mm Heavy Machine Gun/HMG. The crew consisted of a driver and vehicle equipment operator seated side by side in the fixed front superstructure. There were 12 smoke grenade launchers in the front part of the superstructure, giving the vehicle a self-defense capability. The mobility gear remained the same as the original Abrams. The gas turbine engine spun the rear sprocket. As with the Abrams design, seven twin-tire wheels were mounted in a track wheel arrangement along each side of the hull.
In the end, the program was deemed too expensive to obtain per unit, and too expensive to maintain in the long term. It was replaced with the Smasher CEV, which entered service with the Army and the US Marine Corps in 2009. Thirty-nine were purchased.