Bobcat

The Bobcat was an armored personnel carrier (APC) designed and built in Canada in the 1950s and early 1960s. A lengthy development period and changing requirements drove the price up while not improving the basic design, and the project was eventually cancelled in late 1963 in favor of purchasing the ubiquitous M113. History During World War II the Canadian Army introduced the fully tracked APC to the world when they converted a number of M7 Priest and Ram tanks to expedient personnel carriers before Operation Totalize. Existing designs were almost universally half-tracks, or lightly armored tracked vehicles not really designed for the APC role, like the Universal Carrier. These expedient vehicles, named "Kangaroos," were considerably better armored and had much better cross-country performance. Similar vehicles were soon in use by other allied forces as well, converted from broken or out-of-date tanks. In the post-war period the Canadian Army, like its other western counterparts, underwent a period of dramatic downsizing. By the late 1940s it was essentially identical in formation and equipment as it had been during the war, but much smaller. With the cooling of international relations that marked the start of the Cold War, and especially with the opening of the Korean War, the Canadian armed forces started the process of rapidly modernizing their equipment, which was by this point extremely outdated. The Bobcat project started in 1952, intending to produce a fully modern replacement for the Kangaroo in the APC role. Over the next four years of design the requirements changed several times, adding an amphibious capability, as well as another version as a replacement for the Universal Carrier in the battlefield cargo role. When the requirements were finally stabilized as the XA-20 in 1956, a prototype contract was offered to Leyland Motors (Canada) under Project 97.